I have to admit that I am a big fan of the class system because it lets everyone know where they belong. I know that since the days of Blair we are supposed to think we are living in a class free society but when it comes down to it, who would you respect to run the country and the capital city out of these two photos?
  
     
Of course any fool who is not trying to be deliberatly obtuse would prefer the toffs in power over the lazy work shy scum and that’s because we naturally trust people who have the correct number of chromasomes and can spell their own names correctly.
The problem with the class system is that it has lost its way in recent years, the once simple definitions of working class, middle class and upper class don’t cut it any more and we need some new definitions. I suggest that the entire class system be divided into two main superclasses with three subclasses underneath:
Upper Superclass
- Upper Class - The traditional toffs who were born into it and so have the benefit of a good education and have the expectations of their parents &peers to guide them. They are better than most of us because they are expected to be better and so in most cases rise to the challenge. Most of the traditional Tory sorts would fall into this category.
Newspaper of choice: FT, Telegraph
- Middle Class - Those who gained a profession or worked hard to get a little more than those around them. This would not include anyone who lives in a ’semi’ and thinks that doylies are a good idea. Mainly this would be junior and middle ranking officers in the armed forces, doctors, laywers, CEOs and also most business owners. Most of New Labour would be somewhere in here as they are the top tier of the working men and women.
Newspaper of choice: Times
- Working Class - The salt of the earth workers who pay their taxes and get butt fucked by the government at every corner. The people with trades or skills that are important to the country and should be valued, but aren’t.
Newspaper of choice: The Sun
Lower Superclass
- Celebrity Class - No talent, no brains but elevated above all the others in the lower superclass because they went on X Factor and the public loved them. Overpaid footballers and talent free boy bands would all stake their claim to this territory, as would the likes of Heather Mills, Charlotte Church, Catherine Zeta Jones and Kerry Catona.
Newspaper of choice: Unlikely to read but can be seen in periodicals such as “Heat”
- Pretentious Class - Yes, here are the people who live in a semi and think that doylies are good. Normally proud of a few nice pictures of horses around the house and probably collectors of those silly little glass or porcelain animals. These are the people who read the Daily Mail and constitute ‘middle england’. Likely to be outraged at things the gutter press tells them to be outraged at.
Newspaper of choice: The Daily Mail
- The Chav Class - You know who they are. These are the rung well below the working classes who don’t work and spend their time claiming benefits for imaginary diabilities. These are the people who are draining the country of resources and are the product of a generation of celebrating laziness and greed. Every year they elect one or more of their own to be elevated to celebrity status through some form of talentless talent show. These are the people who: go on Jeremy Kyle, breed, wear tracksuits, have Sky TV, spend a fortune on pay as you go mobiles, do the lottery, think easyjet and ryanair are a good way to travel and raise their kids to think that the best career options are either to get pregnant and claim benefits or get someone else pregnant and live off benefits. Likely to have fat kids because they are too thick to cook healthy meals.
Newspaper of choice:Â Heat Magazine
Let’s all congratulate the US for electing a new President who is only 50% white unlike previous presidents who have all been over 90% white. All through the US the Democrats have been congratulating themselves on the change that will come about now that they have elected a lawyer to high office.
We can all admit now that a purple fairy could have won the election against GI Joe and Caribou Barbie provided they had a policy or two. The entire republican campaign seems to have been bourne out of the following principals:
- Obama sounds a lot like Osama
- Barrack rhymes with Iraq (if you are fuckwit american)
- Barrack Obama is kinda the same colour as quite a few muslims
- Sarah Palin was nearly chosen as Miss Alaska
- McCain spent some time being held by the Viet Cong so his country owes him 8 years of living in a nice house with guards and his own big ass plane
Now that the elections are over we can all admit that change is not really all that likely, the US will still go out into the world and bully whomever it can in order to further their own goals. The US will still send troops abroad to rape and pillage in the name of liberty and will still claim the war on terror is more than just an excuse to remove the freedoms that other nations’ citizens have to be above the shallow materialistic corruptions of the United States. I doubt that electing a half white man to the White House will make the US suddenly take an intererst in the reasons why most of the world hates the US. I doubt a dose of humility will be packed inside Obama’s travelling case and I doubt that the meddling with foreign nations will cease and the US will begin to recognise the soverignty of all states outside their own borders.
If the US wants to change then it must respect that treaties are a binding two way thing which must be recognised at all times rather than when the US will gain from it. They must realise that pillaging the oil reserves of smaller nations or invading countries like Iraq is no different from Iraq invading and annexing Kuwait for the same goals. For the US to really change they need to stop their support of the occupation of Palestine and start understanding the reasons why muslim fundamentalists are angry at the imperialistic empire which has been responsible for many of the ills of the world today.
I am no financial whizz. I live on my overdraft and tend to spend every saved penny on extravagant gifts for my girlfriend but even I know that if I was going to invest my money in a foreign bank I would not want it to be in a country where 80% of the population still believe in elves. I would also want to invest it in a country that has a little more by way of collateral than a few volcanoes and a failing fishing industry.
