Class discrimination is a big thing, and it’s related to accent discrimination and somewhat to ethnicity too. There is no shortage of stereotypes associated with regional accents (apologies, but to illustrate: cockney = untrustworthy; West Country = unsophisticated; Yorkshire = blunt, miserly; RP = haughty). Accent is judged alongside class (which I won’t attempt to define here). Ethnicity comes into the picture with groups such as travellers (who have only recently been recognized as an ethnic group) and showmen (who disclaim being one), and Jewish ethnicity is also often ignored as “just another kind of white” (see David Baddiel’s book Jews Don’t Count). Then there are Scottish and Welsh people and maybe even sub-national groupings like Cornish, where ethnicity and accent and class interact in complex ways.
These groupings have fuzzy edges and can be hard to disentangle as identity markers (and thus hard to make anti-discrimination rules against), which is fertile ground for under-the-radar discrimination.
The UK has racism/tribalism built in. It started there and worked upwards. The founding Anglo-Saxons are the Angles and the Saxons, two competing and merged races. The word England means land of the Angles.
The class system overrides any racism, you are judged on much more than your race. Where you were born, your education (what school and university you went to), your friends, where you live now (by area name and distance to better spots), your family connections, your accent and word choice, your dress and behaviour (manners and mannerisms), your job history, the clubs you belong to, and much more.
If you work with some people or someone really cares about you, they'll do homework on you to find out all this stuff.
The UK has mapped out discrimination far deeper than american style racism. There are many more ways to slice up your image than just tribalism and ethnicity.
I remember reading an article by someone from the UK who loved that in the US you could move somewhere new an “be someone else”.
I had no idea what he meant until I visited the UK and some locals explained to me the scale of associations / assumptions involved based on many factors.
These groupings have fuzzy edges and can be hard to disentangle as identity markers (and thus hard to make anti-discrimination rules against), which is fertile ground for under-the-radar discrimination.
The UK has multi-dimensional racism!