Books I Read/Listened To In August

 Fiction

'Robin Hood Yard' by Mark Sanderson

This is the third book featuring Johnny Steadman an investigative journalist for the fictional 'Daily News' and Matt Turner, who in this book has become a Detective Constable in the City of London police. The book is set in 1938 and much of the action keeps to the City of London, which has its own police force, though with occasional jaunts into other parts of London under the Metropolitan Police. The story is mainly around a series of gruesome, almost 'locked room' murders and anti-Semitic attacks. The prospective Lord Mayor of London seems to be involved and there are other issues around Czechoslovak gold, the City of London being the home of the Bank of England and other financial businesses. 

There is reference back to the previous books in which Steadman and Turner were abducted and photographed in apparently homosexual stances for blackmail by a local criminal. This has ironically stirred some gay interest between the two men though both of them are also attracted to Turner's wife. This is a deft way of getting in some gay and bisexual characters at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain.

The book moves at a fast pace though at times feels rather jerky. There is rapid switching between different perspectives which can be a challenge to keep up with. It conjures up the time period and the details of the City of London well, though due to the latter it does feel claustrophobic at times, and rather convenient that so much of the action takes place inside the 'square mile'. The one who turns out ultimately to be the murderer feels a little as if thrust in at the end rather than naturally developing from among the suspects that the reader has seen up to then.

While a well-informed and interesting book, at times it does not come together as smoothly as you might like. This book was published in 2015 and there have been no sequels.

'The Blade Itself' by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie is often seen as the godfather of the grimdark genre of fantasy novels. This novel does start of with very gritty text. One of the main characters,  Sand dan Glokta, is a torturer for the Inquisition of the Union, a country in a fantasy world that we only learn about as the book progresses. There is Logen Ninefingers, a large mercenary-cum-bandit from the mountainous northern lands who gets separated from his band early in the book, though we also see their progress at various stages. Then there is Captain Jezal dan Luthar, a nobleman officer in the guard at the capital Adua aiming to win in a fencing championship. I must also mention Ardee West, one of the few female characters in the book, who Jezal falls for. The other woman character is an escaped slave, Ferro Maljinn aided, despite her resistance, by Yulwei the Fourth Mage. Ferro is really eaten up with revenge and is very violent. There is a great fight scene near the end involving her and Logen, which has a really cinematic feel to it.

This first book is effectively 'assembling the team' at the instigation of Magus Bayaz the First Mage who has been living remotely since the establishment of the Union decades before. It is an interesting twist that when he turns up in Adua with Logen, he is disbelieved rather than acclaimed as this great magic user. Magic does feature as Bayaz has both fire-wielding abilities and mentalist ones too. Logen can talk to spirits, though these are dying out. The trigger for the action is an invasion from the north by a leader who Logen previously worked for. Beyond that there are the Shankas, humanoids who are invading behind the northern army, rather reminiscent of the Game of Thrones

The grittiness of the novel, especially early on, does mark it out as grimdark. At times Abercrombie does dodge fantasy tropes. However, as the novel progresses, he rather falls into many of these. The relationship with Ardee seems inevitable, though she is a nicely feisty character. Though we see through the eyes of Ferro, she is all about antagonism. Bayaz's involvement with Jazal also reminds the reader of incidents from the Harry Potter series. This was Abercrombie's first book so maybe we should expect him to be coming out of the fantasy context with what he produced. Still, the book is sufficiently different to take and hold the interest, even if our adventurous band end up sailing off to distant lands at the end as if starting a 'Dungeons & Dragons' scenario. While I am not rushing out to buy the other books in the series, I would certainly pick them up if I saw them for sale.

'The City of Mist' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón'

If the charity shops are anything to go by, Ruiz Zafón is a popular author in my home town. His books, originally in Spanish, sold in the millions. He died in 2020 and seems to have garnered quite a following among English readers too. This is a short collection of short stories, some very short. Some he translated himself. Many feature the town of his birth and early life, Barcelona. In line with the magic realist approach which we often associate with Spanish-language authors, Ruiz Zafón manages to slip between gritty portrayals from across the 16th to 20th centuries. The term 'Gothic' is often appended to them and there are elements of literally fateful deals, of a labyrinth of forgotten books and of ghosts. These are mixed in with very human mysteries and despair. There is certainly a dark tone across the stories, even when this is moderate such as some kind of unknown lost chance for the architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet or more bleak such as a young woman wasting away from illness.

