One of the most bewildering things I’ve come across as an adult immigrant to the UK, after the price of train tickets and separate hot and cold water taps, is how people talk about class. British people from well-off backgrounds will drop, quite unprompted, into conversation that they went to private school but that it was a “cheap” one. Or that they went to a well-known private school but were not as wealthy as the other students, because their parents couldn’t afford skiing holidays. Or that they went to Oxbridge but did so from a comprehensive school and had parents with “normal” jobs. Once, someone gave me (unrequested) their class history, in which they described going from a charmed home life, to private school in London, to Oxbridge and then a job in the media, “but my parents gave me nothing”. I have frequently and desperately wanted to ask, “Why are you telling me this?”
It took me a while living in this country to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t class oversharing, but class discounting – a way for people to establish that their status, whatever it was, was earned and not bequeathed. Britain is a country of enormous wealth, much of it inherited. In fact, inherited family wealth is fast becoming, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the most important determinant of how well-off a person will be later in life. Britain is also a place where the alumni of a small number of expensive schools and exclusive universities hold a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s power, wealth and top jobs.
