Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[HVC]

Good comment on the Guardian:

It has been interesting to see that not one company calling out increased profits (which feed into dividends) year after year has ever been accused of "fuelling inflation", nor have house owners or landlords as house prices and rents have rapidly inflated.

And yet the minute workers request a pay rise to help survive in an environment full of people very happy to enjoy increasing asset prices, rents and dividends, as long as they are the recipients, it is "greedy workers cannot have more, it will fuel inflation."

The rank hypocrisy of the rich and their Tory enablers is sickening.

Bad comment from the Guardian.  Neither rising profits nor dividends lead to inflation.

Wouldn't it depend on the means of rising profits? If you increase prices in excess of the increase of costs wouldn't that contribute to inflation?

[PJL]

Well we tried true blue Tory about 2 months ago but the markets didn't like it. That's why people now complain about Blue Labour & Red Tories (switch colours if you are American).

More seriously I wonder if the things Thatcher did were a one trick pony. Take interest rates for example. They rose a lot during the early 80s but even a decade later in 92 when they tried it to defend the pound it proved prohibitive and killed the Tory competence on the economy, just like in 2022.

[Admiral Yi]

Wouldn't it depend on the means of rising profits? If you increase prices in excess of the increase of costs wouldn't that contribute to inflation?

That is true.  However consider the fact that increasing profits have not been a recent phenomenon, whereas inflation has.

[HVC]

Wouldn't it depend on the means of rising profits? If you increase prices in excess of the increase of costs wouldn't that contribute to inflation?

That is true.  However consider the fact that increasing profits have not been a recent phenomenon, whereas inflation has.

It could be an escalating factor, no?. Chain grocery stores in Canada are under scrutiny recently for record profits while claiming price increases are due to logistics and untreated costs.

[Admiral Yi]

It could be an escalating factor, no?. Chain grocery stores in Canada are under scrutiny recently for record profits while claiming price increases are due to logistics and untreated costs.

I don't understand.

[HVC]

If inflation is increasing raising pricing (over the increase in the costs of goods/labour) would make inflation worse.

[Admiral Yi]

If inflation is increasing raising pricing (over the increase in the costs of goods/labour) would make inflation worse.

Sure.

[Jacob]

That is true.  However consider the fact that increasing profits have not been a recent phenomenon, whereas inflation has.

I thought there were some pretty massive increases in profits (oil industry and groceries, at least) during and after the recent spike in oil prices... and pretty much concurrent with the increase in inflation. Is that incorrect?

[Jacob]

Sure.

Reportedly that happened with both oil (major oil companies have been earning record profits recently, I'm led to understand) and groceries (at least in Canada). Both would seem pretty fundamental to the economy. It seems reasonable to me that increase in profit-taking in those sectors contributes to inflation.

[HVC]

If inflation is increasing raising pricing (over the increase in the costs of goods/labour) would make inflation worse.

Sure.

So the guardian was correct 

[Barrister]

Sure.

Reportedly that happened with both oil (major oil companies have been earning record profits recently, I'm led to understand) and groceries (at least in Canada). Both would seem pretty fundamental to the economy. It seems reasonable to me that increase in profit-taking in those sectors contributes to inflation.

"profits" are not the same as "profit-taking".

"Profits" are just your revenue less your expenses.

"Profit taking" has to do with investing.  If the price of one of your investments has gone up you have made a profit on paper, but you are then "profit taking" when you actually sell that investment to lock in the profit.

[Admiral Yi]

I thought there were some pretty massive increases in profits (oil industry and groceries, at least) during and after the recent spike in oil prices... and pretty much concurrent with the increase in inflation. Is that incorrect?

Beats me.  I'll take your word for it.

[Admiral Yi]

So the guardian was correct 

The Guardian comment could have been correct if it had limited the indictment to rising profits as a result of increased margins during the current bout of inflation and left the part about rising asset prices out.  But since the author of the comment didn't, it sounds much more like class warfare/Main St. vs. Wall St./banksters rhetoric than an analysis of the causes of inflation.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting piece on the way people perceive class:

The new class rules? It's not about the money
Middle earning no longer means middle class with identifying as working class not necessarily correlating to being poor
Tom Calver, Data Editor
Sunday December 11 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Can you change the social class you're born into? Candice Lott has tried.

