Tales from the Bitface

Over on BlueSky, Andrew Hickey of the excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast shares a post about the modern British class system, by someone who goes by ‘John Bull’. I think I used to follow him on Twitter. The post says:

Class in the UK is pretty easy to understand.

Top 1% of wealth = upper class
Bottom 1% = working class

Everyone else self-defines as “upper-working class” regardless of actual income.

They will think one of the other groups are “scroungers”. But never both.

Which is at least partly intended as humorous, I think, and so exaggerates for effect. But it may not be far from the truth. Except… I don’t recall ever having heard the term ‘upper working class’ before.

The class that does traditionally get split is middle: upper middle class, lower, middle class, these are (or were) common enough terms. And sociologists use (or used to use) the letter system, which had ABC1, C2, C3. Possibly others, but I don’t recall. I assume A–C map to the traditional upper–working range, which means they split the working class up, but not the middle? I don’t know.

Anyway, I tweeted¹ at Andrew saying I’d never heard the term, and he replied he had, a lot. Someone else in the comments also said they hadn’t heard it.

All to say nothing in particular, except I’m thinking that traditionally it wasn’t just about either wealth or income, but titles. You couldn’t be upper class without a title. But now I’m wondering if the so-called nobility sit (or sat) above even the upper class.