Spending my whole life in London, I haven’t, frankly noticed a particularly big shift in British demographics. It is not simply autism which leads me to reject ‘the Boriswave’ as a watershed moment, I genuinely haven’t noticed anything change. 1950s (Sweden) demographics have always been the goal for me and it has always been an ideal, progressive goal derived from axioms of Pure Reason rather than one imported from nostalgia of lived experience. I am genuinely baffled by people who speak as if Britain in 2011 was some kind of acceptable demographic detente.
Nonetheless, like everyone, I do feel Britain c. 2026 is a grimier, dirtier, stranger place than Britain even in 2009.
The main burning point of evidence of this for me lies overwhelmingly in the decline of manners among white English people. And I suspect much racism in our society is motivated by a cowardly refusal of many to admit they feel the same way. You could find endless streets full of Pakistanis, places where nobody could speak English and female genital mutilation posters in NHS hospitals in the Britain of 2009. What you certainly would not have found is Alistair Darling feeling compelled to tell people he has ever had a “2 am kebab.”
This is a sitting member of Parliament, a representative of the people, a holder of the King’s commission, pretending that he drinks into the early hours and orders fast food for popularity.
Go to Kings Cross station stand and wait for 30 mins and count how many people have tattoos, how many men have beards and how few people speak with descendants of received pronunciation. It used to be that fake tan was a fixture of TOWIE, it is now seemingly a uniform for 70% of women under 30.
When I watched the Adam Curtis documentary last year, what struck me was not that Britain was noticeably whiter back in the day but that the White people actually acted in a White way: they dressed properly, they spoke properly, they read books and had hobbies — across the socioeconomic spectrum. You can see this on far more recent artefacts of Telly, like the reporting on the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010; the people being interviewed did not go to Eton or grow up on Bishop’s Avenue, they are ordinary professionals with polytechnic degrees, yet they carry themselves with a dignity which has become alien to us. The people in the documentary who, at the time, would’ve been seen as deeply tragic people on the margins of society, like the Elvis impersonators in Stockport, act and speak like the average English person today.
When did it become acceptable, in modern Britain, to be what used to be called ‘a chav?’
I will here be accused of ‘snobbery’ with people no doubt invoking the term ‘working class’ to beat me over the head.
Working class people, by which I mean people who perform manual labour on a 9-5 basis for a working week, not people like Tom Skinner who are privately educated and comfortably well off; were, historically, very interested in high culture. Even after the passion of self-education went away, they never had much interest in the music hall fake-culture I’m describing. Bernard Manning never pretended to be thick. Working class people care about vaccine Harms, the censorship of John Cleese and the historical failings of Winston Churchill.
What I am describing is how a tabloid-reality T.V identity created for media consumption in the 2000s has become the actual culture of people who would call themselves middle-class.
