"Class divisions are fading in Britain." We have heard it said so often, it must be true. I have even said as much myself. But looking through my notes once more, something made me hesitate. It wasn't, perhaps, the very obvious inequalities in Britain; it was the cultural impoverishment of the lower orders. They are not just worse off in relation to the very rich; they lack even the lowly and trivial ambitions of their parents.
You might wonder why someone like me should care. Well, I don't really, but I've got a lot of time on my hands and I don't need the cash, so I thought I'd turn my brilliant mind to the subject. You see, it's no fun patronising the working class when they behave like a lumpen mass of shell-suited morons.
It's true that more people have washing machines and telephones than they did 30 years ago (Times, 2003). But that is not proof of a narrowing of the class divide. In real terms, there is a greater disparity of earnings between the very rich and the very poor. People's names also give a great deal away. How many proles do you know called Ferdinand?
We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity. Can you imagine the reaction of a worthwhile publisher to the idea of a book on class written by a common person? In fact, it is intellectually impossible for a common person to have conceived such a notion, (Lord Snooty, Beano, 1964).
David Lodge has described The Time Machine as "one of the most desolating myths in modern literature" (Language of Fiction, 1966). Yet HG Wells's tale has a resonance today; for the Elois and the Morlocks read the Uppers and the Lowers. The strata are rigidly defined. Moreover, governments of both hues have reinforced the divisions through their social policy.
The Lowers have had everything they held dear ripped from them. Their dependence on the church has been undermined, along with their noble aspirations to wedlock and the nuclear family (Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, 1995-2003); they have been nannied into filthy estates where they all smoke crack, joyride cars and have their senses dulled by cable TV. If one person is responsible for this it is Rupert Murdoch; at least that's what I would have written were I not a columnist for the Sunday Times. So I blame the BBC instead. The director general has forgotten the meaning of the words " Dei omnipotenti templum hoc artium ..." engraved in the hall of Broadcasting House.
What is to be done, you may ask? We Uppers must do our best to make the Lowers feel more wanted by visiting them in prison. And those who are out on bail should be given a plot of land to build their own hovels. I shall stay in Islington.
The digested read ... digested
The political manifesto for the Monster Raving Loony party
