Quote: WormInHand "Rubbish. You're born into a class, and you can't climb out of it. You may be successful and acquire money, but a pigs ear will never make a silk purse.
There are only 2 classes, anyway. The Upper aristos who don't have to work for a living and everyone else. Those, then, who do - the working class.
The "middle classes" are a fabrication of the first working class people who earned a bit of "new money" and then sought to distance themselves from those less fortunate. They imported vulgar words like "pardon" and "perfume" from the French because they thought it distanced themselves from the commoners who said "what" and "scent" little realising that the aristocrats preferred, and still do prefer, the old English way of talking. The middle classes brought snobbery and pretension to our society and are a scourge I would never aspire to.
A well known definition of a man who is not a gentleman to the Upper Classes is "someone who has to go out and buy his own silver - and then proceeds to call it cutlery". I.e., all of us.
Working class and proud, me.'"
Thats based on the flawed Marxist definitions of the class system;
namely the proletariat - working class who are exploited by the capitalists (upper class) in order to create profit.
Modern sociologists tend to classify the UK's population into 4 groups,
Underclass - namely people on benefits and non-working households
Working Class - the best definition for this is the american term of blue collar workers (semi-skilled), generally not university educated
Middle Class - white collar workers, generally university educated, and >£40k per household income
Upper Class - not requiring a job to live, large amounts of wealth, part of the old "social elite"
