Class and Society
Overview
British people are divided into classes, like kids at school.
We do this so that everyone knows where they belong. It’s very orderly. It’s also a way of making sure one doesn’t marry the wrong sort. Cross-class shagging is quite permissible of course, but when it comes to conjugal unpleasantness, care of the utmost kind is required; in any event, the cross-class shagging can continue post-vows. But can you imagine the horror of marrying a young lady who passed the port to the right? Or who doesn't know the Bishop of Norwich?
The Upper Classes
Most foreign chaps think that the Queen is the crème de la crème when it comes to poshness, but no. The Queen is German, you see, and to be uberposh in England, one must be French (it all goes back to 1066).
Being English is a disgrace of course. That is, if you can work out what ‘English’ means in the first place. You see, originally there were the ancient Britons, then the Romans came, the Vikings, Angles (etymology of English), Saxons and Jutes. These latter races came from Scandinavia, Jutland (Denmark for all intents and purposes), Germany, the Low Countries. And this was all before the French although, when the French invaded in 1066, they were Normans (North Men), meaning they were Vikings too. Nevertheless, to be English is to be a mongrel, a melding of Vikings, French, Britons and Romans.
This explains the success of the Englishman. Genetic diversity. It is also the reason why Americans then became more successful than us. Here, nature took the English mongrel and mongrelised it further, with Irish, Latin, African, Italian, Jewish and Asian blood thrown in for good measure. And so, to return to my theme of the upper classes, pure-breeds may look OK for a generation or two but they soon turn out to be thoroughly retarded and useless. The mongrel may not win Crufts, but he's the one who will steal your credit cards and disappear to the South of France (thanks again to Eddie Izzard for that). We can see that the idea of the superiority of the pure-breed is thoroughly misguided. The races are very different, but the mongrel, the cross-breed, is the highest exemplar of humanity – superior to any of the single breeds that constitute it.
Upper class people are not necessarily rich. It’s about bloodlines not cash. That’s not to say that they’re poor exactly, but can you imagine the ignominy of being down to your last stately home? Some have even had to endure the shame of letting normal people (the great ‘unwashed’) into their homes and charging them money for the privilege, so they can keep the stately ‘pile’ going – the horror!
The (Educated) Middle Classes
Otherwise known as PLU’s (People Like Us). The middle classes have no breeding at all, but, in order to exercise our will to power we go to university and send our kids to university, so that we can know loads of stuff. Then, although we are no better bred than the lower orders, we can feel superior because we have read a bit of Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn.
Not only are we ‘educated’, we are ‘aspirant’ too. We hunger for poshness, yet it remains elusive. The best we can do really is to amass a ton of money and marry into the upper class by finding some empty-headed debutante whose family is running short of stately homes. This kind of aspiration can only be dreamt of by the upper-middle class (yes the middle classes are further sub-divided into upper, middle and lower). An upper middle class person is someone who has a bigger conservatory than a middle-middle class person (see the section on conservatism). This means barristers and surgeons. It might also mean somebody who has made his own fortune by working hard, running his own company, taking risks etc, although other upper-middles deny this. Such people, after all, are common traders... Middle class people can be spotted by the cleanliness of their cars - other classes don’t bother.
The Working Class
For Marx, there were only two classes – the working class and the aristocracy – that is, those who had to work for their dosh, and those who were handed it on a (silver) plate.
But what we mean is people who do manual labour (what our colonial cousins refer to as ‘blue-collar’ workers). This class was abolished by Margaret Thatcher (see below).
Pond Life
..Or the criminal classes. This class was invented by Margaret Thatcher. Before she came to power, there was no crime in Britain, but she gave working class people the chance to buy their council houses, and shares in companies they already owned, thus allowing them to aspire at least to middle class-dom.
Those who could not afford to do this got much poorer much more quickly than they would have done otherwise, and so they had to turn to selling their bodies (or someone else’s) for sex. Or other criminal acts. Mrs T was not happy when she was chucked out of power by New Labour, but she needn’t have worried – the kind of socialism we have (now) in Britain not only maintained the various types of gap between rich and poor, it increased them. So now, poor people are, relatively, poorer than they have ever been. So, as a society, we do fuck poor people over royally, but, being British, we are very polite about it, so they don’t mind at all.