Britain and Class

In 1800, Britain was a heavily class-based society. It was initially very binary - the peasants and the aristocrats - but in the early 19th Century, the new middle-class emerged. In time came finer gradations - lower-middle, upper-working, etc.

Each class had its own traits and mindset, but nevertheless, it is possible to speak in very broad terms of a single spectrum from low to high. (If this spectrum did not exist, the designated points along it would not make any sense.)

The culture had markers associated, if not with any particular class, then with some point on the spectrum from high to low. People knew that each thing they did - the mannerisms, the clothes they wore, the way they spoke - was associated with some level in the hierarchy, and either they accepted their level, or they strove to ascend, or they gave way to despairing downward (financially for them, culturally for their offspring). But the momentum was upward, because everyone understood that high is superior to low.

This system insulated the high from degradation and maintained the means by which the low could be looked after and stewarded towards higher things, or failing that, at least prevented from tearing down the library, the museum and the academy. Such an arrangement was necessary because there is wide variance of intelligence within Britain’s gene pool, which also has running through it a fierce individualistic streak which threatens any order that is not prized and protected.

Thus, the order was prized and protected. This was done by stratifying the gene pool. Classification was never as rigid as leftists would later assert, but it was deeply entrenched and it was replete with symbols. The way that a man asked you the time would provide you with a wealth of signals, which your mind would instantaneously combine into a single, and usually very definite, account of his social status. But this would already have been betrayed to you by his clothing, his gait, his facial features (or the way he held them), and even the way he obtained your attention.

If everyone respected this class system and accepted (or found) their “rightful” place within it, then order could be maintained. Culture could be shaped, morals enforced, the populace directed, and a high level of civility maintained.

It also meant that culture could be categorised hierarchically. We could distinguish between good and bad.

Low-brow culture was scorned but tolerated for the working-class, since it was understood to be all that most of them could handle. But at the same time, public libraries were plentiful and helped any working man with intelligence and ability to ascend to some higher stratum. His origins might still be betrayed by his manner and accent, but not by his children’s, for they would grow up in a better environment than he had, and they would be - in every sense - higher class than him. He might know how to make money, but they would know Austen and Tolstoy, and perhaps even Milton and Chaucer; if he was gruff but able, they would be refined and comfortable.

Simultaneously, high-brow culture was recognised as such and valued for being such, and people were directed towards it whenever possible. It was understood to be largely the preserve of the educated and the upper-class, but if the common man could appreciate it too, so much the better. For the middle and upper classes, staying abreast of high culture was not always easy - by its nature, it demands effort and time - but they did so because they valued it and because they valued their own social status, which depended on appreciating this and being seen to appreciate it.

From this arrangement benefited not just the people, who participated in culture in a way that nourished them, but also the culture itself, which was maintained and supported to become the best culture of which the British gene-pool was capable.

The British people were not a jumbled set of individuals, but a structure, an anatomy, an organism, capable of collective functioning. This functioning was mostly outwardly-focussed. That is to say, it enabled the British organism to achieve things in the world. But an organism is meant to be self-sufficient, with each organ being regulated, monitored and maintained by other organs, and in this task one can say that the British organism was not so functional. The working-class endured appalling hardships and deprivations, and their endurance was rewarded by their “betters” usually with reticence and sometimes with contempt. But at the same time, conditions did improve for them decade after decade, year after year, due to the stewardship from above. The upper and middle classes jostled to be the better stewards of the working-class. The middle (sometimes) accused the upper of being ruthless exploiters and oppressors of the workers. The upper (sometimes) accused the middle of being busybodies looking to exploit the workers for their own self-aggrandisement.

Without a scholar’s grasp of the history, it is difficult to discern, 150 years on, exactly how the Victorian upper and middle classes respectively behaved towards the working-class, and how they actually felt about them (which is a very different thing). But I assume that the middle-class were much as they are today - some deeply moral but all moralistic, yet at the same time deeply hypocritical and mercenary - and that the upper-class found them at turns amusing, exasperating, annoying and inspiring.

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Then, starting probably in the 1890s, accelerating after World War I then accelerating greatly in the 1960s, Britain gradually shed these divisions along with the very idea of having “a class system”. This was part of the deconstruction of our culture. It was useful to the deconstructors to demonise the source of order and to mock its pronouncements. First we were taught to be less rigid about our place and other people’s places within the hierarchy, then the very concept of hierarchy was neutralised, so the various signs which determined someone’s place within it naturally fell away, becoming unknown and baffling to young people who had never been taught what each one meant. Since the hierarchy could no longer be described, even if it could be justified, restoring it was now impossible.

This situation perhaps peaked in the 2000s - the age of New Labour, IKEA, working-class millionaire footballers, Dragon’s Den, and reality TV. At this point, Britain claimed to be a classless society, no longer bound by the pointless divisions and silly distinctions (or “hang-ups”) of the past. All that mattered was money and whether you had the talent or the drive to obtain it.

