A Quote by Andrew Neil

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility. — © Andrew Neil
As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.
In Britain, class is a neurosis. You judge people from the moment they open their mouth and start speaking: what their accent represents in terms of where they were educated, what part of the country they're from, what kind of class background they have.
The emphasis placed by more and more companies on corporate social responsibility, symbolises the recognition that prosperity is best achieved in an inclusive society.
My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That's what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it's very, very dull, whether that's all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same.
We are social animals and we have a hierarachical and unequal society. It is a class society, and the class system creates and perpetuates the social role of consumption. We display our class membership and solidify our class positioning in large part through money, through what we have. Consumption is a way of verifying what you have and earn.
Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.
I talk to the young generation and advise them to be both fully Muslim and fully Western citizens, to be free, to speak out, to express themselves. We have new generations of Muslims who were born in the West, coming from within, and they are well educated and they understand. Some sisters and brothers are ready, yes, even though I can see young sisters and brothers who are also obsessed with their social status, their titles, their salary and are scared to not be tolerated.
We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.
We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries.
I come from a well-educated and cultured, middle-class Maharashtrian family and have been brought up with social awareness.
High levels of inequality generate high costs for society, dampening social mobility, undermining the labour market prospects of vulnerable social groups, and creating social unrest.
Young people are better educated. They grew up in a society which is well connected, well informed. They are able to communicate to one another, to know what is happening.
The morality of a society is not judged by the behaviour of an oppressed class but by the rules and laws made by the state, which either protect or exploit an already depressed section of society.
Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.
A lot of young Poles, very well educated ones, are living in Britain. They are working hard. Of course they are building their own prosperity, but they are also contributing to the economic prosperity of the United Kingdom and surely I can say - and this is underpinned by the economic data - they bring in more than they take away.
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