Sunday NY Times piece on British Snobbery, for all you little plebs and gits

[Ed Anger]

Darkies

[CountDeMoney]

Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.

It's certainly all about class, but we still revere the Self-Made Man Who Grabbed The American Dream By The Hair And Did Her Doggie Style.  If you don't make it, it's simply because you didn't try hard enough.  Johnny Rube still believes in that 19th century bullshit, refusing to believe the deck is already stacked.  Unfortunately, you have politicians who'll tell them it's the fault of the blacks, the Hispanics, etc., and not the 1%ers that are the true cockblockers.

[derspiess]

[CountDeMoney]

I rest my case.

[Martinus]

Not disagreeing that race isn't the bigger issue in the American national psyche, but I'm not sure "little traction" is an accurate description re: class warfare. Terms like "poors," "rednecks," "white trash"; the obsessions with Ivy League and where you went to college, single mothers, welfare; and a whole bunch of the cultural markers associated with what music you listen to, what car you drive, or what neighbourhood you reside in all makes Americans seem pretty invested in class.

It's certainly all about class, but we still revere the Self-Made Man Who Grabbed The American Dream By The Hair And Did Her Doggie Style.  If you don't make it, it's simply because you didn't try hard enough.  Johnny Rube still believes in that 19th century bullshit, refusing to believe the deck is already stacked.  Unfortunately, you have politicians who'll tell them it's the fault of the blacks, the Hispanics, etc., and not the 1%ers that are the true cockblockers.

So it's really no different than the UK, where the deck is also stacked but it's fault of the immigrants this time.

[Sheilbh]

Here's the far superior Hadley Freeman piece he mentions:

Come on, Britain – it's the 21st century. Stop this obsession with social class
I have lived here for 25 years, but still I'm baffled by this fixation with background, schools and cutlery
Hadley Freeman
The Guardian, Wednesday 26 November 2014 18.12 GMT


The whole "fiddling while Rome burns" cliche was getting a bit old – almost 2,000 years old, to be precise – so we should all be grateful for BBC2's bafflingly pointless documentary series about Tatler magazine, Posh People: Inside Tatler, for updating the analogy. So please readjust your inner literary device, Britain: for "fiddling while Rome burns", please substitute with "worrying about which piece of cutlery to use for eating a pear while life passes by".

This was one of the concerns raised by a member of Tatler's pink-cheeked staff, and it was – thankfully – quickly resolved by a copy of Debrett's, with which each Tatlerite is equipped upon being hired. No, you have not slipped through a time-space continuum, this is the 21st century.

This TV programme has received a stonking amount of publicity and good reviews, which seems frankly incredible considering that, as yet, there was literally nothing in the "behind-the-scenes" documentary that a person could not glean from staying very much in front of the scene and simply reading the magazine. The staffers there write ridiculous articles about what the colour of your labrador says about you; these aforementioned staffers have names that sound like Craig Brown parodies, including Sophia Money-Coutts and Marchioness of Milford Haven (the latter is a woman and not, as I'd initially assumed from her name, a boat). The photographers say things like: "This is a high-stress day at the polo. You've got celebrities, you've got royalty and you've got Will Carling!" (I repeat, this is 2014.)

All of this anyone with 15 minutes to spare in a dentist's waiting room could have gleaned without subjecting themselves to this long-running advertisement for a magazine that has a readership of 160,000. And yet, as I say, it was heralded and celebrated with much fanfare, which was entirely predictable because the show was about class and Britain is obsessed with nothing the way it is obsessed with class.

You can tell a lot about a country's neuroses by what's on its television sets. In the US, TVs are clogged with endless ads for enormous amounts of food, demented diets, hilarious exercise contraptions, and medications with a seemingly endless list of side-effects to ease the effects of over-exercise and over-consumption. Britain's TV schedules, by contrast, are completely steeped in class, and have long been so. From laughing at poor people on Benefits Street to laughing at rich people in You Can't Get the Staff, this is how Britain likes to unwind in the evening: by sneering at other classes, and sneering at people for sneering about class.

It was quite a thing to watch Inside Tatler as a non-Brit in this country. I am well-versed in self-deprecation and I know when a British person says "sorry" they actually mean "Get out of my way / You just stepped on my foot / The queue starts there, mate." And yet, when Brits start talking about class I still feel like Mr Farraday, the American interloper in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, watching bemusedly as the emotionally constipated butler explains the significance of when supper is served.

