11/23/2004|||110124165025030465||||||

THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPERS?

Andrew Sullivan's thoughtful piece on Prince Charles's troubles brings to mind a passage from one of my favourite books of the year, Ferdinand Mount's study of the UK class system, "Mind The Gap" :

"The English working class is, I think, uniquely disinherited, and the most important ways in which it is disinherited are the more crippling because they are largely hidden from us...

"We are often told that deference has disappeared from modern Britain. Yet the adulation of the rich and famous is surely as fulsome as ever. In hotels, restaurants and aircaft - the sites of modern luxury - the new upper crust is fawned on as egregiously as old money in its Edwardian heyday...The pop stars and IT tycoons are the equivalent of the upwardly mobile merchants and lawyers of Tudor times and the cottonocracy and beerage of the nineteenth centuries. What has almost disappeared is deference towards the lower classes. Throughout the two world wars and the decades following both of them, the lower classes were widely revered for ther courage in battle, and their stoicism in peace. Values such as solidarity, thrift, cleanliness and self-discipline were regularly identified as characteristic of them.

"That is no longer the case. By a remarkable shift in public discourse, the middle classes have come to regard most of these virtues as characteristic of their own behaviour, indeed as largely confined to themselves. For the ultimate deprivation that the English working class has suffered - in fact the consequence of all the other deprivations - is the deprivation of respect." (p107-8)

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/11/prince-and-paupers-andrew-sullivans.html|||11/23/2004 07:58:00 pm|||||||||

|||