Skip to main content

U and Non-U

Class is to the British what Race is to the Americans. It is not really discussed, and if it is, it is usually dismissed to foreigners as "not really important, these days".

And of course, by and large it should not be that important- the braying Piers' and Tobys have mostly been expelled from the city for being really quite bad at sums, and now content themselves being estate agents, whether in Belgravia or Bulgaria- much more appropriate for someone educated at Cirencester's Agricultural College.

However amongst the more insecure and driven Middle Classes the fight for good schooling has managed to distort and twist the housing market as well as the University entry system. More than for some time it is wealth and social background that determines academic attainment rather than aptitude and intelligence.

Our society continues to neglect talent because it is from the "wrong background".

The acres of trash journalism concerning the putative relationship between the 24 year old second heir to the throne and his girlfriend seems to have encouraged the very worst in those for whom "it is not really important these days but". Personally I find the drooling drivel from those sad creeps who study the Royal family to be fairly emetic, and the garbage about whether Kate Middleton is the Right Gel to be Our future Queen like this from the Daily Telegraph makes me wonder about the whole question of our Monarchical system.

Personally I respect The Queen, but the antics of some of the Royal family leave me quite cold. I suppose we can hardly blame Prince William for grabbing what comes to him, after all he is young, rich, tolerably handsome and very famous- and many red blooded heterosexual men in the same position would seek to "oblige" as many ladies as possible. However in addition to his choice of women, he is doubtless also surrounded by similar kinds of flunkies- people who believe that the Prince is intrinsically special. I think it would take a character of iron to resist being warped by the constant wave of adulation from a sea of women and an army of toadies. Perhaps then we can hardly blame the Royal Family for being different, when they are constantly treated differently.

The Sovereign is the embodiment of the State and Elizabeth II has handled her role with grace, despite the cacophony of grovelling. However, The Queen grew up in different times, when a degree of privacy and discretion could be relied on. In today's modern world, perhaps the vestiges of our class system, mixed with today's crack cocaine of celebrity is a drug that will be too strong to allow any of the younger members of the Royal family to emerge unscathed.

I would still like to tar and feather the authors of the moronic tosh that declares that the choice of napkin or serviette to describe table linen is the root of a yawning social crevasse that may not, indeed should not, be bridged. These people are not merely pointless toadies, they are actually malign.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more