Born into a rough part of Peterborough, the 37-year-old recalls her mother waking at 5am to work three jobs to put food on the table. There were often bailiffs at the door. "From an early age I recognised I was on the backfoot," she said.

A self-funded degree and lots of "hard graft" later, she became one of the youngest-ever directors at the Greene King brewery, a FTSE 250 company, aged just 33.

On the surface, she is a shining example of social mobility. Yet Lott still considers herself "working class at heart". "Social inequality starts from early education – but it actually never ends," she said.

Britain is often regarded as a nation obsessed with status and background — a topic again addressed this month in a BBC documentary by the radio presenter Amol Rajan called How to Crack the Class Ceiling, which explores whether working class people need to "change themselves" to get the job they want.



Rajan, 39, moved to Tooting, south London, from India at the age of three. His father grew up in "unconscionable poverty", he has previously said, before "sacrific[ing] everything" to come to the UK.

Rajan, who from next year will host University Challenge, has repeatedly called for more working-class voices on radio.

Another BBC presenter, Ed Stourton, 65, nicknamed "Posh Ed" who was privately educated at Ampleforth College, has also recently weighed in. Writing in the Radio Times last week, he argued that "clarity and authority" matter most, not where you come from.

Indeed, non-posh newsreaders have been around since the war time broadcasts of J.B. Priestley, albeit in the minority.

"There have always been class divides," says Lee Elliot Major, the country's first professor of social mobility at Exeter University. "But how we define class is always evolving." What, then, does the data tell us about "middle" or "working" class identity in modern Britain?

Income used to be a good barometer of where you fitted in, for the simple reason that "middle-class jobs" tended to be better paid than "working-class" ones.

When Tony Blair said "we are all middle class now" in 1997, he meant that Britain was no longer dominated by a low-paid working class – instead, the middle had become larger and more prosperous.

Yet increasingly, identifying as "working class" does not correlate to being poor.

According to polling from JL Partners, conducted earlier this year, nearly half of all workers with a household income above £62,000 consider themselves "working class".



Do jobs still tell us where you fit in? For decades, sociologists have used occupational categories to define us, and still do: middle classes were professionals, sometimes in administrative or management positions. Working classes, meanwhile, had manual positions.

Using job classification data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), for example, we can estimate that Blaenau Gwent, Hull and Boston have the highest shares of so-called routine or manual occupations, while the City of London, Richmond and Elmbridge have the lowest.

Yet new figures from the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been running since the 1980s, suggest that 41 per cent of people in managerial or professional jobs think of themselves as "working class".



You may be in charge, but the chances are, you still feel working class. Why?

"There are strong emotions attached to class for many in the UK," says Professor Diane Reay, one of Britain's leading class experts at Cambridge University. "People's self-identification as working class [is often] connected to family histories."

For this reason, working class identities have held up surprisingly well in Britain, despite the rapid decline in traditional working class jobs.
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According to the British Social Attitudes survey, more than half – 53 per cent – of people identify as "working class", down only slightly from 60 per cent back in 1980.

Rather than one based on income or profession, this is a "working class of the mind," according to Professors Geoffrey Evans and Jonathan Mellon at Oxford University.



In fact, working class identity in Britain remains much stronger than in other countries, where it has been supplanted by a rising middle.

"In more equal societies where income and wealth disparities are not so great, such as Finland, Norway and Japan – all countries where a majority see themselves as middle class – class has less efficacy," says Reay.

If "working class" no longer means being poor, is inequality really to blame? One theory is that working class identity is kept strong by a sense that the cards are stacked against you.

"In focus groups, people talk about being working class as being a 'struggle', working day in day out, working hard, doing things right," says James Johnson of JL Partners. "That's often framed in contrast to those they feel don't have to work as hard, yet get more rewarded: illegal immigrants, super rich, tax dodging companies, even the very poorest who they feel get help from the state."

