Somehow queues drew most attention but to be honest the class system social mobility and the penalization of ambition and effort are the most interesting to me.
PS I did not comment on food but I actually like it.
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Watch a few episodes of Keeping Up Appearances. It’s a sitcom from the 1990s and parodies the social mobility thing.
Obviously for the purposes of entertainment it’s all hammed up but some similar families do exist.
From personal experience, I never really saw any kind of animosity or envy of anyone coming from a working class family going through uni to a city job / doctor or other profession.
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Started watching it but I really don’t understand the jokes 
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK6w6MzMDhk, and Yes Minister.
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It’s perfectly acceptable in CH. Did it with company as recently as last Wednesday.
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This was good
Do you have more stuff like this? 
Man, British comedy is an OCEAN, ask chatGPT
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Found this: Social Mobility by Country 2026
Kind of interesting
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I must admit I read this thread with interest as I’ve never felt being born working class has held me back. Fair enough I didn’t get to university until I was 32 back in 1993, but that was purely because I was a late child of older parents who were getting on for retirement when I was in my teens (my mother died aged 61 when I was 19).
My extended family were all born working class, there are doctors (one now retired from heading a cancer centre is a Professor), lawyers and artists.
OH is the same, his dad worked in a car factory and his mum was a garment machinist working from home. He went to university at 18 and did some postgrad stuff in his late 20s. His extended family include a retired pension specialist and City bankers.
If you work hard enough you’ll get there, I worked in a global foreign bank in the City with Old Etonians, Horrovians and people who went through the Oxbridge system but never felt they were any better than me despite a lot of them being old money. The experience did spur me on to go to university though purely because I felt my educaton wasn’t complete (I started with the OU for 2 years, then jacked my job in and went to Queen Mary, London).
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The same myth that Americans believe in - except it’s a lie for most people.
There are always exceptions but the social mobility referred to by kisiy3512 earlier in the thread holds true for most people. In the UK (and even more the USA) social mobility (basically how much your income is dependent on your parents wealth) has been declining rapidly since the 90s and particularly over the last 20 years or so.
You more or less disprove your own claim with this - how many Old Etonians, Horrovians, etc. did you meet in that environment compared to their prevalence in the general population?
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I didn’t want to bore you further with this thread but since there are newer replies I’ve looked a little bit more into the effort aspect of it and it seems like there is a term for it “sprezzatura”. If you look it up you would mostly find materials on fashion, but originally it was about deception: making others believe that whatever you are achieving is natural to you and not causing effort, i.e. say you’ve studied all week long but you reply to others that you’ve only looked into your notes last evening before passing the exam.
I.e. it’s not merely to maintain looks, but sort of an ancient survival mechanism preventing hostility: if someone is making an effort to be ahead of others he’s deemed dangerous, and if someone’s just talented, there’s nothing special about it, he’s natural.
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Thanks for sharing!
Heard mentality, we tend to rally behind the perceived leader of the pack.
Yes, except it is more complicated than that. Some situations you are happy to have the conscientious try-hard to deal with something, sometimes the clever-dick is not trusted. In survival terms, there is room for many personality types and a vast range of “abilities”.
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You mean in the UK or you’re addressing the validity of the idea? I personally don’t like this idea
Right. Beyond the UK (maybe even the human condition), sometimes try-hards are trusted more than smart-asses. Sometimes, people chooses narrative over facts or reason.
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But equally people will rally behind the underdog. Just depends.
I think this is true of most societies. People have an innate ability to sniff out the bull-shitter, usually manifested by the “clever-dick”.
Also agree that it takes all sorts. I certainly don’t think the UK is one homogenous blob of people who think and behave in a certain way. We share various customs and social norms but everyone is different. Same as everywhere else.
But even if everyone is different, wouldn’t it be averaging out to the standard norm in certain situations?
For example, I remember watching a vlog of a Pole describing his experience working as a floor assistant in a UK clothing store.
Situation No 1: he had some quick improvement idea and shared it with a manager of his manager; his manager taught him not to overstep like this. Polish POV: it was more efficient this way in this situation, why to bother. UK POV: he violated hierarchy.
Situation No 2: they had a 1:1 with the manager of his manager, and he was casually asking if everything was okay. The Pole shared that the employee changing room was extremely dirty. Polish POV: he was asked for a feedback, he gave one (he’d probably introduction of a schedule/discipline etc.). UK POV: it was pure formality to be asking for a feedback . Afterwards: this manager of his manager came and single-handedly cleansed the entire clothing room. Polish POV: wow, this manager gave an example responding on the feedback. UK POV: the upper manager humiliated the lower manager “look you can’t do your job so I come to the lowest level to clean everything”, and from now on the Polish employee was probably on the path of being managed out in retaliation by the lower manager. So how would this whole played out differently even if in the society everyone is different.
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