Historians say that the class syste

Historians say that the class system has survived in Britain because of its flexibility . It has always been possible to buy or marry or even work your way up , so that your children ( and their children ) belong to a higher social class than you do . As a result , the class system has never swept away by a revolution and an awareness of class forms a major part of most people's sense of identity .
People in modern Britain are very conscious of class difference . They regard it as difficult to become friends with somebody from a different class . This feeling has little to do with conscious loyalty , and nothing to do with a positive belief in the class system itself . Most people say that they do not approve of class divisions . Nor does it have very much to do with political or religious affiliations . It results from the fact that the different classes have different sets of attitudes and daily habits . Typically , they tend to eat different food at different times of day ( and call the meals by different topics using different styles and accents of English , they have different values about what things in life are most important and different ideas about the correct way to behave . Stereotypically , they go to different kinds of school .
An interesting feature of the class structure in Britain is that it is not just , or even mainly , relative wealth or the appearance of it which determines someone's class . Of course , wealth is part of it - if you become wealthy , you can provide the conditions to enable your children to belong to a higher class than you do . But it is not always possible to guess reliably the class to which a person belongs by looking at his or her clothes , car or bank balance . The most obvious and immediate sign comes when a person opens his or her mouth , giving the listener clues to the speaker's attitudes and interests, both of which are indicative of class.
But even more indicative than what the speaker says is the way that he or she says it. The English grammar and vocabulary which is used in public speaking, radio and television news broadcasts, books and newspapers (and also - unless the lessons are run by Americans - as a model for learners of English as a foreign language) is known as ‘standard British English’. Most working-class people, however, use lots of words and grammatical forms in their everyday speech which are regarded as ‘non-standard’.
Nevertheless, nearly everybody in the country is capable of using stand¬ard English (or something very close to it) when they judge that the situation demands it. They are taught to do so at school. Therefore, the clearest indication of a person's class is often his or her accent. Most people cannot change this convincingly to suit the situation. The most prestigious accent in Britain is known as ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP). It is the combination of standard English spoken with an RP accent that is usually meant when people talk about ‘BBC English’ or ‘Oxford English’ (referring to the university, not the town) or ‘the Queen's English’.