I understand that they offered good rates of return and all the snake oil that you could buy but why are our borough and county councils keeping their money in risky offshore accounts when they could be safe and sound in Treasury backed UK accounts? It does not seem to make sense that councils, often the hotbed for corruption and mismanagement, have been allowed to choose where they put their money rather than being required to put it somewhere safe and within the oversight of the central government.
When I was a kid I liked to play cops and robbers; I always ended up being one of the robbers and my big sister would be one of the cops. That way she could guarantee that she was the goodie and would of course ultimately triumph. We played cowboys and indians a bit too but she didn’t like that so much because as the elder sibling she needed a clear cut way to show that she was the goodie and I was the baddie and the line was not so clear in cowboys and indians. On the one hand the cowboys are gun toting bullies who are stealing the land of the noble indiginous people but on the other hand the cowboys were americans who were taming the wild west while being attacked by murderous savages. As it was the game taught us that sometimes it’s hard to tell if you are on the side of the right or the wrong: cops and robbers can very easily be transformed into Robin Hood and the nasty Sheriff and suddenly it’s the robbers who are the goodies and the cops who are the baddies.
During the second world war it was easy to tell that we were indeed on the right side, on the one hand we had the murdering nazis who were recklessly invading countries, persecuting their own citizens and generally being quite beastly. The stiff upper lipped brits could take a stand and later on once the beastly Japanese had executed their cowardly raid on Pearl Harbour it was the duty of every follower of Uncle Sam to help put a stop to this evil menace. Then along came the cold war and the west, with their freedoms and democracy, were ever vigilant against the threat of the mighty warmongering red storm. Stories about the treatment of political disidents showed us that we were resisting a threat which would take away our freedom and our trust in the state to protect us. While the two ideologies were incompatible there was still a fairly clear arguement that we were in the right, even if the opposition were not that far in the wrong (because they were not murdering people or invading much).
Roll on to ‘nam and it gets even more cloudy. Within vietnam there were those who were in favour of communism and those who were in favour of the US intervening. The numbers in favour of the US intervening were not that big but the US thought it prudent to save them anyway.
Then we had a reprieve when Gulf War 1 started. We were clearly the good guys because we were rescuing the peaceful and extremely rich nation of Kuwait from being annexed by the nasty big bully that was Iraq. We rolled in there and fired up our shit and then once we had liberated Kuwait we stopped at the border and didn’t lower ourselves to Iraqi standards by invading anywhere.
It all seemed to change on 11/9/2001 when a bunch of freedom fighters pulled off a death star scale attack on the US and global financialism in general. On the face of it we must be the goodies because the attack killed so many people yet that is not a measure of who is right and who is wrong because the US killed many tens of thousands of Iraqis in GW1. The first battle was to get in to the obvious target. Having spent a lot of time fighting the Russians when they were baddies; the Afghani people were clearly goodies so the Taliban had to be named and shamed as the vicious fundamentalist thugs that they were. The fact that they were effectively put into power by CIA meddling during the ’80s was glossed over but let’s not get ourselves all in a toot about that.
Once we had kicked the evil Taliban boogeyman out of power in Afghanistan the battle there was reduced to resistance fighters taking on the evil invading armies and that is why the coverage has dropped a fair bit since 2002.
Then it was time to get on to making those pesky evil Iraqi folk pay for their threatening behaviour. The US does not like anyone getting into their exclusive nukes club because then they have fewer bargaining chips and can’t invade whenever they like. It’s a bit like how they did not want the indians getting guns in the wild west because it was not that sporting if they shot back. The illusion of a threat of WMDs was created and it was all systems full ahead for an invasion and occupation of the country that has around a third of the worlds oil.
During this time the US has also been busy on the home front conducting torture, detention without trial and finding loopholes for any of the conventions that it has pushed for, signed and then not ratified. US soldiers were held by Iraqi forces in clear contravention of treaties of the Hague that Iraq did not sign and this was plastered all over the media as further evidence that they were the baddies yet the propaganda failed to mention that the US is not bound by such treaties either because they did not rattify them and so that means that the treaties are invalid in that conflict. In the last few year a nation has victimised their own citizens for political dissent and had a corrupt and unelected leader in charge. That nation has threatened to use WMDs while developing new ones. The nation I am talking about also refuses to be open with the UN about what chemical and biological weapons technology it has. The warmongering country has invaded and occupied countries and supported the invasion of Palestine by Israel. In fact if this was a war movie the country I am describing would have an army staffed by serious looking men in black uniforms; and yes, it’s the United States.
I don’t mean that the soldiers on the front line are evil. I also don’t mean that the average person at home in Wyoming is evil, or any more evil than a mother in Fallujah who sends her boys off to fight for freedom from the invading hoardes is. The soldiers are just kids doing a tough job for what they have been brought up to believe is right but it’s the political puppet masters that are out of check.
Â
