thank you for pointing out a typographical error in my post. i have duly changed it to suit my intended meaning.Pickman's model said:
what are the most pressing issues facing the working class in britain?
- Thread starter rednblack
- Start date
Who does that?Ryazan said:
Pickman's model said:
I thought I would give it a miss when I first saw this, but changed my mind.
I get called a fudgepacker, bender, fag at work. It is banter. Turd Burgler is not a foul insult in my opinion, and I am known as one in the circles I move in. Stop causing trouble. All you do on threads is barge in and try and derail by immediately picking on posters. Fuck off you dickhead.
Can you please explain? Even on single person benefit and housing benefit she would be on more than that.Ryazan said:
What are you going on about? I haven’t called you a troll or a racisttreelover said:
You chose to post a comment after my post claiming I was being patronising and failed to point out how I was being patronising.
This is a bulletin board, you post stuff and people respond, I am responding to your one line post and asked how I was being patronising.
And what’s all this bollocks about “back off” & “I really resent these constant insinuations from certain people on the boards” I don’t think I have even spoken to you before.
It was you who chose to post on the thread and I see you have still not bothered to explain how I was being patronising, it is a simply question isn’t it? After all it was you who said it so I’m guessing you understood what you meant
Pickman's model
sunset spires and twilight woods
i didn't get the impression that flypanam meant it in a jesting, bantering way. if you get called things at work, and yr fine with it, good. but don't think that what you find perfectly acceptable in yr employment other people do here.Ryazan said:
if you want to take it up with the moderators, be my guest, but i imagine you'll get short shrift from them.
bolshiebhoy
socialism leinster drink
Have a word, don't you think people would accept less at work than on a poxy website? I know if someone at work, or in the street for that matter, called me half the things people on here have, it would be a cause for violence. Lighten up if you can at all.Pickman's model said:
reallyoldhippy said:
With housing benefits going direct to the housing association, and with debts from other places draining her money, she had around £80, sometimes less, a week in which to bring up 2 children. But, of course she worked on the sly, as it was essential given the situation. You seem a little naive really as to just the kind of circumstances lower class single parents have to deal with. Not really smiliar to the experiences of those from the middle class who, from whatever radical class analysis they might use, consider themselves to be exploited and oppressed as working class individuals. I agree to a certain extent with such people's views, but there is a point where this agreement stops.
£80 is not much for bills, food, clothing, transport and other things related to the needs of children. A single person might get by happily, but not a family.
I always scoff at the argument put about by some that people in such families are poor because of spending on superfluous items. Often people don't have enough for what they do need.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Ryazan said:
I don't usually like Rory Bremner, but back in the nineties he did a great sketch which sort of said it all to me.
The sketch was set around a dinner party in a nice Islington middle-class home, and the guests, puffing on fags and drinking wine and spirits, were pontificating about the w/c spending their money on booze and fags.
newbie
undisambiguated
Ryazan said:
I don't think becoming m/c is the conscious aim, but it's a potential consequence of successfully trying to take control of your own life. Almost everybody wants that, I think.
The unsuccessful don't make it, they're stuck with a council tenancy and little or no chance of an exchange, a crap job with no prospects, being at the bottom in the scramble for decent schooling for their kids and so on.
But many can improve their circumstances economically, to the point they can afford a mortage on a nicer place to live. They move, the culture of their birth atomizes, and they introduce ambiguity into their personal class position (the w/c couple from an estate who firsttime buy a flat in a nicer area are easily portrayed as welloff middle class incomers).
Gradually, imperceptibly, a stereotypical w/c person can move into fuzzy 'classless' territory, which is a short step from trying to grasp the material choices and opportunities available to the middle classes.
It's easy enough to see postwar history as a scramble to become middle class* by as many w/c people as can. Ultimately, on a material level being unambiguously working class has very little going for it.
That says nothing about aquiring the political or cultural attitudes of the middle classes. That's a different, though obviously related, issue.
edit: * poor wording. the scramble isn't so much to become middle class as to cease to be working class.
Pickman's model
sunset spires and twilight woods
have a word with yr homophobic mate! there's nowhere either here or irl that i insult people, whether i know them or not, about their race or their sexuality.bolshiebhoy said:
as it happens, i'm straight. so i'm left wondering why flypanam's first thought when it comes to slagging me is to reach for a homophobic cuss. i'd suggest that it's unacceptable behaviour in anyone, especially someone with delusions of being in some as yet unproven way a revolutionary socialist. if you find wbhat flypanam posted in any way acceptable, it says a fuck of a lot about yr politics. if i'd come out with the same wankery that flypanam did, the entire swappie/ruc posse would have been out in full effect demanding my head.
instead the fucking lot of you are silent, leading me to conclude that you (pl) at least tacitly condone what he said. the fucking lot of you should be ashamed.
Pickman's model
sunset spires and twilight woods
eh? as though i'd take etiquette tips from you!flimsier said:
bolshiebhoy starts knocking on about anarchism being a cornershop mentality - what the fuck's that supposed to mean? when people start talking about cornershops, they mean small convenience stores run by asians, ime. hence my comment. then bolshiebhoy decides it's perfectly acceptable to say that all indians are islamophobic, which you'll see if you read the fucking exchange again, and it's me who's out of order?
newbie said:
Very few of those I grew up with in inner city Manchester who have moved out to the suburbs have ceased to consider themselves working class. What they do consider themselves to be is working class but better off than they were before, or better off than their parents were. Which is entirely reasonable, because that is exactly what they are. (Some that I know aren't that better off in their pockets than they were before, even if their environment is better, as this kind of move is usually accompanied by the taking on of more financial commitments.)
