Class Act

The big wee man of comedy, Ronnie Corbett, has finally shuffled off this mortal coil. And without a title too, cried the commentariat, while every honours list today is packed to the rafters with donors, stoners, chancers, cronies and outright crooks. To Ronnie’s family, consider it the highest honour that he was thought too good to join their distasteful and hypocritical ranks. To those of us who grew up with the Two Ronnies, you were a better night-in than any knight-errant.

But we grew up in different times when, despite the failings of our stubborn, stiff upper lip demeanour, and rigidly observed protocols, British people had far more about them and far greater opportunity for expression and advancement than the Frost Report class system sketch betrayed. “I know my place” said Ron, as the lower class oik at the end of the line. How would that attitude go down with those on the bottom rug today?

I am Upper Class. I like to pretend, however, that I am Middle Class, to ingratiate myself with him. He is Middle Class and he pays the taxes that pay the grants that maintain my family seat. Otherwise I rely almost entirely on charity. I no longer look down on him, but I still despise him.

I am Middle Class and I still look up to him because he was born into riches. I am aware, however, that he relies on me and my fellow taxpayers to foot the bills, but I do wish he would stop dropping his aitches. I preferred it when I was happy to believe he was better than us. [TURNS] I look down on him though, because he is The Most Vulnerable in Society.

I am The Most Vulnerable in Society. I don’t look up to anybody but I do call those who pay my benefits, ‘Tory Scum’. I don’t know why I feel this way, but it is expected of me and I like to do my bit because we’re all in this together.

I am Upper Class. I only look up to royalty. I envy him though, because he is Middle Class and he still has aspirations.

I am Middle Class. I do all the work. I envy him because he is where I want to be [TURNS] but I fear him because he is the alternative.

I am The Most Vulnerable in Society and I don’t give a damn. I used to be Working Class but now you work for me. Now and again the Middle Class try to make it difficult for me, but I’m not afraid of them. I am, however, afraid of... him.

I am muslim class and I am untouchable.

Something new?

They say there’s nothing new under the sun. Every generation discovers for the first time the hitherto unknown activity [whispers] ‘sex’ and every generation metaphorically re-invents many wheels. Human society – its morals, its sins, its hopes, dreams, crimes and calamities - and every social phenomenon has its echoes in times past. I was reminded of this last week when I heard on the radio, in the early hours of the morning, the short poem by Bertolt Brecht: Everything new is better than everything old:

How do I know, comrade

That a house built today

Has a purpose and is being used?

And that the brand new constructions

Which clash with the rest of the streets and

Whose intent I don’t know

Are such a revelation to me?

Because I know:

Everything new

Is better than everything old.

It is satire, of course, a play on the plagiarism of novelty and much like reading Dickens today and discovering that the human race has evolved not one pace forward since the days of Victorian squalor. Indeed Dickens wrote at length of the plight of slum dwellers in those unlit streets. The average height back then was around five-foot-five (165cm) Today it is more like five-foot-ten (178 cm). But this simple statistic ignores societal variations; those in deprived areas are more likely to tend to the Victorian average and as social mobility has been lost, whole inner-city boroughs are made up of people for whom six feet in height is a freak of nature.

Everything new is better than everything old. But an old plan in new clothing has resurfaced to take advantage of this disadvantage. The government's Technical Housing Standard requires floor-to-ceiling heights to be at least 2.3 metres, a requirement that has been in place for half a century or more. But developers have realised that with inner-city humans being shorter, housing being in desperate demand and building heights restricted by the planners, a 10% reduction in ceiling heights would allow a whole extra floor in a ten-storey block of flats.

In the guise of something new, the London borough of Newham has been quietly resurrecting an old plan from the early nineteen seventies. Despite the recent tragedy at Ronan Point, planners came out in favour of a trial scheme: In the 'interests of humanity' the developers of Harlow New Town proposed a restriction in the height of inhabitants for precisely this reason so that in the words of Mr Gabriel, a spokesman at the time, the genesis of the idea was the possibility tat they could 'fit twice as many in the same building site'. They said it was all right. It seems that some things old are just as good as everything new.

Steely stuff

UK Steel is screwed. That is the long and the short of it. Like coal before it and shipbuilding, the heavy industry we once had is going the way of the dinosaur. “But what will the workers do?” comes the cry “The government must step in and save the industry!” Their hearts may be in the right place, but who pays for it?

