Nice article, Rafe. I experienced a similar class effect when applying for a professor's job in an Australian university after 5 years in the US. When asked about my future ambitions, I said I might be interested in a Dean's position after five years or so. The chair of the search committee later gave me feedback that the committee was 'shocked' with my presumptiousness. The chair defended me by claiming I was adopting a "US" interviewing style. Then again, my mother always warned me that I would never get out of the (working) class by becoming a professor. :-)

Stev, your mother was right, ofcourse.

Becoming a professor will obviously get you out of the "work" part,
but nothing will ever change your class, old chap.

There was great merit in the British way of doing business both before and after Dunkirk. It meant that the Germans didn't take we Pomgolians seriously and fell about laughing rather than invading. If one indeed takes tea-breaks immediately before being invaded by hard-working, efficient and serious people with the most modern and effective army in the world, they are either going to think you are not worth bothering with or that you have some secret they don't know about and get scared. The same applies to sport. We Pomgolians invented every popular international game in the world, including cricket. But does that really mean we have to be good at them as well? The world is rather presumptious in its expectations of us. Likewise our invention of the industrial revolution and democratic Parliamentary government.

Though to attempt to discuss the issue in the seriousness with which the rest of the world views itself, which is highly un-British, let alone unsporting, having had to pay the Americans for our winning two world wars for them, followed by the winter of 1947, basically bankrupted the UK. And unlike Germany and Japan which had had a large number of US dollars dumped into them as they were the Americans' front-line against communism, and which having been bombed to perdition had had to build new industries from scratch with modern machine tools, and had had the corrupt dead weight of their then ruling classes completely destroyed, we still had an empire to get rid of and war-worn industrial and social machinery to work with. Socialism did a very good, nay, essential, job in the UK in 1945-50, and was much needed to get the place out of the grave. That the dead hand of "Conservatism" once again raised its class-ridden head between 1950-1964 was indeed a fundamental problem. I can only apologise for Pomgolia's later consequent infliction of Margaret Thatcher and her economic existentialism on the rest of the world. But her economic ideas, like Adolf Hitler, came from Austria.

I found some difficulty working out the point of this article. I'm still not sure whether there is one.

To start with, Arthur Koestler is a somewhat unstable take-off point. In his day he was merely eccentric, today I have a feeling that he would be ignored as a bit of a nutter. Talented, but nuts.

In his time he was a communist and an anti-communist. He was fascinated by the paranormal, had "mystical experiences" throughout his life from the age of fourteen, and experimented with LSD. He was president of a Zionist fraternity at university, but a lifelong atheist. He was married three times, and died in a suicide pact with his - apparently - healthy third wife.

Why anyone would take his assessment of the British class system with anything larger than a grain of salt is the first puzzle.

The second is the strange attempt by this article's author to associate the condign stupidity of the British Union system of the fifties and sixties with said class system.

Where's the connection?

Unions were not the opposite of the upper class, any more than a duke was the opposite of a merchant banker. Or a pharmacist. Or a payroll clerk.

If union stupidity is to be a measure of antiquated class divisions, it might be as well to examine the uniquely-Australian "ambit claim". I recall once being faced with an apparently serious bid for eighty days' paid annual leave, coupled with a further twenty paid sick days, plus - and this is the one I found most jaw-dropping - automatic double pay for public holidays, even if no work was performed.

When I consulted with a more savvy colleague, I was told that they didn't really mean it, but would eventually trade them for more moderate demands - but in the meantime, I should not be tempted to laugh, but to deal with them with a straight face.

If the above is a little confused, blame it on the article itself.

What was the point again?

Just remember that when we abuse the UK unions of the 1950s, those unionists were the children of 3-4 million unemployed fathers many of whom had between 1929 and about 1938 walked the length and breadth of the UK looking for the sort of odd job it is easy to find next door in modern affluent Australia. There was no social security in the UK at that time. If you wanted the dole, you didn't just trot down to Centrelink. You had to sell just about every single item of furniture in the rented, poor-quality, jerry-built terrace house you were living in before you were means tested for the dole.At the time, the UK health system was on the level of that in the USA today, which about 40-50 million people can't afford insurance for. And that sort of life had been going on for 200 years. Don't dismiss it lightly. Sins against fathers travel down generations, just as do the sins of fathers.Understanding, not abuse, is what is needed for the working people of those times.

Some ridiculous union-led attitudes still exist. At our local primary school, where I occasionally work (not as a teacher) the immediate response of all staff to ANY policy initiative by the government is "What does the Federation say?" Never mind that the Teachers Federation is a union that has presided over a real-terms decline in teachers pay of 30%, or that the rusted on Federation heavies (as well paid as ever) have led campaigns that make many people think that teachers will defend useless colleagues to the death and have no interest in teaching standards - no-one is allowed to criticise the union or point out that there are far better ones around. Months were wasted not long ago because the Federation had decreed that the Government's new ranking system (A to E) was not acceptable - exactly what business it was of a union to override the policy of a recently elected government was never made clear - the end result was that teachers had to prepare reports at extremely short notice in accordance with a ridiculous compromise scheme invented by the Federation. Not one ever complained at the stupidity, or the hours of meetings and extra workload this ideological stoush involved.