To people who have lived in other countries, do you think the uk has a unique ‘crabs in a bucket’ mentality?

I have dual citizenship and have spent a lot of time around both kinds of attitude. In the US, "success" means wealth. So there are people like professors and teachers who are homeless because they're paid too little to afford housing. Many of them have nine-month contracts, so that they are not paid at all during summer vacation. Yet greedy, useless investors and Boomer landlords who contribute zero of value to society are considered to be successful because they exploit people. I don't think you're aware of how old-fashioned your attitude seems. You have been indoctrinated by those Boomers who hardly studied and spent their younger years screwing around, and have since had decades-long retirements by exploiting everyone else (not paying sufficient tax to fund schools and colleges and healthcare and all the other things they benefitted from). Those are the people who smugly lecture everyone who is struggling that they're jealous of success. That's what your attitude is about and like so many people in the US, you don't seem to understand that you have it. You're right about British attitudes. I encounter kids all the time whose parents actually encourage them not to apply to university and not to try at school. This attitude comes from the fact that it's impossible for people to better themselves. I work with people whose own jobs depend on getting results. There's intense competition. And yet they refuse to hire employees who wear shiny clothing and the wrong shoes. Any candidate who went to Oxford is hired without question. If there are two candidates who went to Oxford, then the one who went to the best school or who has the dad with the best job gets the position. That's how ingrained class attitudes are. The point is, there's no reason to make an effort when it makes no difference. People are not dumb. A working class person knows that it's almost impossible to succeed in a non-working class job. Where I work, someone from the north recently left because hardly a week goes by when someone doesn't make a nasty comment about people from the north. British people know that they have a place and it's a lonely, hard, utterly pointless struggle to change the system.