CLASS CEILING
Too much? Well how about a more balanced BBC perspective from a previous life. Austerity doesn’t really affect me. I’m quite comfy on the whole but I bet it’s a bugger if you’re on benefits.
Too smug? I’ll get this thing to work eventually. Let’s take a deep breath and press both butons at the same time.
Most people in Britain don’t earn enough to have a healthy and relaxed lifestyle free from stress and without working endless hours or topping up their income through state benefits. They just don’t. It isn’t only a scandal, it’s dysfunctional and completely counter productive. The objective of prosperity isn’t wealth – tons of cash – it’s wellbeing, what we call happiness. Which is why in Denmark where average incomes are actually lower, work-life balance is measured at 10 (that’s maxed out, floating-on-air happiness level) on the OECD Beter Life Index and so is their life satisfaction. In the UK, we’re lagging way behind on litle more than half as happy. (That’s without the Glasgow Effect).
There are endless think-tank projects and Commons commitee reports on this kind of stuff that stun you with minutiae. No mater. What they really amount to is that Britain is run by a greedy elite who hold generational power and manipulate national affairs to their own advantage. That’s why you find that 19 – yes 19 – British Prime Ministers went to one school. And it wasn’t Selkirk High. According to the roll of honour not a single Selkirk student, including me, has so far entered Downing Street. But Eton College sent 19 forth, Harrow followed with seven and Westminster squeezed in six.
Only eight of 53 PMs since Walpole in 1721 went to what we now call state school.
Last week we heard that even when private school former pupils enter the same profession as escapees from Bash Street institutions, they earn on average £4000 a year more. Tim Nice-but-Dim isn’t quite the bonehead we think.
You can’t blame him either. If you’re brought up in a club and share experiences and outlook with like-minded mates, you feel you belong – even if it’s only the Masons. In Edinburgh, which is really an English provincial city outpost, about 25 per cent of school age kids are in private education. For those of you who did maths at Stalag Secondary, South Lanarkshire, that’s officially called A Lot. And I reckon I know most of them. All their friends go to Merchant Company schools and they retain those friendships right through adulthood. They send their children there. They form businesses together. They inter-marry and socialise together. Their alumni man the judicial benches, sit on the appointment commitees, steer the professional bodies and people the boardrooms. And who do you think they are most likely to choose to join them?
Last week we heard that even when private school former pupils enter the same profession as escapees from Bash Street institutions, they earn on average £4000 a year more. Tim Nice-but-Dim isn’t quite the bonehead we think.
by Derek Bateman
Welcome aboard, Tim. (The downside of such entitlement expectation among the middle classes is that the psychiatry industry is kept afloat treating the failures who only become bank clerks and assistant civil servants).
This creation of a self-selecting nomenclature is a miniature copy of the English class system which has elevated snobbery and exclusivity into a fetish. It’s what happens when your head of government is chosen by genetics, not by votes. A culture of fawning and servility becomes the procedure for advancement so that even hard-headed businessmen liable to have broken fingers as well as rules on the way to riches, see a tray of glitering medals and a Ruritanian title as the apotheosis of their career. Those of us who sneer in contempt do so from the outside and are easily discounted.
September 2015 9
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