Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Ngl, the U.K. has had a weird fetishisation of the idea of meritocracy, especially since the beginning of the 21st century. Despite classism being a the foundations of British life, there’s a total lack of acknowledgement of it.

The modern understanding of meritocracy harks back to ideas in Victorian Britain. Centuries later we still believe the poor are poor due to moral failing.

"the deserving versus the undeserving poor" yup

Yup. I don’t know if this word exists yet, but I’m coining it. 21st century Britain is a neo-classist society. One where the ideology of social mobility exists as a facade to maintain a social hierarchy.

Makes sense, just like class solidarity exists for the rich.

Yup. Notice how over the course of 2 decades there has been little improvement in oxbridge UG admissions. This despite much PR and ‘access schemes’. On the surface it seems like there are improvements, but dig a bit deeper and it’s more entrenched than ever before.

I mean, I left the UK because it got worse in the ~15 years I was there. Fuck it.

Hahaha - god yeh. I only started uni in 2012. But because I was working class and dark skinned, I was subjected to so much shit I had multiple breakdowns. Literally only graduating in 2019.