I long ago accepted that I would never understand this country's class obsession, or get it right, and this was brought home to me with force earlier this year. In an article in this paper I described Kirstie Allsopp as "posh" – a term which, I thought, seemed pretty accurate, considering she is the daughter of the 6th Baron Hindlip and the cousin of Cath Kidston (even I know Cath Kidston is posh). But I was wrong. The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp was so outraged that she called me a name on Twitter not suitable for a family newspaper. Ah well, I was like Eliza Doolittle, having got it wrong at the horse races, again.

The point of the Tatler documentary was, clearly, for TV audiences to snort at these ha-ha ridiculous posh people who were all prone to shouting "my father went to Eton!" at irrelevant moments, as if they had a form of public school Tourette's. But sitting on my sofa at home, the show didn't feel like an exposé of what one person in the programme lovingly described as "the Tatler world": it felt like a microcosm of Britain itself.

If you think it's only the polo playing upper classes who have the time to fret about mind-boggling invisible codes involving how a person eats a pear, look to the newspapers. How the media huffed in disapproval at David Mellor's repulsively snobby rant at a London taxi driver, and quite right too. But their indignation was somewhat undermined by their insistence on recording what school and university Mellor attended half a century ago.

Ask yourself, Britain, if there is another country on this earth that insists on noting what school a 65-year-old man attended in any news story about him; and then tell yourself, there is none. All countries are interested in status – in the US this is usually expressed by a fascination with money and, increasingly, fame. But only in Britain is there this kind of paralysing myopia where a person is defined eternally by where their parents sent them to school, where snobbery and inverse snobbery clash with equal force and explode into a fiery ball of angry arguments involving such seemingly random – but actually deeply significant – things like grammar schools and John Lewis.

This kind of double-edged class-obsessed snobbery underpinned the – to an outsider – bewildering furore last week about Labour MP Emily Thornberry's now infamous photograph of a house in Rochester. Twenty-five years I've lived in this country and yet I am still at a loss to explain how a text-less photo of a house led to an MP being sacked. But I am alone in the corner, eating my pear with the wrong knife: the rest of the country spotted the invisible code embedded in that photo and reeled in horror.

Perhaps Britain's class obsession is a way of consoling itself that old rules still exist, even if the empire doesn't. Heck, you guys can barely hang on to Scotland – no wonder you try to distract yourselves by talking obsessively about schools and cutlery. Oh, and because I know you're still wondering, the answer to the question of how you eat a pear is with a spoon. Happy to have cleared that up for you, Britain.

[The Larch]

The obsession with Eton seems to be pervasive enough to warrant a whole section of "Fictional Old Etonians" in their wiki page (of course, James Bond went to Eton, as well as Bertie Wooster, Alan Quatermain, Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey and many other pompous stiff characters). It appears to the foreign eye that labeling somebody as having studied at Eton is more than enough to get the brand of stick up toff for life, both in real life and in fiction.

Come to think of it, the whole Harry Potter universe revolves around the fact of a bunch of kids who are super special enough to warrant to attend a super special school that will forever brand them as being super special themselves for life and different from the rest of the world. 

[The Brain]

Hogwash.

[garbon]

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/07/champagne-house-of-lords-reform-taxpayer

Champagne wars in the Lords as peers say no to a cheaper vintage

The British public has endured the expenses scandal, a cabinet minister describing police officers as plebs and a Labour MP sending an allegedly snobby tweet about "white van men". But for sheer chutzpah, the peers of the realm have potentially topped the lot.

It has emerged that a proposal to save taxpayers some money by making peers and MPs share a catering department has been rejected "because the Lords feared that the quality of champagne would not be as good if they chose a joint service".

The disclosure, made last week by Sir Malcolm Jack, clerk of the Commons between 2006 and 2011, as he gave evidence to a governance committee examining how the palace of Westminster should be run, was met with gasps and open laughter. The astonished chair of the committee, former home secretary Jack Straw, asked: "Did you make that up? Is that true?" Jack responded: "Yes, it is true."

Were the Lords right to be so sniffy, asked another committee member, Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley?

Jack, who had responsibility for catering procurement in the Commons, responded: "I don't think they were; we were very careful in our selection."

Evidence given the next day by the recently retired clerk of the house, Sir Robert Rogers, only served to confirm the peers' continued protectiveness over their choice of bubbly. When he was asked why there was not a joint catering service, Rogers responded: "It would be very difficult to get a joint catering service. I must be very careful for a number of reasons what I say here." Paisley then asked: "The champagne?" Straw added: "We heard a few things yesterday." Rogers replied: "No, I am not going into the quality of the champagne. People are very possessive about some services. Catering is an absolute classic."

The House of Lords – which has a £1.3m annual catering budget – has bought in more than 17,000 bottles of champagne since the coalition took office, enough to give each peer just over five bottles each year, at a cost of £265,770. As of 31 March this year, the House of Lords, which currently has 780 peers, had 380 bottles of champagne in stock, worth £5,713, held in its main cellar and at individual stores on site.

