Falling Down

On the monkey business of middle-class Britain.

On the bank of the Seine at Bennecourt by Claude Monet (1868)

There's an unspoken rule in modern Britain broken only by fools and self-saboteurs. No matter how comfortable one's upbringing, one must paint a picture of struggles and strife.

Last week, prime minister Rishi Sunak revealed the hardship of his youth. On ITV, Paul Brand asked him how a man richer than the King could keep in touch with the struggles of ordinary Brits.

"What do you do day-to-day to ensure you're still in touch with the kinds of struggles ordinary people face," asks Brand. "Have you ever gone without something?"

RS: I went without lots of things, because my parents wanted to put everything into our education and that was a priority.

PB: So, what sort of things had to be sacrificed?

RS: Lots of things…

PB: Can you give me an example?

RS: Lots of things. Like lots of people, there'll be all sorts of things that I would have wanted as a kid that I couldn't have, right? Famously Sky TV!

Sunak's head lolled like a sunflower in a gale. Etched on his face was that of a teenaged miscreant conjuring a false name and date of birth before a police officer pours all 24 cans of illicitly gained Strongbow down the drain.

For a man without a blemish in 44 years, Sunak has the social nous of a teenaged boy unclasping a bra for the first time. The manual dexterity of a harpooned squid.

Sunak failed to mention attending a £51,000 a year school, the certificate from which assures a seat at the very top. His crushing lack of 500 channels to surf mindlessly didn't hold him back.

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The reaction was typically British. The lower middle classes admitted they too had Sky TV in the 1990s. As did the working classes. Here, the British middle classes sensed an opening.

With their social antenna wound around the discourse like Japanese knotweed, ceaseless social climbers revealed they too suffered without Sky TV.

Why tell such pinguid porkies? The middle classes predicate their existence on simple formulae: Whatever their perceived betters do is good. Whatever their perceived lessers do is bad.

Back in the 1990s, the sight of a Sky dish punched on the side of one's home was to some the mark of vulgarity. It was that of a 'tramp-stamp'—a tattoo etched on the small of a woman's back. Within the strictures of this tabloid morality, anything which foreshadows raffish pleasure is vulgar. If their betters think it vulgar, then they too think it vulgar.

The upper classes—the truly posh—try their best to ignore the social climbers desperate for their approval. (For this reason, the working and upper classes often have more in common: they're free from the pasteurising middle.)

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To the upper classes, the middle classes are those soon-to-be-ghosted Tinder dates who, when waking next to you, ask 'What are we now?' Pro-tip: 'Sentient, electrified meat hobbled with the cruel sense of our inevitable death,' is a prize-winning answer. Assuming you don't prize a second date or a courtesy text.

This rather unedifying theatre satisfies those consumed with sinister thoughts, such as whether their neighbour spears peas on the tines of their fork, or whether Aldi is a middle-class supermarket. To this neurotic pageant, the strivers are hostage.

That's not to indulge in what we call the politics of envy. By 'the politics of envy' we mean 'noticing that the seven percent of privately educated Brits dominate over half the top jobs in the media, the arts, the judiciary, the government, and every lever of cultural and political power.'

It is to notice that the Danish poor take two generations to rise to the middle, whilst poor Brits take five generations to do the same. Neither can one notice that civilised democracies don't sell hereditary privilege to the highest bidder. Such countries put the merit in meritocracy.

Of course, that’s not to disparage the privately educated. Given the means, all parents would secure for their children every advantage available to them. Despite the demented efforts of the twentieth century, human nature remains immutable.

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Some commentators claim this election is the class election. Why? The incoming Labour prime minister Keir Starmer has promised to strip private schools of their 20 percent tax break.  

This minor tickling of a playing field so unlevel it's a ski slope has provoked some choice, wholly rational commentary in the British media, 44 percent of which attended such schools.

"Labour's attack on private schools is a sinister threat to democracy itself," claimed the achingly well-adjusted Daily Telegraph.

This burgeoning genre shares telling and intimate details. Every parent mentioned drives an old banger, endures dreary holidays around the British bumpkin belt, and scrimps and saves and begs and borrows to find the average £15,000 a year in school fees.   

This national game of Guess Whose Testicles I Fell Out Of gets more British by the day. In the Daily Mail, an anonymous boy of fourteen outlines his fear that Starmer will force him into a state school in which the kids don't work hard. These street urchins will force him to vape and to do drugs. They'll sneer at his ambitions to become a human trafficker. Sorry. Not a human trafficker. Worse than that: an investment banker.

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What that anonymous boy of fourteen fears is what the British middle classes fear most. The fear of 'falling down' haunts and torments even Rishi Sunak, a man richer than the King.  

It is this irrational fear which provokes Telegraph readers to claim they display two trees at Christmas. It is this irrational fear which prompts the precarious middle classes into obsession and mimicry of their perceived betters. This irrational fear pens the essays which claim a minor tweak to the school playing field is the end of democracy itself.

Those fears are self-revealing. A true meritocracy would see the most competent rise to the top. To fear falling down is to admit that rising above one's station isn't always the natural order of things.

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I say it's irrational because there is nothing to fear. In Everyman's elephantine collection of Orwell's essays, we learn plus ça change is more British than French.

Across 1,400 pages, Orwell laments the mulish class system at the height of Britain's powers and at the depth of her snobbery.

In Such, Such Were the Joys, Orwell details the immutable middle-class fear of falling down. He splits his lip on the sharp elbows with which that fear is both exorcised and enforced.

That was eighty-odd years ago. In another eighty years, another Orwell will lament the same things about the same country.

At least they will if Tesla's T-800 Musk Bots haven't yet liquified every last one of us.

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