he Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain”.
Our Downers – to use Mount’s preferred term for the losers in the British class system – are, by world standards, culturally impoverished. It is difficult to be precise and non-subjective about this, but there seems to be a genre of working-class life in England which has no equivalent in the rest of the developed world. The deprivation in question is not material: we’re not talking about child labour, or anything which by global standards – the standards of the four billion people who live on less than $4 a day – is considered absolute poverty. It is difficult to quantify this deprivation, though Mount does have one or two good examples, such as the fact that 42 per cent of all burglaries happen to 1 per cent of all homes, principally those belonging to the poor and/or single parents: so the less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen.
It is difficult also to discuss this without sounding snobbish; but there is, clearly, a crisis of value among the poor in Britain – the bottom decile, or 10 per cent, and perhaps the decile above it. The crisis is related to the fact that our culture now values only two things, money and celebrity, and the poor by definition don’t have either.
I think this is offensive bollocks. A crisis of value among the poor in Britain? From where I’m standing the most obvious crisis of value is in the LRB and Guardian-reading classes.
Once class simplification was set up [by Marx], however, something very close to class war did take place. Mount sees this process as being driven by middle-class dislike of the proles. He draws extensively on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses to evince a widespread contempt for the working classes on the part of their betters: Huxley, Shaw, Wells, Lawrence, Woolf, the usual suspects – ‘the extraordinary thing remains that so many of the finest talents of their generation should have found the mere existence of millions of their fellow countrymen loathsome to the point of being intolerable.’
They still do.
Leave a Reply