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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

In a normal country, this sort of post could be liquidated with a comment like "People often do not grow up, and keep using playground-bullying jokes. News at 11."

But - the UK is deeply and relentlessly classist. Accents are one of the instruments that ruling classes use to keep the hoi polloi "in their place". So this issue gets highlighted routinely - and there has been a real effort to address the problem, particularly by Labour governments (starting with the Blair ones) and particularly in state-controlled media.

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We don't all have the same experience of life, so I preface this by saying that this is just my experience.

UK life can be somewhat tribal, like anywhere, but I don't recognise your framing of the UK as "deeply classist" nor do I think any classism is as one way as you paint. I grew up lower middle class/working class in very working class areas (council estates, ex-mining villages/towns, that sort of thing). Two of the worst things you could be in those areas was "posh" or from outside the area. So called inverse snobbery was a big thing. If anything, though, not being local was a bigger cause for feeling like an outsider.

I think you disproved your own point

My point was that it's too simplistic to paint classism as a one-way street somehow used to keep the "hoi polloi" down.

Fair enough: I read “classism” as cutting both ways. But given your starting point it makes sense.

Please elaborate?

The fact is, you've got a widely-understood marker that is used to distinguish which class you belong to and a common understanding that a member of one class does not belong among members of another. The direction of hostility in your example doesn't really change things. Think about it - it's fairly common for members of the working class to resent those in the upper classes who rule them. But as kids you probably weren't thinking about what class you belonged to, or about any tensions between different classes and their origins. You just knew "the posh boy doesn't belong here" - and you picked all those things up without being explicitly told them because the UK deeply classist

The resentment may go both ways, but the effect is completely different. Some children in a mining town making fun of some visiting kid’s posh accent is probably unpleasant for the kid. Adults from that mining town being on the receiving end of class-based discrimination (whether conscious or subconscious) when being evaluated for university applications, job interviews, salary reviews or promotions is something else entirely.

Yep, I experienced this growing up in Yorkshire with a posh accent. Inverse snobbery was rampant. I was made to feel extremely unwelcome.

Puts me in mind of the two Ronnies sketch.

Upper class Cleese: "I'm upper class, so I look down on him".

Middle class Ronnie: "I'm middle class, so I look up at him, and I look down on him".

Lower class Ronnie: "Oi know my plaice".

Hmmm, are you British? Perhaps you could give some examples? I don't think the UK is relentlessly classist and accents work both ways because having an accent that is too posh in Britain is also a disadvantage.

We used to tease someone at work who had a posh accent; they pronounced Diet Coke as 'Daat coake'. Everyone makes little jokes all the time in the workplace, but if anything we possibly went a bit to far in teasing that person because we felt she was fair game being from a privileged background. You can often tell from an accent when someone has been privately educated; there are many situations where this might not be an advantage so these people also try to suppress their accents. The dim witted but arrogant privately educated schoolboy is a British cultural meme.

Having an accent from a different region can be a disadvantage just because in some regions you literally would not be able to understand what people are talking about among themselves because you don't understand a) the regional use of dialect and b) the local topics of conversation that will have specific regional words.

Obviously it's important to emphasise kindness and respect, but with regards to light-hearted jabs, it's important to note the direction you’re punching. If you are mocking someone who’s had a magnitude more opportunity and investment and education more than you, it isn’t hugely a problem for them. If it goes the other way toward someone who’s had to massively struggle to get where they are it undermines them. A punch is a punch, but surely Mike Tyson punching a pensioner is worse than the opposite?

Power dynamics are the same actions having different outcomes.

I’m British and I love a good bit of banter as it shows trust, but taken too far or done with any significant power asymmetry becomes toxic very quickly.

I guess perhaps fitting the working-class box is "cooler" in popular culture, though.

Here's another example: Interactions with the police.

As someone who, whilst though I grew up poor, is white, eloquent and has a Surrey accent, the various times I've been arrested I've been able to deftly fit into the "good citizen who's made a mistake box" and got off with minimal consequences. If I talked like I was from the estate or had a darker complexion, these interactions would sway toward the "bloody criminal" box and I would have had the book thrown at me.

Classism is a two-way street. Or more like a pyramid where everyone's very protective of their level.

> I don't think the UK is relentlessly classist

Laughs in aristocracy and Oxbridge

> having an accent that is too posh in Britain is also a disadvantage

If you want to be a football pundit, maybe. It definitely won't be in any managerial / upper-level position, or anywhere where real money is around (finance etc).

> she was fair game being from a privileged background

That's the thing - she was playing the class game wrong, if she was in a setting full of people from a different background. She was not in the right job for her class. Classism works both ways; it's still classism.

> Having an accent from a different region can be a disadvantage just because

That's the natural state of thing everywhere, if anything it's less pronounced in Britain because actual language differences are minor (compared to, say, continental Europe). This is not what people are anxious about; they are anxious about revealing they hail from a region that is outside the South-East, and hence is considered poor - with all that it entails. Not a biggie in a country where bootstrapping is lauded, but a serious problem in a classist society.

Btw, I'm not British, but I've lived on these cursed islands for enough decades to experience "the system" in all its gory details.

> I don't think the UK is relentlessly classist and accents work both ways because having an accent that is too posh in Britain is also a disadvantage

It's well documented that fee-paying private schools (so called 'public' schools) contribute disproportionally to UK politics [0]. Eton alone [1] has produced 20 prime ministers (including Johnson and Cameron). These schools require wealthy parents, and thus tend to exclude the poorer paid.

Although you are much more likely to hear regional accents in British media than you used to, social mobility is more constrained now than it has been in living memory. Actors are another group of people where parental wealth correlates to access to drama schools.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#Politics

> Hmmm, are you British? Perhaps you could give some examples?

> We used to tease someone at work who had a posh accent

> because we felt she was fair game being from a privileged background

Isn't this British classism?

"We felt she's from a different social class, so we teased her because of that".

I remember when shopping with my wife who just moved to the UK, a retail worker was chatting with us and she was explaining to us something along the lines "Oh you know like when you go shopping in Tesco... or if you're posh then it's Waitrose.".

Isn't this subtle, unconscious British classism too, that says who you are based on where you shop?

It isn't subtle at all. My partner recently asked me what the equivalent layering of supermarkets would be in Italy, and I just couldn't - because there isn't such a layering there (or rather, it's layered by different criteria, i.e. political and regional differences).

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