read the Telegraph; vote Tory

面白い記事がありました。わたしは新井潤美先生やKate Foxの書籍を読んで、イングランドには未だに、階級が存在することを知りました。それは、扱う記事も示唆されていますが、目には見えなく人々の心の中に存在するだけではなく、喋り方や社会的な地位、普段行くスーパー、購読している新聞や雑誌などでも所属している階級が明白になってしまうようです。

面白い表現もありました。それが赤字の箇所です。記事にあるheとは、記事で紹介されているエミリーさんの父親のことで、working-classの出身です。それでは、なぜエミリーさんの父は、Telegraphを読んでTory、すなわち保守党に投票するのでしょう。それには２つ理由があります。第一にTelegraphが、Torygraphと呼ばれるように、イングランドの保守系高級新聞でupper/ upper middle classの出身者がその主な読者とされるからです。第二に今の保守党はイングランドがイングランドであるべくモラルを守っているからです(Why working-class people vote conservative | Society | The Guardian)。つまり、Telegraphを購読して保守党に投票するというupper/ upper middle classの典型とされる行動が、よりイングランド人をupper/ upper middle classらしく見せるのです。それゆえに、working-class出身のエミリーさんの父親は、upper/ upper middle classに憧れているため、自らのworking-class的な考えを捨てupper middle classを演じるべくTelegraphを読みTory派になっているのでしょう。(Othello)

Across the barricades: love over the class divide | Life and style | The Guardian

Think class in relationships was only an issue in Jane Austen's time? Think again. We talk to three couples about their experience of coupling 'up' and 'down

The rules of discussing class in Britain are, pleasingly, very like those of cricket. Once you know them, they seem incredibly obvious and intuitive and barely worth mentioning; if you don't know them, they are pointlessly, sadistically complicated, their exclusivity almost an exercise in snobbery in its own right. Nowhere is this more evident and yet more tacit than in relationships: people marry into their own class. It's called "assortative mating". You know this by looking around, yet there's such profound squeamishness about it that research tends to cluster around class proxies. The question goes: "Do you and your spouse share the same educational attainment?" (Translation: are you the same class?) Or: "Did you go to the same university?" (Translation: are you really, really the same class?)
（中略）
So what's it actually like, when you don't mate assortatively? Emily Wyndham married her husband 11 years ago this week. They met at Oxford University. "I'd describe my parents as working class made good," she says. "My father had to leave school at 16 for financial reasons, but he became a businessman, they built a hotel. Not anywhere nice – it was in a crap industrial coastal town they forgot to close down. In doing so, they made quite a lot of money – enough to send us to private school – so we were the first generation of our family to go to university. He's always very keenly been aware of his position in life, and always very keenly felt he was working class, and wanted to assimilate himself to become middle class. He's very class-conscious. He reads the Telegraph; he's voted Tory for years and years.