We see this in the data - the JL Partners poll found that one of the biggest class identifiers was not job or income, but education. Some 46 per cent of people with a university degree identified as working class, but among those who left school with only GCSEs, the figure was 73 per cent.



Not appearing qualified "on paper" can be a huge barrier to those from working class backgrounds.

Tyler Mills grew up in Ladywood, one of the poorest parts of Birmingham, where "gang-related violence", he says, was a fact of his childhood.

His passion was graphic design – yet his school's teacher was kicked out before he had a chance to take his GCSE, meaning he left school with no qualification in his subject of choice.

Unfazed, he took a BTech in design and went on to study at Nottingham Trent University. Now 25, Mills's career took off after his work was spotted by a top advertising agency and he now works as a designer for the council.

He is well paid, though still considers himself working class. "Without someone showing you the doors, you can't see those opportunities," he says.

The Sutton Trust has estimated that the untapped talent caused by low social mobility could cost the economy up to £140 billion a year by 2050.

But, if qualifications do not provide a fair depiction of someone's skills, could technology help bridge the gap?

This is the aim of Mission Beyond, a venture by entrepreneurs Harriet Green, Manny Amadi and Dax Grant.

They are developing a "careers advisor in your pocket" – an app which, when a user provides information about their day-to-day life and interests, uses data to match them with careers they otherwise would not have considered.

Within three years, the group aim to have helped a million young people find a job. "There is a confidence problem," says Amadi, who points out that working-class children are not always as good at talking about the skills they do have.

Even in the 21st century, another persistent class divider – perhaps the most outward, and hotly debated – is accent.

As a student, Mills was so worried about his Birmingham accent that he took elocution lessons.

"As a black man, I already felt different enough. I had people taking the mick at university, so I decided to work on it to sound more southern."

While other class identities are shifting, research by Professor Erez Levon at the University of Bern suggests accent biases are the most resilient.

"The same hierarchy that existed 50 years ago, we're finding exactly the same hierarchy today," he told Rajan's documentary last week.

"In law firms, working class accents were being judged as significantly less confident, even if their answer was exactly the same."

In 2013, a Manchester University study tracked how David and Victoria Beckham had stopped dropping H-sounds at the start of words as well as using less cockney-sounding vowels. "Beckhams getting posher," the university concluded.

The effect also works both ways, however: traditional accent biases remain so strong today that many middle classes use so-called "mockney" accents to feign a working-class background.

For many, class is the great unspoken social hurdle, especially in professions such as politics and media.

Elliot Major points out how class is often overlooked on panels. "When experts like myself are asked onto the BBC, they quite rightly look at gender and ethnicity. But at the moment they don't look at socio-economic background. I would argue that's flawed, and quite damaging," the professor says.

There have now been three female prime ministers and ethnic minorities are well-represented in Rishi Sunak's cabinet – but some 65 per cent of ministers went to private school, compared with 7 per cent of the general public.

Being "working" or "middle" class no longer means what it was. Yet the strength of the legacy of Britain's class system means that those who start from working backgrounds feel they have to graft harder to get ahead.

There will not be more barristers, police chiefs and cabinet ministers from state schools until that changes.

@TomHCalver

One striking thing was about it being tied to family history. Because identification as middle class doesn't just seem a thing in more equal societies, but also in the US which has more inequality. But that line about the family history, which I think is true, reminds me of the stereotypical 8th generation Italian or Irish-American who is proud of their heritage. It's part of a mythology but also, perhaps ironically a sign of social mobility and justifying it. In the same way as those Americans have stories of hard scrabble backgrounds and arriving in the US with nothing to their current relative affluence through hard work etc - I wonder if there's something similar going on with people referring back to their parents, or grand-parents' struggles/poverty. It's an explanation that they got to their current middle class income and lifestyle through virtuous hard work.

[Tamas]

I guess this is the British version of how in America you are "middle class" unless you are in abject poverty. Just that there it is used to avoid facing societal issues, here it is to avoid having to recognise privilege.