> I have kids and live in an area where the class divisions are pretty stark
How do you mean? I was asking for an illustration of the "class system" that you find oppressing to your person.
> most of the population is bombarded every day by outright racism and hate.
Well that's not true is it.
> The British upper classes make a joke of it
What might be considered Victorian upper class constitutes practically no one. If you don't like the media don't consume it.
Honestly I do not understand this unhealthy fixation on class that you have and frankly reject your assertions regarding it. At a guess you are using it as a simplification to understand a landscape you can't fully understand without it.
Something like 60% of people going to Oxbridge went to private schools, despite 93% attending state schools, and this is after decades of campaigns, outreach, and adjusting entry criteria by school type. And this is new, the fraction from state schools used to be more like 10-20% if that in living memory.
Lol, if your best rebuttal is “no it isn’t, you idiot”, you risk making my point for me. The fact remains that UK tabloids are pretty shocking for anyone who was not grown inside the bubble. When even forums like Reddit consider links to Uk tabloids as “very low quality sources”, the situation is clearly dire. Deny it as much as you want, it’s still there for everyone else to see. But I understand that this sort of thing is difficult to accept, if it’s been normalized since birth, in the same way NorthKorean citizens find it normal to have a communist king or most Americans were really convinced Saddam had WMDs. Propaganda is really difficult to shake off, when it reaches a certain volume.
As for the landscape of classism in the UK, tbh, it is not that hard to elaborate. Of course we are not talking in Victorian terms, modern classism has its own conventions. The facts are, still, that most top jobs go to graduates from top universities, whose alumni are drafted overwhelmingly from certain (expensive) schools, whose pupils are put “on rails” at the tender age of 4 by parents with deep pockets. See for example this source, but the situation is very well-known: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/oxford-unive... Note that i’m not talking in absolutes, this is actually something that affects me: I know my kids will struggle to ever reach any pinnacle, if they stay here, simply because I cannot afford to put them through the “right” schools.
This system has its upsides (the upper classes are really well-educated, as our classicist PM demonstrates) but it is undeniably a drag on social mobility: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48103017i
How do you mean? I was asking for an illustration of the "class system" that you find oppressing to your person.
> most of the population is bombarded every day by outright racism and hate.
Well that's not true is it.
> The British upper classes make a joke of it
What might be considered Victorian upper class constitutes practically no one. If you don't like the media don't consume it.
Honestly I do not understand this unhealthy fixation on class that you have and frankly reject your assertions regarding it. At a guess you are using it as a simplification to understand a landscape you can't fully understand without it.