Is UK still obsessed with class?

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The Irish nobility are not actually Irish in the modern sense. They were made nobles by the King or Queen of Ireland, who at the time was also the King of England. Now Ireland doesn't have nobility, but the existing titles are still recognised by the British crown.


The House of Lords is primarily composed of "life peers", who have been appointed to the role and are not nobility. The hereditary peers get to elect representatives to the Lords, but they're such a small minority that they can safely be ignored.

While the nobility owns a lot of land, it's a long way from "most". The major landholding aristocracy are:

# Land Owner Acres

6 RICHARD SCOTT, DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH & QUEENSBERRY 280,000
8 THE DUKE OF ATHOLL’S TRUSTS 145,000
10 HUGH GROSVENOR, 7TH DUKE OF WESTMINSTER 140,000
11 DUCHY OF CORNWALL 135,000 (the heir to the throne's trust)
20 HENRY SOMERSET, 12TH DUKE OF BEAUFORT 52,000
24 HUGH LOWTHER, 8TH EARL OF LONSDALE 35,269
29 ANDREW RUSSELL, 15TH DUKE OF BEDFORD 21,474
32 EDWARD GUINNESS, 4TH EARL OF IVEAGH 20,664
35 DUCHY OF LANCASTER 20,000 (Monarch's personal trust - largely historic ruins)
36 JOHN SAVILE, 8TH EARL OF MEXBOROUGH 20,000
40 SIR LYONEL HUMPHREY JOHN TOLLEMACHE, 7TH BARONET 17,908

Add all eleven of these up and you get to 887,000 acres, which is a lot, but much less than is owned by the Ministry of Defence, who in turn own about half as much as the Forestry Commission.

There are 37.3 million acres in the UK. So about 2.3% of the land area of the UK is owned by eleven nobles, either directly or in trusts. Let's say that the rest of the nobility, between their smaller estates, owns as much again as those big hitters - that's 4.6%. A good chunk yes, and it was wrong to say that only Westminster is rich enough to be powerful, but for example there's a Danish businessman who owns more than the Duke of Atholl - those top three or four are wealthy yes, but not so obscenely wealthy that they own half the country.


No, at least not from the government due to the special circumstances of their birth. My point was that one might reasonably give money to the poor, but nobody would include a Beatle in "the poor" despite their working class background.

Last edited by The_Walrus on 28 Jan 2024, 3:08 am, edited 1 time in total.: Removed accidentally-pasted content that made the post about twice as long as it should be

They can't veto laws passed by the House of Commons, and they can't pass new laws themselves, but they can delay the passing of laws. The Commons has to send (some of?) its laws to them, the Lords can reject them or add amendments, then it goes back to the Commons who (I think) have to vote on it again, and so on, back and forth, until after 3 rounds the Commons can then forge ahead regardless. All of which takes some time.

The quality of debate in the Lords can be markedly more calm and intelligent than that of the Commons (which is often rather a circus or Punch And Judy show). I guess that's because the members of the Lords are generally older and wiser, and don't have the same pressures on them as do members of the Commons. It's been argued that life peers, hereditary peers, and appointed bishops etc. are too undemocratically created to be rightfully entitled to have a say in the running of the country, but others say that we need a second chamber and that it would be silly to have a democratically-created one because it would just duplicate the Commons.

Yes, class is defined by multiple parameters - "education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture" according to Wikipedia. There are many people who have different scores for each of those criteria, and it's hard to know whether to call them upper, middle, or lower. Some argue that class doesn't exist, and I agree that in a sense it's only a construct and that it's not very real, but I think some only say it doesn't exist because they want to gag the debate about the rich-poor divide. It's quite clear that some people have a lot less wealth and opportunity than others.

As for me (self assessed, somewhat glibly):
Wealth - working class
Income - mid to low working class
Education - mid to low middle class
Occupation - mid to upper working class
Social subculture - mixed middle and working class

I remember them asking Paul McCartney, around 1964, whether wealth and fame had changed him. He replied, "No, I'm still a scruff."

One of the major reasons British citizens choose to migrate to Australia is escape the toxicity of the class system that pervades Britain.

There is a glass ceiling for social mobility in Britain, everyone knows this. In Australia, Canada or New Zealand you can make a new life and your social success is largely based on your financial acumen and to some extent your education.

^
I did a Web search for "glass ceiling by country" but the only hits were about women, and more about moving from privileged positions into even more privileged positions than movement up the lower economic strata. I suppose that's why it's called a ceiling. It seems the concept has occasionally been extended to race, but not class.

This is of more interest to me, because I don't much care about gender and race barriers against moving up from an already comfortable position, but it doesn't seem to notice that the floor, though stickier for women and non-whites, is sticky for everybody:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cei ... _floors%22

I can't speak from experience (I haven't lived in the UK) but long association with British born Australians this seems to be a common theme. The obsession in Britian with ancestry/heritage and lineage is strongly associated with class status.

Many who leave Britian (at least whom I've spoken to) felt their children would have better opportunities and upward mobility in terms of social networking in Australia.

But this is just one of many things that motivate people to migrate from Britain in the 2020s. Back in the colonial era and 1940s/50s British migrants were basically escaping poverty. In the 2020s the warm climate and perception of friendlier people and opportunity for jobs brings Brits to our shores these days.

I see Australia still has the UK monarch as head of state. I only ever discussed the matter with one Australian, when there was some talk of chucking the Queen out, and he was of the opinion that if they got rid of her then the role would just go to some other bloodsucking parasite. Not that I quite know what the role is or what the perks are. I've never understood what heads of state are for, given that in practice they can't make laws, only rubber-stamp them - they can refuse to, but they never seem to and I've heard that if that happened then the game would soon be over for them. So I guess their job is to parade about and keep the believers brainwashed so that the elite (including themselves of course) can hang onto their wealth.

Oh yes, we had a referendum and overwhelmingly Australians voted to retain the Queen as head of state. We have a governor general (Queen's representative) who has in the past intervened in internal Australian politics such as the famous sacking of prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975.

Working class Australians generally talk "smack" about the royal family but quite clearly (based on the referendum results) there's a lot of people who like the connection to the British crown. Go figure.

Seems like the monarch's representative can do things the monarch wouldn't dare to do. I wonder if the Queen had anything to do with the decision at all?

To answer the thread's question - absolutely. You can't really avoid conversations about class or stereotypes regarding where you fall on that system.

To be fair to the queen, she wasn't really consulted when governor general Sir John Kerr invoked (many say abused) his constitutional powers to remove a standing prime minister - Gough Whitlam.

Doesn't class have privileges in the UK?

Yes that's a lot of power, being able to remove a prime minister. There's a school of thought that says Rupert Murdoch can do and has done that to the UK, but only indirectly by brainwashing the electorate through his newspapers.

Many Australians can't understand why Rupert Murdoch has been allowed to have so much influence in both US and UK politics?

I guess it's a case of nobody having been able to stop him. There was talk in the UK Labour Party of banning foreign nationals from owning UK newspapers, but for some reason it never got off the ground. Owning mass media is of course an extremely powerful thing when it comes to influencing what people think, as well as being directly very lucrative.

Talking of Whitlam, this (among other things) says Murdoch had a role in that:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63631316
Don't know how much of it is true.

It's plausible, Whitlam was socialist/left wing activist before he became prime minister and Murdoch tends to support conservative governments. Murdoch also had a hand in the removal of the famous anti-US, anti-nuclear new Zealand prime minister David Lange.