Guardian: Queen gone downmarket, less posh

You have copied and pasted thousands of words from the Guardian only to post a link at the end. Would it not be more sensible to give a summary of the article, provide a link to the full text and then provide a discussion point around which this thread will revolve? What is anyone supposed to make of this?

Posh Britain: will they always lord it over us?

The posh, like the poor only more noisily, are always with us. Consider the new film The Riot Club. It is, you’d think, a devastating critique of Britain’s ruling classes, an adaptation of state-school-educated dramatist Laura Wade’s 2010 play Posh, which, by dramatising the wretched roistering of a restaurant-ruining university dining society closely resembling the real-life Bullingdon Club to which so many of our current rulers belonged, skewered the sense of entitlement to power of a privileged, wealthy, public school and Oxbridge elite. The play, at least, was timely: it was staged just as that elite was about to become the government and put its collective foot more firmly on the throat of the poor than previous administrations.


When Michael Billington reviewed Posh in 2010, he complained it was too implacable. “[Wade’s] argument would be even stronger if it admitted that, even within the ranks of the bluebloods, there were occasional spasms of doubt and decency.” But what made Posh bad drama for Billington made it good politics (certainly if you’re of a socialist persuasion): why dramatise the decency of the posh when we, if only figuratively, should be strangling George Osborne with Boris Johnson’s entrails?


But in that shift from stage to screen the implacableness of that rage got lost. Instead of evisceration, celebration. Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard reporting from the Toronto film festival, wrote: “t scores an own goal; it comes on dressed as a cheerleader for the left, then can’t help but defect.” The headline? “The PM should love it.”


What happened? The drama got co-opted by posh. It wasn’t just because the film is produced by David Cameron’s one-time roommate and fellow Etonian Peter Czernin, though you’d think that didn’t help. Czernin, incidentally, is a member of the Howard de Walden family. His mother, Hazel, Baroness de Walden, is holder of the 400-year-old baronetcy created by Elizabeth I in 1597 for Thomas Howard for his role in defeating the Spanish armada. In 2012, the family’s worth was estimated to be £2.2bn, and family members, including Czernin, benefited from multimillion dividends on the De Walden Estates properties in central London. Is Peter Czernin posh? Certainly factors such as going to Eton, being able trace your illustrious ancestors back to Tudor times, fattening your bank balance with the proceeds of rents from your family’s central London property portfolio and having David Cameron for a chum, don’t disqualify him.


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Photograph: Modern Toss/Modern Toss
Nor is The Riot Club’s dismal political switcheroo explained by the fact that its stars come from posh acting dynasties, though that probably doesn’t help either. One of the leads in the film is Max Irons, son of Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons (still celebrated for playing Oxbridge arse-kisser Charles Ryder in the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). Max attended the Dragon School in Oxford (boarding fees per term: £8,980; day fees per term: £6,230), as did so many other thespians – Tom Hiddlestone, Emma Watson, Hugh Laurie – whom one wouldn’t balk at calling posh. Another lead is Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox and Joanna David, who attended and was expelled from Bryanston (boarding fees per term: £11,162). Freddie, 25, incidentally, told the Radio Times that he has taken to speaking with a Mancunian accent while working on the Manchester-based TV series Cucumber: “I decided I was going to stay in the accent until the job’s done. Of course, my parents hate it.”


But what the preponderance of posh in The Riot Club throws into relief is the complaint, now made almost weekly, that aspiring actors from disadvantaged backgrounds can’t get a break. Dame Judi Dench has disclosed that she receives begging letters from kids who can’t afford the cost of drama school training. David Morrissey makes a similar complaint, arguing that creative industries have an “intern culture” that is failing people from disadvantaged backgrounds.


In this sense, acting is a microcosm of Britain, one of the world’s most sclerotic, class-bound societies. Only 7% of Britain’s school-age population attend private schools, but half the cabinet – including Cameron (Eton), Clegg (Wesminster) and Osborne (St Paul’s) – went to private schools. Politics and acting are just two professions fast becoming what they weren’t – exclusive fiefs of daddy-bankrolled spawn.


Dench and Morrissey have a good point. One way of addressing it would be if we stopped making films about posh people starring posh people and produced by posh people. Aspirant actors from disadvantaged backgrounds might get a toe-hold.


