That old "posh" British accent - why did we laugh at it?

When I was at university, I used to laugh with my friends at the Monty Python sketches ridiculing posh English accents and the army officers that used them. This was in the very early 90s. The Monty Python sketches were getting really old themselves, and the accents we were laughing at were fast dying out. 

One of my reasons for joining in this humour was less honourable. Being young I hankered after friendship. When I got to university I found a lot of my fellow students going in a political direction I knew I couldn't follow. Today we'd call it the "progressive" Left. But I found that when I played Graham Chapman's sergeant major character, some of those friends laughed very loud*. I didn't share the political bent that made them laugh at some things rather than others - but social pressure encouraged me to laugh at that parody

How we laughed at the posh-speaking army officers. Except that those officers were the ones that were actually in charge of one of the best militaries in the world, widely respected.

I've been thinking about this again when I watched a documentary about Britain's campaign in the Falklands. It is their sort who ran half the world. They were not much like today's breed of Englishmen: who all seem to hate each other, who are negative about themselves, everyone around them, the future, our past...negative about everything, really, which they seem to think is a badge of honour

* my student friends even seemed political at what they'd laugh at. Maybe that's true of some of the things those of us on the centre-right laugh at. But I do think that "progressives" took the phrase "the personal is the political" excessively seriously. A huge number of them were obsessive about their politics. It was hard to talk to them about any subject without them relating it to the struggle against the Tories. This cultist frame of mind is incredibly inimical to the imaginative life

Thoughts on class

From a comment of mine on the Telegraph news site:

"As soon as the word "class" is mentioned, you've opened  a can of worms. People will have entirely differing presuppositions of what the word entails.

Listen to sociologists talking on "thinking allowed" on radio 4, and you are listening to a group of would-be scientists who base much their work on a set of definitions of assumptions about "class"

But how can you do that? Who knows where one class begins and one class ends - where is that set out exactly? And if many sociologists agree on a particular set of criteria for being one class or another, who's to say those criteria aren't wrong, or completely artificial?

The word is useful for them because it immediately ties them to Marxist theory, but also to a whole set of very real problems in the UK over the last 150 years or more. Because of the Marxist link my heart sinks when people mention class.

But noone in this country seems able to forget the humiliations suffered by the lower classes here. Not just the poverty and hardship (and a certain amount of envy too), but some of the social behaviours that kept the system in place. Social competition in the higher classes, and the pressure to keep those from 'lower' classes - who wanted to join the higher ones - in their place, meant a lot of superior airs and aloofness, and plenty of resentment. 

(just the other day a neighbour told me how she had worked as a cleaner in a girls school in Oxford, and received some pretty haughty bad-manners from a 20-something woman working there.  I'm afraid that, knowing the school, that does not surprise me)

Many seem to blame the class system for all inequalities (which are probably inevitable anywhere to some degree). I think that is wrong. It provided structure, and something to aspire to. Take away the system, and the inequalities have not gone away

The dynamics, the social aloofness, can keep standards, but they can also be an ego trip for those in the middle to upper classes, and thoroughly divisive in relationships as well, to name just 2 problems. 

Now, though, the tables have turned, and some spit the meaningless phrase "White middle-class male" out with real venom..."


I notice that I said "Take away the system, and the inequalities have not gone away". Another interesting facet is that people of the left see that inequalities still remain (as they always will), and that people help their friends (ditto) and take it all as evidence that the class-system has not  died at all. I think they are very wrong. These are just ordinary social dynamics and the hand-wringing over whether a potential son/daughter in law is of the right class is a thing of the past.


We may still worry about our offspring's marital choice, and we may still dislike 'chavs', but this is far more to do with standards of behaviour - a different concept and entirely natural. We are not going to stop worrying about our children and their relationships, neither are we going to be happy about being gobbed on by some unpleasant kid who can't find anything better to do. This is nothing to do with old conceptions of 'class', no matter how much people like Owen Jones claim it is