Is UK still obsessed with class?

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I know that you still have the House of Lords, but in the USA we never hear a thing about them.

Last night I watched a very entertaining movie, Paradise Lagoon (1957) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050100/

The movie satirized England's class system. Kenneth More starred as a butler who absolutely adored the social system where he was subordinate to his Lordship's whims, and where lesser members of the staff were below him.

Then, they are stranded together on a desert island. Because His Lordship and his family are useless in the situation, the butler becomes the leader, and is called "Guv."

He is about to marry one of the Lord's daughters, when a ship suddenly appears and rescues them. The butler happily and quickly reverts to his servile style.

I've seen a few other movies that satirized the British class system, e.g., The Ruling Class, 1972: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069198/

You still have the royal family, dukes, duchesses, earls, lords, ladies, etc. Are they still treated with deference and respect? Or, are they seen as basically a joke since these satirical movies came out?

You can watch the full Paradise Lagoon movie on YouTube.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaqmb-i1qrA

They also have The Ruling Class



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijd8bregkt4

Peter O'Toole is BRILLIANT!

I wouldn't say obsessed, but it remains in the background of our culture and influences things, even when we're not aware of it.

For example much of the land in the UK is still ultimately owned by a small number of 'nobles'. These are people with titles like Lord or Duke whose families were given the land by monarchs many hundreds of years ago and simply inherited it.

So, people who live there have to rent the land, and can't own it?

I would think that people would be painfully aware.

I have read that the The Beatles despite their wealth and fame was still considered working class because that is what they were born into. Was that and is true?

It looks like they were knighted: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-his ... y-knighted

Probably not the same as a hereditary title.

Which can be either good or bad depending on your perspective. If you have a top down perspective, then they'll never be upper class they're lower. But if you have a bottom up view, they'll never be one of them because they're ours. Both are true, but in reality none of the surviving Beatles are working class.

I hope that got my point across. I'm a picture thinker!

Imo the lower the class you are the more you notice the class system. The higher up it you are the more you deny the class system and the further you stick your head up your own arse.

But that's just how I see it from my bitter and twisted armchair

The UK royals are still depressingly popular with about half the public. Certain tabloid "news"papers have a lot of content about the toffs. I gather it's some kind of psychological reason, their fans watch them and feel wealthy by proxy. Mostly I feel this when I see them:

Plus a feeling of disgust that they're living the life of Riley while so many commoners are worried about economic survival. And paradoxically I also feel a little bit sorry for the high-profile ones who think they have to do all those rituals and can't say what they really think.

Don't know if the UK could be rightly said to be obsessed with class though. They do very often still have that daft belief that some people are greater than others. But it's probably subsided quite a bit since the old days. Apart from the royals, there's less tolerance of hereditary wealth and privilege, but a lot of people still think it's OK for entrepeneurs to get rich by exploiting the public. Socialism isn't as popular as it used to be.

Yes Macca was knighted. They all got MBEs (Member Of The British Empire) but John Lennon sent his back. One of his declared reasons was that Cold Turkey had gone down in the charts, but I think mostly he did it out of principle. I always preferred John to Macca, though none of the Beatles came over as snobs, and seemed pretty honest, except maybe Macca who I sometimes think would say anything these days if it promoted the Beatles' brand.

None of the Beatles' titles are hereditary. Here's the dirt on the peerages that are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_peer

It's all rather complicated.

They worked for their money, they didn't inherit it.
Entertainers were always perceived as particularly low class.

Celebrity is a byproduct of high status, but high status isn't necessarily a byproduct of wealth or celebrity.

The "nobility" are basically irrelevant, outside of the royal family and the Duke of Westminster.

Class operates slightly differently to the US, but I think the gap between the working and middle class (which, to be clear, is not a sharp dividing line) is broadly common to any society with income and education inequality.

While class is largely something you're born into, some of the contradictions are recognised. Nobody thinks Paul McCartney requires financial handouts. Being "poor middle class" is a common experience, too. My dad spent the last fifteen years of his career working shop-floor retail, but would never have defined as working class because his parents were comfortable, he was well-educated, he'd spent previous decades working in middle-class jobs.

It sure is.

The article mentions Irish nobility--I would have thought that the Irish had banned titles of nobility.




Does the House of Lords do anything at all?

Also, if the "nobility" owns most of the land, that would make them quite relevant.



Do English nobles get financial handouts?

^ The House of Lords is part of the legislative branch of the UK government. Theoretically, they are there to scrutinise legislation from the Commons and amend it if they feel it isn't workable or contradicts other existing laws.

Unfortunately, what we've increasingly seen in recent years is that seats in the House of Lords are being given to donors of the governing party of the day as thankyous. They're effectively being bought and sold, which is why many people are calling for reform. I think there are somewhere North of 800 'Lords' currently, far more than could ever sit in the chamber but many of them never go there.

The relevance of the nobility is debateable, imo. It's true most of us never think about them or really notice them beyond the royals so in that sense, yes irrelevant.

But in being massive landowners and extremely wealthy their influence politically and economically is considerable. I suspect they're quite happy to be 'invisible' to most of us while they live lives of extreme priviledge.

When i say they own most of the land, I'm taking about land outside of towns and cities, which is of course most of it. We still have plenty of tenant farmers and also a type of property ownership called 'leasehold' where you own rights to a property for a set period (say 100 years) but the land remains the ultimate property of the freeholder and reverts to their ownership once the leasehold expires.

Sounds a bit like our sharecropping system that replaced slavery in the Southern states.