A former leader of the Commons, Peter Hain, said the revelation only went to make the case more compelling for reform of the way the palace of Westminster was run. "Parliament can sometimes be a complete pantomime of itself and I am afraid this is a case in point. The case for continued reform is now overwhelming," he said.

The governance committee is taking evidence as part of a consultation over whether the palace of Westminster should be run by a clerk who also has duties to advise on constitutional and legislative matters, or should be split up, with a corporate-style chief executive taking over responsibility for the £200m-a-year budget. Yet the committee's work is in danger of spilling a series of uncomfortable secrets about the way the parliamentary estate, on which 1,800 people are employed, has been managed.

The committee taking evidence from MPs, peers and former clerks of the Commons has heard tales of mice running through the MPs' tearooms, perennially overflowing urinals, a visitors' centre with a permanently leaking roof, and an account of how even the clerk of the Commons' jaw dropped when he first heard what MPs had been able to claim on expenses.

The question of future governance has pitched three key reformers – Hain, former home secretary David Blunkett, and the chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge – against three former clerks who served consecutively between 1998 and 2011. The clerks told the committee: "The history of the administrative modernisation has, in our view, resulted in a house service fit for purpose, with one point of accountability in the office of the clerk and chief executive."

The three senior MPs told the committee in a submission: "We fundamentally disagree ... From the presence of mice all over the house, including in the members' dining room and other venues where food is consumed, to long visitor queues and bungled pay negotiations, we do not consider the house service is at all 'fit for purpose'."

Tory MP Andrew Tyrie also told the governance committee about his frustration at the ambivalence among management towards keeping the palace in good order. "Someone very senior came into my office and said, 'You know, Andrew, the management of this place is not all that bad. It all functions pretty well'," said Tyrie. "He made to move to the door and part of the door handle came off in his hand. I said, 'That has been coming off every few months since I got the office four years ago.'"

[Malthus]

The obsession with Eton seems to be pervasive enough to warrant a whole section of "Fictional Old Etonians" in their wiki page (of course, James Bond went to Eton, as well as Bertie Wooster, Alan Quatermain, Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey and many other pompous stiff characters). It appears to the foreign eye that labeling somebody as having studied at Eton is more than enough to get the brand of stick up toff for life, both in real life and in fiction.

Come to think of it, the whole Harry Potter universe revolves around the fact of a bunch of kids who are super special enough to warrant to attend a super special school that will forever brand them as being super special themselves for life and different from the rest of the world. 

Allan Quatermain? Isn't he essentially a professional hunter? In the books he's described as a bit of a hobo - hardly the best example of posh. 

[The Brain]

lol hunter

[Jacob]

Allan Quatermain? Isn't he essentially a professional hunter? In the books he's described as a bit of a hobo - hardly the best example of posh. 

Professional big game hunter = posh hobo.

Seems reasonable enough.

[Malthus]

Allan Quatermain? Isn't he essentially a professional hunter? In the books he's described as a bit of a hobo - hardly the best example of posh. 

Professional big game hunter = posh hobo.

Seems reasonable enough.

 

Read "King Solomon's Mines". He's not the stereotype of the "great white hunter" in a pith helmet and spats - more like a genuine backwoods type, who eked out a meagre living in poverty by hunting (which is why he agreed to go on a hair-brained rescue mission - he was being paid 500 pounds to do it, which he wanted to pay for his son's higher education - and paid in advance, so if he died it wasn't a big deal). It is funny to see him quoted as an example of "posh".

It is also, considering the time it was written, very refreshingly non-racist - almost surprisingly so.

[The Brain]

Stroller thinks it's terribly important that people know their place.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Allan Quatermain? Isn't he essentially a professional hunter? In the books he's described as a bit of a hobo - hardly the best example of posh. 

Professional big game hunter = posh hobo.

Seems reasonable enough.

 

Read "King Solomon's Mines". He's not the stereotype of the "great white hunter" in a pith helmet and spats - more like a genuine backwoods type, who eked out a meagre living in poverty by hunting (which is why he agreed to go on a hair-brained rescue mission - he was being paid 500 pounds to do it, which he wanted to pay for his son's higher education - and paid in advance, so if he died it wasn't a big deal). It is funny to see him quoted as an example of "posh".

It is also, considering the time it was written, very refreshingly non-racist - almost surprisingly so.

I'm glad you think so.

Another good one from Haggard is Nada the Lily, all the leading characters in it are non-white. They are adventure stories so the non-white people are portrayed as quite different and exotic, but inferiority does not seem to come into it.