That way of thinking is widespread and is one thing that frustrates and infuriates those who wish to deny that working class is still a meaningful term. Of course, working class people, in the eyes of some people, are not allowed to use their own experience in order to determine their own class status. But there you go....
newbie
undisambiguated
What they think of themselves as, and the general trend of their behaviour, aren't necessarily the same. When they buy their way into a formerly coherent w/c area they have an undeniable role in the spreading of middle class choices. Least that's the way gentrification has been portrayed around here over the last 20 or so years. Many explicitly and proudly attempt to stay true to their roots, and resent being lumped in with the genuine m/c. They're looked on as being, to a greater or lesser extent, hypocritical. They can also be seen as sell-outs by the people they left behind.
bolshiebhoy
socialism leinster drink
As in 'small is beautiful', 'think local' etc. Not tricky really and nothing to do with race or religion. But that was the direction you took things and your racial generalisation drew an ironic reply. Now, haven't we all derailed this thread quite enough...Pickman's model said:
newbie said:
Don't know if that's supposed to be an answer to my post? Because, if it is, I don't see how points about gentrification can be addressed to me, seeing as I wasn't talking about gentrification.
What I was talking about were the kind of people who leave the inner-cities behind and move into the modest suburbs. Most of the people I know who've done that have been able to do it thanks to their own financial sacrifices. Most of them continue to work in the same jobs that they did before, which makes their regarding themselves as working class is far from hypocritical. And,as probably a majority of people that they live among in such modest suburbs are in a similar position, I would regard them not as in any way middle class areas, but as better-off working class areas.
And I have never heard the friends and relatives that such people leave behind in the inner-cities condemn them as sell-outs. In fact, people are usually glad to see members of their own families, in particular, be able to move away from many of the problems that they have to endure and into more comfortable conditions.
Clintons Cat
Walks Like A Twat.
personal debt/housing
newbie
undisambiguated
I thought I was addressing your point about whether those your grew up with 'have ceased to consider themselves working class'. I don't think it matters what they think of themselves- they are part of a process.
Your experience of people moving out from the inner cities is mirrored by my own seeing them moving in. I don't know about ooop north but I know of a number of places dahn sahf where there have been transformations of formerly w/c areas. As the more successful w/c move out they're replaced by others moving in, who change the character of the area as they popularise it- a process the latter stages of which are undoubtedly gentrification. The net result is a m/c area, with possible resentment amongst those w/c people who have never moved away, who can't afford to buy within their own area, whose kids can't afford a flat where they grew up, and for whom there are limited or non-existant social housing opportunities. I don't blame them for that resentment, nor for characterising the anonymous incomers as middle class.
Your experience of people moving out from the inner cities is mirrored by my own seeing them moving in. I don't know about ooop north but I know of a number of places dahn sahf where there have been transformations of formerly w/c areas. As the more successful w/c move out they're replaced by others moving in, who change the character of the area as they popularise it- a process the latter stages of which are undoubtedly gentrification. The net result is a m/c area, with possible resentment amongst those w/c people who have never moved away, who can't afford to buy within their own area, whose kids can't afford a flat where they grew up, and for whom there are limited or non-existant social housing opportunities. I don't blame them for that resentment, nor for characterising the anonymous incomers as middle class.
Stobart Stopper
Well-Known Member
1.Crimerednblack said:
2.Education
3.Income/expenditure
4.Hospitals/healthcare
5.Debt
6.Racism
7.Religious discrimination
8. Defending asylum seekers
9.War
10.Billboards
11.The Berliner Guardian.
Pickman's model
sunset spires and twilight woods
you certainly have, from yr very first fucking post on it.bolshiebhoy said:
Clintons Cat said:
This may prove to be the real biggie in the next year or two.
Personal debt in this country as it stands is barely manageable with near to full employment. When the recession truly bites all this will end in tears. However all this seems news to the Provie who are still going around the doors hawking their vouchers for Christmas.
This is a bit annecdotal but for me sums up the sharks:
A number of years ago I came home from work and forgot my door key. Then I realised my wife had gone to watch the Manics in Cardiff and wouldn't be back for some time. So I made myself comfy on the windowsill.
As I sat a while I saw the provie agent coming up the street. As I too in the past had been a customer I knew her and we engaged in small talk. I told her I was locked out, a bit cold but, would sit it out. The first thing she said was that if I liked I could borrow 50 quid and could then sit in the pub to keep warm, remembering last time I borrowed from them I declined. But that is the provie for you- they are there when they think you need the money and exploit the situation.
A friend of mine has two children she borrowed money one Christmas to buy presents, but provie loans work on a 52 week cycle so by the time she paid it back its Christmas again. Of course she never gets to save as she is busy paying back double what she borrows. This for them is perfect as the final payment is the right time of year to hawk another loan. They brought catalogues and showed my friend the nice toys she could get for her kids from Argos.
While I am no longer in debt to Provie I cannot help noticing that they call at many houses in my street (and probably countless other houses in the village, county and country) sucking millions out of working class homes and no doubt virtually snatching millions of dinners off working class tables.
Of course the provie deals in areas where banks and credit cards will not go- the poorest households where often there is no bank account or poor credit rating. Their interest rates mean that for 50 quid borrowed you pay back
about 85 quid.
Of course debt is not confined to the poorest, with millions from middle class down getting a bit spendie with their credit cards, but at least we know that as long as there is a Provie the financial services sector believe in equal opportunities to be in debt.
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