Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
only lower class girls wear big hoop earrings over there?
That's the general perception, yes.
only lower class girls wear big hoop earrings over there?
this is like something from the 19th century, & the comments are worseEh, it's from the Telegraph, but it is an interesting piece of local reporting with some perspective on one of the more interesting developments of the past 24 hours - vigilantism, turf wars http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...don-riots-the-knives-are-being-sharpened.html
davelj
3 minutes agoI hope your "partner" was female, Sir and commited toward a marital relationship......if not, you are part of the problem ???? 3 minutes agoI hope your "partner" was female, Sir and commited toward a marital relationship......if not, you are part of the problem ????
Well, for one thing, you haven't read the book and you're, so to speak, judging it by its cover. Maybe it discusses the subtleties of class.
There is a link between what is called 'chav culture' and poverty. You can't say that most chavs aren't working class - maybe they don't work now but I'd wager their grandparents did. And working in farmfoods for a year I worked alongside people I'd definitely call 'neds' or whatever, they worked, they liked a drink, they watched shite telly and they lived on schemes. They weren't bad people but they probably didn't have much hope or the future, neither did their children.
What you're talking about assumes there is this large group of people who are basically scum and can be excluded from society on that basis. To do so is to basically say that there is a group who are no longer deserving of any intervention on their behalf. I think that the only way we can improve the lot of people in estates and what else is to not view them as simply 'needlessly aggressive, frequently inebriated' but people who exist in malign and insidious social conditions that results in a kind of nihilistic hopelessness and anger. The only way to improve on this is to take efforts to try and improve their conditions.
I think that there has been a concerted effort to break down class identification and redefine the terms of what belonging to a certain class means since the 1980's. I view it as two-pronged. People who would have identified as working class 30 years ago will often now identify as middle-class simply because they have aspirations, they perhaps own their own council house, they want their kids to go to a university. The distruction of the trade-union movement also contributes to this, as less and less people see themselves tied together with workers doing similar jobs and trying to get better conditions for themselves.
On the other hand you have the muddying of the lines of what 'working class' means to start to become the aformentioned 'chav' culture (also called the underclass), and nobody who is aware of the significance of class would want to identified with such a group as it is portrayed.
The benefits for essentially dissolving the working class as a self-identified group seem to me pretty obvious.
on top of the "we are all middle class now" type sentiments there is also the idea that working/lower class values have eroded. there is no more noble working class which works hard at their factory job and buys sensibly priced footwear - instead they recklessly piss away their money (provided by the welfare state of course) on expensive trainers, gaudy jewellery & whatever other un-classy shit you can think of.
this must be related to why trainers are the dominant object which people are talking about being stolen, rather than bikes or ipads.
unlike white trash in the US though, they don't have a lobby (i think?) and no one talks about them as though they are the "real" population of their country.
i'm saying that's one of the dominant sentiments, it's not what i believe. thought that was clear
whatever slime
i was just lumping onto grizzleb's post - the idea that there's no more respectable or diligent working class, just chavs is a somewhat important one i thought. it probably has as much to do with the idea that chavs cannot be helped as the idea that (almost) everyone is middle class now through college or car ownership or whatever.
sorry, i suck at posting on internet forums i guess. imma fuck off & kill myself now
i was just lumping onto grizzleb's post - the idea that there's no more respectable or diligent working class, just chavs is a somewhat important one i thought. it probably has as much to do with the idea that chavs cannot be helped as the idea that (almost) everyone is middle class now through college or car ownership or whatever.
sorry, i suck at posting on internet forums i guess. imma fuck off & kill myself now
Mr. Tea;265600 And you can fuck off with this patronising "flat-footed said:
To get back to the post above, yeah, I think that's accurate. I'm trying to think of the last time I even saw a depiction of a specifically identified working class person outside of a Ken Loach film
BTW has anyone encountered any commentary that actually talks to those involved in the rioting? Conspicuous by it's absence so far.
I'd say Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay have both taken up that baton, as it were, very well. Fish Tank was brilliant for the way it tackled class without having to be didactic about it, really brilliant.
I think the difficulty is most people will quite sensibly decline to talk about this stuff if they are actually doing it.
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Not disagreeing with you entirely - just saying that some people love nicking stuff for the sake of it.
on top of the "we are all middle class now" type sentiments there is also the idea that working/lower class values have eroded. there is no more noble working class which works hard at their factory job and buys sensibly priced footwear - instead they recklessly piss away their money (provided by the welfare state of course) on expensive trainers, gaudy jewellery & whatever other un-classy shit you can think of.