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Photograph: Modern Toss/Modern Toss
What was most loathsome about The Riot Club is different from the foregoing. It’s the betrayal of the rage that made the play worth seeing in the first place. In the New Statesman recently, Cambridge student Conrad Landin recalled taking part in a focus group as the film’s makers tried to get a student perspective on the subject. He recalled the film’s director Lone Scherfig asking them: “But aren’t these the people you’d secretly quite like to be?” “‘No,’ I replied, aghast. ‘No,’ said several of the other Cambridge students in the room.” But that’s the narrative lie of posh: we hate them because we want to be them, not because we want to eliminate them as a precondition to becoming ourselves. Filled with Nietzschean ressentiment, teeming with self-loathing, we project on to the Other (the Posh) what we aren’t and never will be. Or, as Wade put it in an Observer interview: “We love watching rich people behave badly. It has a sort of grisly fascination.” If that’s true, and I doubt it, we have to kill that love: otherwise, if we watch stuff like The Riot Club we bend the knee to a lucrative global industry that has a dual function. Internationally, selling posh abroad (think: Downton Abbey, The Kings Speech, The Queen) has helped reduce the balance of payments deficit that resulted when the industries in which the working classes toiled were eliminated by the Conservative governments of the 1980s. And domestically? Selling posh helps reduces us to voyeurs of a pimped-up grotesquerie of toffs behaving badly. Think: Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Made in Chelsea and now The Riot Club.


The Riot Club, then, recreates Brideshead’s deferential culture of fondness for posh at the moment when we least need it. Why? Because the fledgling meritocracy of postwar Britain is getting slaughtered as the posh reassert control. Like many other rotten things in this United Kingdom, it started with Tony Blair. When Blair, educated at Fettes – Scotland’s poshest private school – was elected at the 1997 general election, he broke the run of state-educated prime ministers. His predecessors – Major (Rutlish grammar), Thatcher (Kesteven and Grantham girls), Callaghan (Portsmouth Northern secondary), Wilson (Royds Hall grammar), Heath (Chatham House grammar) – were state-school kids. In The Time Machine, HG Wells divided society into the Uppers and Downers. For a while, between 1964 and 1997, the Downers started to get the upper hand. Things can only get better, sang D: Ream as Blair was elected in 1997. Arguably things have got worse – unless you’re posh.


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Photograph: Modern Toss/Modern Toss
Now the Uppers are back in power – a cabinet teeming with Etonians, the standing disgrace that is a posh clown as London’s mayor. But this posh return to office is unsustainable: if the government, like the police, fails to look like the society that it is supposed to serve, then alienation from it and its claims to authority follows. This is a specifically British problem, and one that, the safe money says, drove the movement for Scottish independence.


One laughable attempt to circumvent this problem is for our rulers to pretend to be what they are not. It’s what Slavoj Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal. What does that mean? It means Cameron presenting himself as blokey Dave in his polo shirt, doing the dishes; it means George Osborne telling us we’re all in this together (quite so: when you’ve been evicted because of the bedroom tax, or come back from being ritually humiliated at the jobcentre, don’t you head off to Corfu to cheer yourself up, chilling on the yacht of a Russian billionaire chum?).


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Photograph: Modern Toss/Modern Toss
But what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne disavow so vehemently (and their vehemence merely confirms what they disavow) is that they are posh. That’s why, quite possibly, the photograph of Cameron posing with his Bullingdon Club mates when he was an Oxford undergraduate was airbrushed from media databases. The photographers, Oxford-based company Gillman and Soame, made the “policy decision”, after the picture appeared in national newspapers, not to allow any school photographs they own to be published. They denied then that they had been pressurised to withdraw the picture by the Conservative party, but some were sceptical. Columnist Peter Hitchens, for instance, told Newsnight: “I think it tells us something about David Cameron that he doesn’t much want us to know, that he is not the ordinary bloke that he claims to be. That he is actually much grander and much more aristocratic than he has made out.”


