‘La Vice Anglaise’

For those of you who, like your humble scribe, naturally know nothing of these matters, this apparently is a knowing French term used to describe sado-masochism.


Our Gallic bredrin clearly see this predilection as a peculiarly English phenomenon and, given the perceived fixation with spanking and humiliation that epitomises the English Public School caricature, the French might be forgiven for such an arch side-swipe at the ‘les Rosbifs’.

Of course (by way of returning the compliment perhaps), the English used to dub syphilis ‘The French disease’. (And while we’re still on the subject of sexual mud-slinging, the French in turn apparently pointed a poxy finger at the Italians calling the ‘syph’ the Neapolitan disease...)

But as the dogs in the street know, the real English vice is its class system. Like its railways, Britain's class system still largely works on a Victorian model. Unlike the railways however, the class system is no longer fit for purpose (if indeed, it ever was).

If you believe that the British class system is a thing of the past: then the Deptford Croppy would like to welcome you to Earth and prithee, what colour is the sky on your world?


But jibes asides and let's have it right, on any measure one cares to choose, the British class system persists and even thrives. Meanwhile, education continues to be used as a shameless tool of social engineering. Widening wealth gaps, a comparitively poor record on upward social mobility and almost endemic underclass ignorance...the comparisons with Victorian Britain are troubling and frequent...

The proof of the pudding is perhaps to be found in the make-up of the current cabinet. If you were to look at the CVs of Her Majesty’s Government for example in 1870 and then compare them with those of the current administration, there would be a depressing commonality to both lists in terms of schools, universities and socio-economic backgrounds. In a blind-test, they would probably be all but indistinguishable.

As posited earlier, the great British class system still rests largely on Victorian foundations. Economically, this depended on vast pools of uneducated labour to be used in commerce and soldiery.

That model was pretty much left to its own devices for generations but now, in an era when cheap ignorant English labour is more ignorant and less cheap than the workforces of many developing nations, the English ruling class is beginning to realise it has a problem on its hands.

Thanks in large part to the implementation of ‘Reagonomics’ by the Thatcher regime, there are now successive generations in some parts of the UK who have never known work and futhermore, there hasn’t been a decent war to kill off a generation of oiks since the 1940s...

Education has always been the weapon of choice in pursuit of this implicit policy of class perpetuation. When, as now, the state education system undergoes the kind of piecemeal dismemberment at first, second and third level that locks out swathes of society, this is invariably dressed up as 'choice'. Like people at the bottom end of the UK's population have any 'choice' about their social exclusion; the only choice they have is between 15 different kinds of baked beans...

'The government is empowering you with the choice of setting up your own schools,' runs a current government education initiative. The largely unspoken truth of that proposition is that the only people who will really benefit from this criminal reallocation of state funding are the educated middle classes who can already afford private education (or better yet, if at dinner parties, they like to profess a voguish faith in state education, they can buy a house in a good school’s catchment area and thereby deprive an equally deserving but less well-off family of a good start).


Don't even get the Croppy started on University education. The Rusty Wire Service, as a matter of philosophical principle, consents to be governed, only under duress, by a regime that sends the flower of its youth to be bombed and shot but cannot provide its children (including those its wars have orphaned) with a fair chance of state education to a decent and reliable standard.


This is a human right and nothing less. The true value of the sacrifice of Britain's Glorious Dead isn't just to be measured in European freedom, it is also in that pact of blood between the state and the people which won for the nation its health and welfare systems.


These same hard-gained rights are being eroded, almost as a matter of course, by successive governments of robber barons and bought cronies and now; we are back to tamper with education again. 'Lest they be forgotten' indeed.

Choice. Equality. Fairness....No state which still explicitly acknowledges as a constitutional truth the disgraceful fallacy that some people, by mere accident of birth, are inherently better than others, can ever truly hope to aspire to any of these things.

And (like a compliant dungeon punter) we have a middle class which, in return for very shaky sneering rights over the masses, endures this degradation of society surely making it the biggest 'gimp' of them all.