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.

HenryVIII, making an observation on their ridiculous and self-defeating tactics does not necessarily mean that I disapproved of the Union movement of the 50s and 60s.

Just their stupidity, and failure to see what was productive and what was self-destructive.

They had a job to do, and performed it increasingly poorly.

There were two main reasons why Maggie Thatcher was able to roll the Unions when her turn came. One was the significantly increased prosperity of the seventies over the fifties, and the other was the appalling decisions made by the Unions on which battles to fight and which to walk away from.

Because of the former, Maggie was able to use the latter to drive a wedge between them and their natural constituency, and by extension to lay the blame for the public discomfort caused by miners' strikes etc. squarely at the feet of the Unions.

In the background was of course the generic Union battle for relevancy among an increasingly comfortable workforce. Quite simply, their number one rationale - to protect the weak, and those unable to help themselves - was losing impact.

“Subconsciously, we still seem to resent the industrial revolution.”

How true.

This article identifies not only one source of Britain’s relative post-war stagnation, but also an ongoing strand of though in the reactionary/romantic left that has origins in the 19th century (Dickens, Ruskin etc) but persists even today. The peculiar alliance of the far right and far left at anti-globalisation rallies and in the anti-capitalist movement are direct inheritors of this tradition which despised trade and idealises pre-industrial society.

Britain’s post-WWII economic stagnation was due to the fact that its empire was finally down around its ankles and it had well and truly overreached itself in one imperial war after another (including WWI and II). For centuries its ruling/merchant class had reaped the benefits of dirt-cheap labour and resources from its empire to drive its industries, and dirt-cheap military fodder from its working class to fight its wars.

Both creditors (the colonies and the workers) finally called in their loans. Life’s like that.

Candide,

Teachers’ pay has certainly declined relative to average earnings over the last three decades, though that is due to teachers’ industrial weakness. Victorian male average weekly ordinary time earnings were $1107.30 ($57,777 pa) in November last year (ABS 6302.0, November 2006). In 1975, after seven years a teacher reached the top of the scale and was paid 166.6 per cent of that average. That would be $96,256 at the start of last year, compared with an actual $57,775 - a relative cut of $38,481 or 40 per cent. The new top level for most teachers, which now takes eleven years to reach, paid $65,414 – a relative cut of $30,842 or 32 per cent. But these are not CPI-adjusted figures.

Can you post specific figures to show that teacher pay has declined 30 per cent in real terms (i.e., in relation to the CPI), tell us what period that is over and give the actual salaries of Federation officials over the same period so we can judge if they in fact are “as well paid as ever”?

Pericles, the major point of the essay is that classical liberals who believe in free trade and the rule of law have to fight on two fronts, against economically illiterate conservatives and against socialists as well. In Britain that conflict was linked to the class structure and Koestler desribed how the anti-business, anti-productivity ethos was shared by the upper classes (conservatives) and the trade unions (whether socialist or not).

Koestler took on some nutty ideas in his later years but he was a highly skilled journalist and a good observer and reporter. In any case the facts of the British class structure and the attitudes that he described are well known and should not be in dispute.

A second point is the way anti-business attitudes and misperceptions of the industrial revolution were propagated by writers (with Charles Dickens the example) so that they probably exerted more impact on the views of the educated public (rendering them economically illiterate) than the work of any professional economist.

Henry VIII, it is absurd to decribe Margaret Thatcher as a conservative in that context because she had to confront the Tory conservatives (wets) in her own party. You have to think in two dimensions and not just a spectrum where liberals sit somewhere between conservatives and radicals. Interesting to note that the Labor administration that followed did not undo the major reforms that Thatcher put in place to control union power and save the nation from going bust.

It is most likely that the unemployment of the 1930s was caused by a combination of trade union bloody mindedness (Sydney Webb wrote "sabotage" in his private diary to describe the work of the union leadership) and tariff wars that cramped free trade.

Pericles
‘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.’

What’s the problem? This is typical bargaining practice, commonly known as ‘asking for more in order to settle for less’. It’s a universally respected procedure, with two notable exceptions – (1) when it’s practiced by trade unions and (2) when it’s practiced by female partners in divorce litigations

Pericles2 (I hope this isn't going to become confusing)

>>In any case the facts of the British class structure and the attitudes that he described are well known and should not be in dispute.<<

Koestler was not English. He had an outsider's perception of the British class system. As a German Jewish refugee, his assessment of the complexities and nuances of the class structure is as instructive and as relevant as would be his observations on the ebb and flow of a game of cricket.

He simply repeats the same old tired clichés about the upper classes, and with these as basic assumptions, proceeds to argue common purpose with the workers.

Unfortunately, there are many people who think, like you, that this image of the British upper classes is "beyond dispute", when in fact there are subtleties and nuances that extend way beyond the trite simplicity Koestler imagines.

What's the problem, SJF?

The problem is that making a ridiculously inflated ambit claim demonstrates one's belief that the other negotiator is either a fool or a manipulative slimeball. Neither attitude is likely to bring out the best and most cooperative frame of mind in one's opposite number, and the result is usually time-wasting and acrimonious wrangling.