As long as there are commentators like Mark Steel around, class prejudice in this country will never be allowed to quietly fade away. Why? Because he makes a career out of talking and playing up the class divide. In his column in today’s Independent (2 July), he mocked the Home Counties population of home-made jam eating, harvest festival attending, medal wearing, housing estate hating, regionalist retired admirals, for their disgraceful failure to throw their support behind Scottish tennis player Andy Murray: all outdated, hackneyed, stereotypical, inaccurate drivel which no doubt Steel will continue to trot out to keep class war myths ticking over long enough to see him through to the time when he can draw his private pension.
Sorry Mark, but the world of Jeeves and Wooster and Colonel Blimp has gone. We now have Wayne and Coleen and Colonel Sanders. As for people not supporting Murray because he’s Scottish and doesn’t support the England football team, so what? What’s good for partisan Scots is surely OK for the English. Why should the freedom to extend or deny support for whom one chooses be denied on the grounds of nationality?
Then there are the issues of stiffness, Tim Henman and his swooning Home Counties supporters. I live in the Home Counties. I have never voted UKIP, swooned, and happen to think Tiger Tim was never good enough to win Wimbledon and should probably have chosen to become a stockbroker, like every other person, give or take the odd retired admiral, who resides in Mark Steel’s fictional version of the Home Counties.
2008-07-02 @ 19:38