Illustration: Modern Toss
Photograph: Modern Toss/Modern Toss
So what is posh? I know, I know – I can’t believe I got this far through the article without defining my terms either. But posh is hard to define, especially when we’re in a hall of mirrors in which the posh disavow what they are and the goalposts of posh move so fast. Consider the Queen. She’s posh, right? Well, yes, but less posh than she was. In her 1950 Christmas broadcast, for instance, when she said “had” it rhymed with “bed”. Thirty years later, according to researchers at Australia’s Macquarie University , her vowels had moved downmarket (or as the Mirror put it: “Er Madge don’t talk so posh any more”).


Posh is also more difficult to define once you realise that the term is relative. “Oh golly, oh gosh, come and lie on the couch with a nice bit of posh from Burnham-on-Crouch,” sang Ian Dury on Billericay Dickie. Really? Can you be posh and from Burnham-on-Crouch??


But real posh is something else. The Guardian’s Etonian film critic Derek Malcolm got close to it once when told me that his old school had conferred on him an “effortless sense of superiority”. That, I suspect, is part of what it is to be posh: certainly my lifelong sense of inferiority marks me out as Downer not Upper, non-U not U.


And then there is another definitional problem. The posh don’t like the word posh. “Posh?” exclaims Templer reprovingly to his wife in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, his 12-volume anatomising of 20th-century English posh. “Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.”


And then there is the grubby industry of wannabe-posh style fascists who make their pennies from unconvincingly stipulating what posh is and how to become it. Apparently, you should never, ever, say toilet. “In high society, the T word is worse than the F word,” explained self-styled adjudicator of posh William Hanson. “Avoid using it at all costs or prepare for social relegation. Lavatory is the smartest word.”


But this sort of elitist cobblers doesn’t get to the heart of posh.


One founding text of postwar posh is a paper called U and Non-U by professor of linguistics Alan Ross, published in Encounter in 1955. Ross argued that the upper classes were no longer better educated, richer, or cleaner than those not of their class. What distinguished the upper classes from the rest was the way they spoke.


U-speakers said sorry, not pardon, argued Ross, listened to the wireless not radio, and deployed table napkins not serviettes. Rubbish, retorted Evelyn Waugh in Noblesse Oblige: “There is practically no human activity or form of expression which at one time or another in one place or another I have not heard confidently condemned as plebeian, for generations of the English have used the epithets as general pejoratives to describe anything which gets on their nerves.” In his 2004 book, Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain, Ferdinand Mount took issue with Waugh: “It is not simply the fluidity of language which has washed away this whole disgraceful topic. What has gone is the will to erect, maintain and police such distinctions … the upper class no longer dares enforce its code.”


It doesn’t need to. It can rule effectively by affecting to be what it is not. Indeed so much of what it is to be posh has been erased as the old elite has reasserted its hold on the British throat. The posh may not smell better, think better, be richer, speak differently from the rest of us. They have erased their apparent distinctions while reinforcing their real ones, a very British version of Leo Strauss’s noble lie.


Will the posh always be with us, degrading our lives and diminishing our opportunities? Yes, unless we abolish private schools. The postwar dream was otherwise: welfare state and education reforms were designed to create a humane, fairer Britain that would provide a safety net for the vulnerable and ladder to the aspirant. Now the safety net has been snipped and the rungs of that ladder are increasingly reserved for the posh, for the 7% who were given an unfair advantage, those whose education was paid for by their parents. It doesn’t have to be that way.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/21/-sp-posh-britain-the-riot-club-bullingdon-privilege

Knowing someone who works for the Guardian, they are the poshest newspaper out there (unsurprisingly) and nearly everyone that works there went to private school.

This is a free society, you can make of this however way you want.

Their Oxbridge employment is higher than any other national newspaper IIRC. Nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself but it is utter hypocrisy to then use these same graduates to print things like this.

Knowing someone who works for the Guardian, they are the poshest newspaper out there (unsurprisingly) and nearly everyone that works there went to private school.

TSR a 'free society'... you must be new here.

Their Oxbridge employment is higher than any other national newspaper IIRC. Nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself but it is utter hypocrisy to then use these same graduates to print things like this.

'He was educated in Dudley, Oxford and London.'

Not sure if it means the university though.

The writer of this article was Oxford-educated, yes.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/feb/16/highereducation.students2

Posher than The Queen.

Nah.