Somebody trying to persuade for Remain was saying the other day that "45% of UK exports go to EU but only around 7% of their exports come to the UK". Maybe so, but that is spread across 27 other countries. It would be physically impossible to trade equally with a population 8 times our size. For instance, if we exported 50% of our production to 5 other countries and they each exported 10% of theirs to us we’d have an overall trade balance yet a massive trade surplus with each of them if we mix and match our ‘facts’ to make our argument, the way socialists do.

Socialism is complicated; take housing... (See how I am changing the subject so as to appear knowledgeable while still nevertheless changing the subject – it’s the dialectic, or something.) I want to buy a house, except I can’t afford a house. But if I demand that the state just gives me one it is only going to upset the bloke next door who has scrimped and saved to buy his. So the state will build me a house (probably a bit bigger and better than the one next door because, you know, standards) charge me a subsidised rent, then pay me that rent back in housing benefit. They’ll have to cover the council tax as well and pay my national insurance, so I get a full pension and obviously cover my general running costs because I’m boracic and I certainly can’t afford it.

The bloke next door is looking at me in a funny way now. He’s envious because he thinks I have more than he has. That’s silly; we have the same, but I don’t pay for what I’ve got as I don’t have a job. That’s not my fault because I don’t have any qualifications, which is because I could never really be arsed at school. Anyway, unlike me, he doesn’t have time to get really annoyed because he is greedy and has a second job to go to. Me, I have plenty of time, which I spend on Twitter, complaining about the government and the fact that those bastards want me to suffer austerity so they can keep the NHS going or something.

So the state taxes low earners to subsidise no earners. And it taxes companies so they need to keep their costs down, so they import cheap workers from poorer countries – who want to come here because the wages my neighbour can’t live on are still much better than theirs. Then they get to live here, pay virtually no tax – even though the government pretends that they do - while receiving tax credits and housing benefit and child benefit and so on – and send money home so that in a few years they can buy a house of their own in their own country; unlike me, here at home.

My neighbour can't afford to retire in England as he has a mortgage to repay, but he's thinking of moving to one of the poor countries made even poorer by the migration of all their workers, where he can buy a cheap house and live off his savings and his UK state pension. People like him take money out of the UK but spend frugally so don’t really do much for those poor countries they move to except to encourage more Brits to move abroad and buy cheap houses, so pushing up the prices which means the workers in those countries still have to migrate to Britain to earn enough to buy a house...  

Anyway, in the socialist utopia all this is normal.  The state should make everybody happy. The way to do this is to spend money. We haven’t got any money and you would think we can’t spend money we don’t have, but you’re not thinking, my friend. We can either earn money – oh no, evil capitalism – or we can do it the kinder way. To build our dream home we just have to borrow money we will never be able to repay but that’s fine because the state can just print more to make what we borrowed worth less, so that eventually repaying it becomes pointless anyway. Other countries have to do the same because we‘re not paying them back, so they have to borrow more and so on. In the end, everybody owes everybody else so much that I think we just write off the debts and shake hands.

Could it be overmanning?

As a socialist I’m a bit hazy on the finer details, but I trust a future Labour government to sort it out and say no to brutal ‘Tory Cuts’. Save the steel and solve the problem, I say. Then do the same with energy, housing, transport, trade, jobs, education, health, defence... On balance, though, maybe not today, maybe not next year but sooner or later UK steel is still screwed.

Sky-High Futures

Some British teachers, it transpires, are demanding that schools stop promoting 'fundamental British values'. Odd, I thought they’d stopped doing that a good two generations ago. Their reason (the very thought that such morons could be deemed to possess reason!) being that it may encourage children to think other cultures inferior. Inferior, that is, to the culture which established global trade, invented practically everything of any use to mankind, single-handedly civilised the dark continent – for a while at least – and gifted the world a set of core values which are the very basis for civilised behaviour.

Teachers’ union leaders object to ‘How to be a British Citizen’ classes because it is seen as demeaning to other cultures and may inculcate 'cultural supremacy' here, in the land of its birth. They want to teach human rights instead and obviously some ill thought out hotch-potch of multicultural, diversity-based drivel. What they mean is islam, of course. It is the supposedly tiny minority islamic culture they seek not to diminish or offend or treat as, you know, a minority issue. Oh and while we’re on the subject of islam we Brits also abolished slavery... you should try it.

