This is the UK caste system on display. The Brits just don’t understand how in the US you can be anything you want to be, and nobody can stop you. Over there, if you are blue collar, you are destined to spend the rest of your life in the blue collar class.
A very fine observation. We should keep what you said in mind when, say, evaluating the writings of the 'seminal' thinkers of Darwinism, who were almost all of the British upper-caste. The attitude that you describe makes itself manifestly clear in their books. For, in applying their Darwinism to man (eg, Fisher), the underlying implication that comes through is that the castes--upper and lower--are variations. Variations in the sense of evolution, which is to say, genetic variants. Can you believe it? A blue-collar worker in the UK is a genetic variant of man, and an upperclass Oxford twit is another sort of evolutionary variant. Some British Darwinians go a little farther than this though. There babblings almost give the impression that they consider caste-members to be different species. I'm sure they would deny that if the question be put to them bluntly, but their writings leave the reader with that impression nonetheless.