The New Snobbery

Artrockers,
The first daffs and crocuses are blooming on the small patch of Brixton paving I like to call my garden, the goldfish in the tub I like to call a fishpond are up and about, having a nice swim in what was, 'til fairly recently, a block of ice. So here we go again, the cycle of seasons is doing it's business and life is returning. Amazing isn't it? The weather may have improved and the blossom may be on its way but make no mistake, the storm clouds are gathering. This year much of our populace will take an almighty kicking one way or the other, if they manage to keep their jobs they'll still have to deal with a massive increase in the cost of living with no proportionate increase in earnings. Of course they deserve this because they did...Nothing, that is to say they blithely got on with their lives, working hard, contributing to their communities, bringing up the kids...Bastards! So when it all goes off the rails it makes sense to take it out on those who played no part in the derailment, or more truthfully those who have no voice to complain because they didn't get a private education (very remiss of them, feckless some might say). I recently attended an event in the more well-heeled part of Brixton - it was a real wake-up call. You see, they assumed that I was one of them so they spoke their minds (I use the word 'minds' loosely). And what came out was a river of bile, snobbery, elitism, classism and hate for everybody who didn't own a second home. The word 'feckless' was bandied about, along with 'idle', 'thuggish', 'slatternly' and a whole host of words I thought we'd left behind in the pages of Dickens. But this class of person has no problem chucking them about because, you see, the working class are too thick to understand them, and even if they could, well, they hadn't been invited. I found the whole thing rather terrifying, like a Muslim attending an EDL meeting undercover. But here's the thing, these people weren't The League Of St George or some shadowy part of the establishment, this was a meeting called by the local Lib-Dems.
The evening concluded with a motion to sterilise the working class and remove childrem from parents too stupid to send their kids to Prep school. Maybe not, but I came away from the evening a wiser but sadder man, recalling Derek Jameson's (Oh dear, nasty working class oik) query: 'Do they mean us? They surely do!'

Tom Artrocker