As a result of the nullification of social strata, culture itself suffered. There is no doubt that British culture today is of a much lower quality, optimised for a much lower intelligence level and pandering to a much lower way of being, than it was a hundred years ago. Yes, you can point to this or that atrocity committed by Britain back then, but it is obvious that the general culture then was, at the very least, “aiming in the right direction”, whereas today it is aimed shamelessly downwards at the gutter. Of course, this is due also to factors external to Britain, but one exacerbating factor, which has also reduced our ability to combat those external factors, is the loss of our own belief in cultural hierarchy; our belief that cultures and mindsets can be categorised vertically, and that we ourselves can (and should) be sorted vertically according to which of those mindsets we have.

The working-class enjoyed the new egalitarian order, because it meant they no longer had to “look up” to their “betters”. On the contrary, Mondeo Man could have a CD player in his car just like the wealthiest aristocrat; hell, he could have a Bentley and drive it around un-self-consciously if he could just get the money to buy one. There were no limits. And after all, why shouldn’t a yob have a fancy house? Why shouldn’t he feel good about himself? Why shouldn’t he, an ignoramus, consider himself equal to - perhaps even superior to - someone with so-called “good breeding”? What even is “good breeding”? With no hierarchy of values, how would we discern good breeding from bad? The field was open.

Middle-class students in the 2000s enjoy ironically aping the manners, lifestyle and attire of riff-raff (it’s easier than appreciating Brahms)

The liberal middle-class also enjoyed the new “classless” Britain. It meant they could be lazy with their diction, drop their Ts, save a fortune by sending their kids to (a good) state school, indulge in trashy low-brow culture, forget about some fusty hierarchy in taste, art, aesthetics, or the other facets of “so-called civilisation”, and needn’t observe the many Ps and Qs of “correct” etiquette. What did any of that matter now? We had become egalitarian, open-minded, non-judgemental. We could “let it all hang out”. We could be comfortable with ourselves, not beholden to arbitrary social and cultural standards that had been upheld by the ancien regime and, in the absence of said regime, were now meaningless and absurd.

But, as much as the middle-class enjoyed this new-found (newly-granted) license, it also endangered them, because it threatened to demote them from their higher perch, to merge them back into the working-class. They didn’t want that! They enjoyed aping the working-class, but they didn’t want to be mistaken for them! They still wanted to be superior to them, and certainly to be considered superior to them. But, without the old distinctions of manners and diction, how to assert that one is, indeed, superior to the riff-raff?

Just as the old order was finally disappearing, its replacement arrived: progressivism.

Now what mattered was, not how you spoke or dressed or behaved, but what you believed.

At first, this was established by substituting the old inferior for an entirely different one. The liberal middle-class were encouraged to feel superior to, not the working-class, but “bigots”, “racists”, “straight White men”, etc. This culminated in the late 2010s with the most exotic categories of bigot: “transphobes” and “climate change deniers”.

The bugbear was not lack of civilisation, refinement and manners, but lack of open-mindedness, tolerance and the intelligence which (supposedly) goes along with those traits. To lack those was to be bad in three spheres: genetically (unintelligent), culturally (uneducated) and morally (unkind).

The theory was that this was an entirely different spectrum of inferior-superior. You could be upper-class but yet be a transphobe. (Indeed, the upper-class were often pilloried for being bigoted in various ways - racist, sexist, psychotically snobbish, nostalgic for the Empire, etc.) Meantime, you could be working-class but still be a good progressive. After all, being born poor doesn’t stop you being open-minded, inclusive, a trans ally. In theory, there was no direct relationship between this and the old class system; it was an entirely different set of metrics for judging people (including oneself).

But, in 2011, a clip emerged of an EDL rally where a young working-class skinhead moaned drunkenly about “Muslamic rayguns”. Britain’s middle-class absolutely delighted (they still do, thirteen years later) in mocking this man - so thick and uneducated, he doesn’t even know the correct name for the Islamic rape gangs he wickedly claims are preying on the young girls of his pathetic working-class community…!

This was a turning point, when it was realised that in actuality there is huge overlap between the old inferior (working-class) and the new inferior (bigoted). It is not an entirely different inferior-superior spectrum at all, but the same spectrum merely tilted slightly. In fact, the working-class is the demographic most narrow-minded, most plentiful in bigotry, most lacking in education and intelligence and open-mindedness. (In retrospect, this realisation was always bound to dawn sooner or later. It is an obvious fact.)

The old snobbery (which had never really gone away) was not just revived, but now given a moral justification. The liberal could unleash her long-held, and long-withheld, loathing of the working-class, but this time with a clear conscience. Their crime now is not to have been born poor, but to have been born bigoted, and to have proven their inferiority by failing to shed this bigotry. In fact, given the moral imperative to defeat bigotry, despising the working-class is now the liberal’s duty as well as her pleasure. This is how we got the slur “gammon” - joyfully shouted into the air by someone who has little else between her ears. It is also how we got “low information voters”, “the deplorables”, “try reading a book”, “it’s not my job to educate you” - a whole set of condescending terms and phrases beloved by the liberal midwit.