The NUTers also called to increase immigration, being particularly in favour of the muslim refugee methodology, presumably because that would help to more quickly make us the minority. That would rub our nasty right-wing noses in it and relegate ‘British Values’ to the shitty little backwater it deserves to inhabit. To which end we should also welcome the tolerant nation of virtually 100% muslim Turkey to the EU ranks, especially in view of their fantastic contribution to human rights, tolerance and good humour.

We seem to be building a new state in much the same way a ‘nontrepreneur’ starts up a business doomed to fail in order to flog his dead horse. In this brave new world allowances have to be made so that inferior competitors still get prizes – like applauding truly awful poetry set to a monotonous beat as art and pretending its crayon-wielding plagiarists are important social commentators and historical diarists – Rap-Pepys. Or insisting against the facts that equality is somehow a naturally occurring human right while at the same time demanding special recognition for Oscars of Colour.

In that enterprising spirit I have a business idea which is a perfect match for the future of civilisation. I’m going into the suicide vest industry. Money people will surely be queuing round the block to get in at the ground floor, hoping their investment will go sky high. Starting with the kids – get ‘em young, they say – next Christmas Winterval’s must-have toy could be ‘My First Suicide Outfit’. Just think about it – how many products out there are so good, you’ll never need to buy another one?

They blow up so quick...

Okay, I confess, I haven’t run the numbers through the spreadsheet yet and I know that if the initial uptake is good, future sales may not be, but I’m using an inherently flawed socialist business model here where all that matters is that you react to the immediate demand - which seems to be high - without heed to the future market. Yes I realise it may become a dying industry and sales will eventually plummet like gays from tower blocks. It may bomb, but surely I’ll get my rewards in heaven?

Play up!

It’s like playing a game where only the other side knows the rules; as if the whole stack of Community Chest cards is being kept under the table in a game of Monopoly. But hey, when the reckoning comes I reckon I’m not too bothered by the rules because I’m winning by a mile and the game doesn’t really matter anyway; it’s not real life. There is something peculiar about the game of ‘debating’ on Twitter – Twitterbate - whereby the laws of physics, economics, and simple human decency don’t apply equally to both sides.

For there are but two sides, despite all the pretence at nuance and differentiation. These can roughly be equated to left and right, or if you are playing the game properly and fully engaging in the Cosplay, ‘Heroes for Social Justice’ versus ‘Evil Corrupt Tory Scum’. The left’s chosen monicker – blazoned across their cape - is confused because, nobody really has a firm, fixed idea of what constitutes social justice, except that it is ‘the opposite of everything the Tories believe in’.

By way of explanation I ought to rough out what general population Tories believe (as opposed to governmental Tories who are actually social democrats). They believe in self-reliance, personal pride, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, opportunity for all, pulling together, pulling your weight if you can and if you genuinely can’t, having your weight borne equitably by the rest. The idea is to lift everybody up; gratitude isn’t necessarily required, but it is at least expected that you show you deserve the leg up.

The left on the other hand – thinking this is somehow fairer – seem to want to pull everybody down. Or if they don’t believe this they are doing a pretty poor job of demonstrating otherwise. Like the ISIS of the west, they far prefer demolishing Palmyra than accepting its existence because it doesn’t accord with their narrative. Hell, they won’t even re-use the raw materials, crushing the work of millions of man-hours into dust to remove any reminder of former accomplishment. History is after all, like the rules of the game, theirs to command and if they want to knock over the board when they are put in check, well...

In order to win the game the left’s rules allow the complete change of subject, venue, the game itself and the repeated denial of their own losing position. A favourite high-ground gambit is to attempt to bring the opposing players into disrepute – shouting Tory scum, racist, profiteer and all that - but if that doesn’t work, other cheats are available. Starting riots, for instance, hoping to distort the game so the spectators are confused enough to believe them when they say they won after all.

It's just not cricket... is it?

So, as the caped crusaders for love and justice and compassion and their own peculiar version of ‘the truth’ (Thatcher!) set about trashing the joint so that nobody else can play; bursting the ball, pulling on their goalpost jumpers and crying foul, the right calmly picks up the winnings and moves on to fight the next battle. Politics? It’s more like a bunch of squabbling kids.