10:26am August 13, 2013

On being middle class in the UK vs US

- Martin Pengelly

So far as I can see – because I can’t see past the end of my own nose – to be middle class in Britain is to be the offspring of state-sector teachers, state-educated to vote Labour, drive a Citroën 2CV, read the Guardian, keep mung beans in jars and say ‘no thanks’ to nuclear power. And to be smug about it.

But also, in Britain, one can be working class or upper class or, indeed, upper-middle or lower-middle class, or even middle-middle. I suppose that’s what I am. In Britain, in sum, we have a fully functioning class system and we’re not afraid to use the stereotypes it throws up. But in America, to be middle class seems to me to be… any American at all.

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In the UK i’d be straight up working class because that’s where my family comes from and it’s much harder to leave. As in my parents were born into families that have been poor and working class for as far back as we know.

In the USA, I call myself mixed class. My parents had jobs where they worked for bosses and had no control over the materials. They were, when I was growing up, a technician and a respiratory therapist. They made middle class money, but any decent class analysis would call that working class. (My more traditionally working class friend calls it upper working class to differentiate from working class families who are working from paycheck to paycheck and may have never been to the two year colleges my parents attended.) Plumbers are working class here and some of them make UPPER middle class money, more than we had even when my dad was promoted to engineer and became truly middle class for a few years.

So we had upper working class jobs, poor and working class background, middle class money, lack of middle class financial security, and for four years I went to a school for rich kids. Now we are poor and won’t ever not be. So I call myself poor from a mixed class background.

But in America practically everyone from working class all the way up to the lower end of rich, thinks they’re middle class. When they say hard working middle class that’s a euphemism for working class, because a lot of people won’t admit to being working class, and we have a strong history against socialism here so to talk about the working class as a politician is to risk being branded a socialist.

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