III. The Middle Class.

3.1 Upper middle class. The upper middle class in Britain broadly consists of people who were born into families which have traditionally possessed high incomes, although this group is defined more by family background than by job or income. This stratum, in England, traditionally uses the Received Pronunciation dialect natively and was traditionally frequently associated with professionals with tertiary education.

The upper middle class are traditionally educated at more prestigious private schools, called "public schools" in the United Kingdom. Public schools were predominantly founded to serve the educational needs of the upper middle class, whose children have always constituted the majority of their customers.

Many upper middle class families may have previous ancestry that often directly relates to the upper classes.

3.2 Middle middle class. Middle middle class in Britain often consists of people with tertiary education. They speak in accents which could range from received pronunciation, to provincial as well as Estuary English. They may have been educated in either state or private schools.

Typical jobs include accountants, architects, academics, doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers, managers, businessmen, engineers, or civil servants.

They are highly politically and socially engaged and might be regular churchgoers, sit on local committees and governing boards or stand for political office. Education is greatly valued by the middle classes: they will make every effort to ensure their children get a university education; although they are sometimes unable to afford private schooling.

They also value culture and make up a significant proportion of the book-buying and theatre-going public. They prefer TV documentaries and dramas over reality shows, BBC radio 4 over pop stations and broadsheet newspapers over tabloids.

3.3 Lower middle class. The British lower middle class primarily consists of white collar workers and their families living in less affluent suburbs. They are typically employed in white-collar but relatively unskilled service industry jobs such as retail sales, rail ticket agents, railway guards, airline stewardesses and ticket agents, travel agents, hotel clerks, shipping clerks, factory and other industrial building owners and low level civil service jobs in local and regional government. Prior to the expansion in higher education from the 1960s onwards, members of this class generally did not have a university education.

Member of the lower middle class typically speak in local accents, although relatively mild.

IV. Working class

4.1 Skilled working class. This class of people would be in skilled blue collar jobs, traditionally in the construction and manufacturing industry, but in recent decades showing entrepreneurial development as the stereotypical white van man, or self employed contractors. These people would speak in local accents and have craft apprenticeships rather than university education. Typical Mosaic types for this group include White Van Culture or Affluent Blue Collar.

4.2 Unskilled and semi-skilled working class. Traditionally, these people would work in blue collar jobs. They would typically have left school as soon as legally permissible and not have been able to take part in higher education. Many would go on to work semi-skilled and unskilled jobs on the assembly lines and machine shops of Britain's major car factories, steel mills, foundries and textile mills in the highly industrialised cities in the West Midlands and North of England.

However, since the mid-1970s de-industrialisation has shattered many of these communities, resulting in a complete deterioration in quality of life and a reversal in rising living standards for the industrial working class. Many either dropped in status to the working poor or fell into permanent reliance on welfare dependence. Some dropped out altogether and joined the black market economy, while a limited few did manage to climb up to the lower middle class.

V. Underclass. The "underclass" was first identified in the 1990s, a group consisting of the long-term unemployed, elderly pensioners, economic immigrants and those dependent on state benefits, typically living in public housing or.

5.1 Immigrants from Europe. The British have a long tradition of receiving immigrants from across the seas, including refugees from persecution or poverty. Three hundred years ago a few thousand Protestant refugees from religious persecution came from France and some other parts of Europe, but their descendants are by now no longer a distinct group. In the eighteenth century labourers from Ireland built the canals, until a later generation built the railways. When Irish people come to live in Great Britain they are not considered to be foreign, and it is calculated that nearly a million people now in Britain can be recognised as Irish in their origins. Some keep their Irish links alive; there are two newspaper shops in one West London street, both selling many copies of twenty local papers from different parts of Ireland.

The oldest definable ethnic group is Jewish. In numbers it is small. Depending on definitions there are 300,000-400,000 Jews in Britain, or well under 1 per cent of the whole population. Most British Jews are descended from people who came from Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Before then a small number of Sephardic Jews were well established in international trade and banking, and in the 1930s there were refugees from Nazi persecution, most of them highly educated.

Many Jews from all these groups have attained great eminence through their contributions to the arts and academic life. Those who were concerned with politics were mainly active on the left. From 1950 to 1979 there were always at least twenty-five Jewish Labour members of the House of Commons, though few of them were much concerned with Jewish interests. But by the 1970s more Jews were moving to the right in politics: in 1989 there were only seven Jewish Labour MPs as opposed to sixteen Conservative MPs, including several ministers.

The Jewish population is now declining slowly, as a result of mixed marriages. Some Jews keep a strong attachment to their religion and to their community. Many live in a middle-class area of North London. But for most practical purposes they are no less assimilated with the general community than the people of every European country who have settled in Britain, both recently and long ago. Some of these to maintain elements of a distinct national identity, both formal and informal - particularly people of Italian origin. In big towns, Poles, Ukrainians and others have their own churches, mostly taken over from English congregations which had dwindled and could no longer maintain the buildings.

5.2 Immigrants from outside Europe. Like other northern European countries Britain has received large numbers of immigrants from the Third World, but in Britain's case they have come mostly from the Indian subcontinent or the Caribbean. There are now well over a million people whose origins were in the Indian subcontinent, and 600,000 from the Caribbean. The number of people with Commonwealth origins, including those from Africa and the Far East, is about 4 per cent of the whole population. The vast majority are in London and the big cities of the midlands, rather fewer in other regions - though there is a big Muslim Asian community in West Yorkshire. Restrictions on immigration from the Commonwealth were first imposed in the 1960s, and have been kept, with variations, since that time.

There are a few industrial areas where big Asian communities remain closely knit, with many of their people working in local factories. In one of these, Southall in West London, Sikhs and Hindus have reflected the conflict within India. In the West Yorkshire area there are many separate schools for those Muslims who want them. Some Muslims and Hindus at first arrived in Britain with English as their second language. Some came knowing no English, but equipped to work in factories along with others speaking the same language.

Many Asians work for public services and many others run their own businesses. Together with their Chinese competitors (kept mainly by people from Hong Kong), Indian restaurants provide a fine addition to the great variety of eating places available in most towns. Londoners and other city people also have good reason to be grateful to the Asians who have taken over many of the small shops. Typically these are run by families who keep them open late at night and on Sundays, and help to keep the streets alive in spite of the competition of the supermarkets.

For the immigrants from the Caribbean, coming from societies with many of their customs as well as their first language close to the British pattern, there was less fundamental novelty in the new homeland. In some respects the people from the Caribbean have had experiences similar to those of American blacks who have moved to northern cities of the United States, with high unemploy­ment for unqualified young black people.

People of West Indian origin have excelled in several forms of athletic sports, and Britain's most recent teams at Olympic Games have included many black people. The Caribbean influence on song and dance is obvious.

Answer the questions.

1.What is the general classification of a British social class system today?

2. To what class does the majority of the population in GB belong today?

3. What is the common characteristics of each class in terms of higher education?

4. Where do the immigrants in GB mainly come from?

5. Do you agree that economical immigrants belong to underclass stratum of the British society?

6. Can you explain the idea of a multicultural society?