It doesn’t happen everywhere. People in Italy don’t talk about the “working class” like they do in the UK and I’ve never heard anybody claiming they were a member of the “working class”, let alone people claiming that as if it was something to celebrate or to be proud of. There isn’t a “working class” accent in Italian, the closest thing is marginally educated people that can’t use half of the verb moods and tenses. Romans speak more or less homogeneously, likewise in other cities. Children are not segregated by class, so the child of a doctor may be in the same class of the child of the mayor, of a child that gets free meals and of another that lives in a squatted flat. They mix and they don’t develop different accents.

Instead in the UK people debate this class idiocy ad nauseam almost daily. They spend a significant amount of time and money to ensure their children don’t go to the same school as children from lower social classes (and as soon as you make a child, they’ll bombard you with their insanity). This is of course never stated explicitly and I suspect they are not conscious of that.

This is a country where even the supermarket where you buy groceries will be used to infer your class status. For instance, while I don’t know what my class is supposed to be, I’ve been told that I’m at least middle class because Waitrose is the cheapest place where I buy food. I’m posh and whatnot class because I occasionally go to the opera. Once I recognised the Thieving Magpie and told a colleague the name of its composer, that earned me the accusation of being megaclass. Once I was rented a flat, the landlady told me, because she could tell from my manners that I must come from a rich family (in fact I don’t). My girlfriend (that earns minimum wage and whose parents are cleaners) was suspected of being from the upper middle class because of how she holds cutlery (not as well as she should, if you asked me).