And let there be no doubt. They are educated, they are intelligent, they are open-minded, but they are midwits. They are educated, yet ignorant and gullible. They are intelligent, yet undiscerning and unquestioning. They care, but they care more about “the fact” that they care, and they will betray entire classes and demographics and religions and races in order to prove just how “caring” they are. Their view of themselves is entirely at odds with the reality. Their self-image has been fed to them along with everything else. They are incapable of looking either outwards or inwards with any independence of thought. In either direction, they see only what they have been told to see. Everything else remains unperceived, inconceivable, even preposterous if you were to suggest it to them. They are the most brittle and rigid people on Earth.

This is the British middle-class - not peasants, not aristocrats, and perennially insecure about being mistaken for the former when they yearn to be the latter. Thus, they are the most malleable people in the country. They will believe anything that they have been told means they are sophisticated. They will even believe there is no such thing as “sophisticated”, if believing this means they are sophisticated. They will believe in equality, if believing in it means they are better than people who don’t.

Three years after the “Muslamic rayguns” hilarity, the Rotherham report was published, finding that the illiterate skinhead was absolutely correct. So were the EDL he represented. So had been the BNP. So was every working-class person who had dared to complain about this matter only to get shouted down, mocked and demonised by middle-class virtue-signallers.

That middle-class was now revealed to be not so virtuous after all, and not so smart either. They had fallen for a trick - they had been conned into believing lies, comforting lies which designated them superior to “bigots” - when the “bigots” were correct. This negated the middle-class’s claims about themselves. Clearly, they were not very virtuous, not very aware, and not very intelligent either.

This left the middle-class with a potential crisis. If they looked at this reality long enough, it would grind their self-image to dust.

Their solution was simple, but brutal and heartless: stop looking at the reality of Pakistani grooming gangs preying on the White working-class. Simply deny it. Minimise it. Pretend not to have heard about it. Admit the issue, but draw false equivalencies with something else. Admit the issue, but pretend not to understand how it connects to the general issue of multiculturalism, or mass immigration, or race, or Islam, or anything. If you can’t deny the thing itself, deny its implications. At every stage, retard the truth by playing the hatchling. In the face of such appalling truth, play dumb.

This is wholly immoral, especially for the class who see themselves as society’s moral arbiters and its intellectual elite, but the middle-class are prepared to do it, so desperate are they to maintain their social status and their self-image. If their self-image cannot withstand a fact and their social status depends on ignoring it, they will ignore it. No matter how important and appalling the fact is, it will be swept under the rug.

And so, the issue of Pakistani grooming gangs was folded into the general issue of child sexual exploitation. This negated the racial aspect of it, so that the issue of multiculturalism was not tainted and the policy of mass immigration (population replacement) could continue, and the middle-class’s gutless endorsement thereof could survive undiluted, and thus their social status could be preserved.

As a result, Britain’s working-class endured another ten years of being ignored, mocked, dispossessed, degraded, replaced, and raped.

Then, on the 29th of July 2024, a Black teenager slaughtered three little working-class White girls, and all hell broke loose. He wasn’t Pakistani, he wasn’t even Muslim, but it didn’t matter. He was racially different from them and he had harmed three of their little girls. Therefore his act struck a very sensitive nerve and triggered a very angry reaction.

The response of the middle-class was exactly the same as with the grooming gang issue ten years before: minimise, deny, misinterpret, pretend not to understand, draw false equivalencies, and demonise the idiot working-class.

What we see is that the British middle-class are a deeply moral group of people, but that their current morality is completely perverse. When it was directed towards protecting the poor in Victorian times, it positioned the middle-class to serve and strengthen the British social organism. Now, it positions them to be very destructive towards that organism, towards their very nation, and, eventually, their own existence. But that threat to themselves is still some way off. In the meantime, their treachery condemns the working-class, the very class they once claimed to care so much about, to yet further appalling debasement. That, in turn, will animate the working-class against them, leaving them despised by globalist oligarchs on one side and by racist “gammon” on the other. Their fate, at that point, might be terminal.

Whether the upper class still exists in any meaningful way other than the afore-mentioned globalist oligarchy is a good question, and not one I will attempt to tackle here.

Instead, I want to ask whether Britain’s class system - which galvanised the people, nourished culture and maintained civilisation - is now more trouble than it is worth. Has this strength become a fatal weakness? If it makes huge groups of people betray each other in such terrible and mercenary ways, should it be discarded?

The second question would be, if it should be discarded, can we persuade people to do so? After all, the class system is clearly extremely important to people, especially the middle-class (whose position is most precarious). Even when they preach equality, they do so only so as to express and maintain their own status in a hierarchy! It is that important to them.

If the British people can only function with social hierarchy, but at present their hierarchy is driving them towards the abyss like cattle towards the slaughterhouse, then clearly something has to change.

Perhaps a new hierarchy, wherein individuals have been categorised by proving their worth in ways pertinent to this age, unlike the decrepit old order? That is probably inevitable. I just hope that cultural hierarchy survives, because I value it there perhaps more than in any other sphere.

I remain, as ever, equally committed to the reality of the British people and the reality of hierarchy - hoping that each will not destroy the other. These isles are capable of so very much more than vulgar money and hollow status-seeking.