There has been a bit of a debate here for some while about
poshness. The Prime Minister and
Chancellor were both privately educated and both went to Oxford
University. They both have aristocratic backgrounds (if a
little distant now) and come from wealthy families. They both belonged to the notorious
Bullingdon Club that you were only invited to join if you had pots of money. They have been referred to pejoratively as ‘2
posh boys’; the criticism being that they were privileged, lived in a select
strata of society and, by implication, had no idea what the lives of the rest
of us are like or what affects us. They
were being tarred with the ‘let them eat cake’ brush.
This disparagement hasn’t really worked, though it is
sometimes referred to in the socialist press or used in cartoons, mainly
because Cameron speaks sensibly and Osborne is able to point to the mess the
previous administration made of the economy.
The Coalition is not exactly popular, in poll terms, but nor, in
general, is the alternative greatly desired either.
The epithet came up again recently, when a Minister was
asked to dismount and wheel his bicycle through the pedestrian gate from Downing
Street (where he lives incidentally). Had he been in an official car, the policeman
would have opened the main gate for him.
He swore profusely at the policeman and allegedly called him a pleb, a
term which I have used oftimes, as a polite alternative to f*cking cretinous
Jobsworth b*stard, but which was seized on as proof that he too is ‘posh’. I am not in any way posh BTW, even sometimes
drinking my tea from a mug whilst sitting on the settee watching television! And I don’t like champagne. And I get too hungry for dinner at eight,
etc.
It is Party Conference season. This week it is Labour’s turn and the Labour
Opposition have now decided that this is the time to start their campaign to
win the next election and have begun to state their policies. Their initial shot across the bows is to
emphasise that they are not posh. With
most of their money coming from the labour unions and thus the ‘working class’,
this is an essential prerequisite anyway.
But there are a number of problems.
Firstly, poshness is an invented condition these days. It used to refer to those who could afford to
travel, of course then only the wealthy landed gentry, on the sunny side of
ocean-going steamers (Port-Out Starboard-Home).
But the landed gentry are not the richest persons in Britain
any more. The only real aristo in the
top ten is the Duke of Westminster (#7).
Even The Queen only comes in at 262 on the rich list, behind J K Rowling
and a lot of celebs and filthy lucre industrialists. In fact the richest woman in Britain
is apparently a former Miss UK. Is she, or Rowling, or let’s say Bernie
Ecclestone, who is also richer than The Queen, but who worked in the gasworks
after leaving school at 16, posher than The Queen? Maybe not.
They might be snobs, but probably not posh.
So it’s an alleged attitude that’s referred to here. One which, perversely, The Queen doesn’t
possess. But it may be one that the
Minister possesses. His father was a
Conservative Minister, he was privately educated and went to Cambridge,
was an officer in the Army and is now a senior politician. All that may have given him delusions of grandeur
or made him an obnoxious, arrogant bully, but he is hardly posh.
Moreover, the ‘landed gentry’ these days, those that live in
big houses with lots of land and people to look after them (used to be called ‘servants)
are pop stars and actors. So, are they
posh?
There is also something curious about our response to these
words. If I was called ‘posh’, I’d
either take it as a joke or protest mildly.
It never used to be pejorative, but clearly now is. On the other hand, if I was called ‘a pleb’,
I think I’d just accept it and perhaps try to be less common next time. Yet the term was always derogatory.
Secondly, the problem with Milliband taking up this anti-posh
stance is that both he and his Shadow Chancellor were educated at Oxford,
as was Balls’ wife Yvette Cooper, a sort of power behind the throne, and Balls was privately educated to boot.
All three also studied at Havard incidentally. They earn more than I ever did and are much
richer now. And Milliband has a much
more plummy voice than I. So are they
not posh?
It also doesn’t work to brand all Tories posh; Margaret
Thatcher was the daughter of a grocer and John Major, her successor, was the
son of a trapeze artist. I can
understand all Labour politicians wanting to have working class roots on the
other hand.
Thirdly, we haven’t asked the obvious question about the Downing
Street gate incident. Why
did the policeman behave the way he did?
And why did he threaten to arrest the Minister for swearing at him? Maybe because he was in fact a Jobsworth and
bore a chip on his shoulder about opening a gate for important people or
towards important people generally? This
is a dangerous route to go down. The
whole ethos of the British policing system, since Peel invented the police, is
that they are citizens like you and I.
That’s mostly why they are not armed and don’t strut about issuing
orders to us plebs. I imagine that
grates with some of them, who must feel they deserve more respect than they get
from a large minority of the population who see them as ‘authority’ and thus to
be reviled. I agree whole-heartedly that
we should love our police for what they do far more than we do. I wouldn’t be a policeman, but I have great
admiration for those who would and are. But
I wouldn’t have any respect for one that tried to belittle another citizen.
Fourthly, and I think this is most important, what’s wrong
with people who can afford a good education and who have enough money to spend
on election campaigns, etc without having to work, becoming our leaders? On the whole, I think I’d rather have someone
who ought to have some idea what their talking about as my Prime Minister, than
someone who was poor and uneducated. If
my next door neighbour announced he was running for Parliament and hoped to
become PM, I don’t think I’d support him much, however sensible he might
be. But that’s just me. However, if politicians are too much like us,
we would find it hard to give them leadership over us. The first among equals applies only to the
leader of the Cabinet, not the leader of the country. In other words, the ‘equals’ are the other
Ministers, not the plebs.
Interestingly, at the moment, Labour is doing rather better
in the polls than the Coalition, but most people asked prefer David Cameron as leader
to any of the Labour aspirants. Perhaps
they’re seen as down-market or just too ordinary?