At times you might be irritated by the brusqueness and as a reader almost feel dismissed by Ruiz Zafón going about his business. However, as is noted in the foreword, the stories tend to grow on you after you have read them. These days I see more books of short stories being published and yet you also encounter opposition almost hostility to them for lacking substance. Thus, how you engage with this book probably depends on how you engage with short stories as these are of the archetype. They work to engage you and unsettle you as the best (magic realist) short stories should, but give them time to achieve that.

Non-Fiction

'The Making of the English Working Class' by E.P. Thompson

First published in 1963, though I read the 1980 edition (955 pages), when I was a student this book was more renowned for existing than actually what it said, apart from the analysis of social class as being not something fixed, but a relational perception (re-)established with every interaction between people. However, while that aspect features at the beginning and I feel remains a valid approach, this book is much more than that. It covers the period roughly 1780-1830. Thompson does assume that the reader is familiar with the radical movements of the mid-17th Century and with the Reform Act of 1832 and the Chartist Movement of 1848. He refers to these quite often, but frustratingly does not really explore them.

I guess that this is Thompson's purpose. He is seeking to shine a light on the aspects of the development of working people, their experiences and their outlooks, that so easily get overlooked. We can see the late 1960s and the 1970s as being at the peak of 'everyday history' and this book certainly is part of that perspective. There is an immense amount of detail as Thompson looks not simply at the economic aspects of how England changed due to the Industrial Revolution, but also the inputs from religion and ideologies, especially coming out of the French Revolution. He draws attention to all the various movements and especially publications of the era which looked to develop or oppose the development of working people. At the outset while there were labourers a lot of working people were artisans. This time period saw the end of many crafts and their replacement by the water- and then steam-powered factory. 

As Thompson shows well the picture was far from being a uniform transition and he picks out clearly how the impacts varied across England. The focus is on England, because as he notes, the impacts, especially of religion, on Scotland, Wales and Ireland did provide a very different context which would deserve books of their own. Saying that when people from those nations came into the English scene he does not neglect them. By taking a nuanced view of what was happening even within England, this allows Thompson to do deep analysis and his digging into the very varied experiences of Luddism show the value of this.

There is a lot going on in this book and all the names, publications and locations can be overwhelming at times. However, Thompson does also write with gusto and while analysing also sweeps the reader along with all the different incidents and voices that the book encompasses. It might look like a hefty tome, but as well as being informative I found myself moving briskly through it carried along by Thompson's energy. Despite its age, I do recommend it as a book that will alert you to things of which you might never have heard but also to show how effective historical analysis does not mean a book has to be a dull read.

'The German Empire, 1871-1918' by Hans-Ulrich Wehler

I have been very fortunate this month to have selected two excellent history books to read. I was struck a few years ago when speaking to a German living in the UK, at the time of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, that they thought historians had 'got over' what they saw as an inappropriate 'blaming' of Germany for the start of that conflict. I noted at the time that even books written by British historians seemed to have defaulted back to the 1930s explanation that 'everyone' had been to blame for the outbreak. This runs against the perception informed by the work of Fritz Fischer from 1961 onwards which showed how German policy had, if not created the context for war, pushed events towards it in a more active way than had been perceived. That line was the one which informed my university studies of German history, and indeed my teaching of it, but now in the period after the 1980s rows between German historians, to have faded away leaving the blame-everyone perspective to hold the field by default. In this situation, I feel it makes this book even more important now than perhaps when it was published in German in 1973.

Wehler is far from being an ardent Fischerite. Towards the end of the book he emphasises that we must take care to distinguish the aspirations of radical groups in German society, especially in terms of annexations, from the actual policies of politicians and even the military. Wehler is good on making clear that the context which is established sets parameters on what might and can be achieved. While he is seen as a proponent the Sonderweg (special way) interpretation of German history, in fact I would again argue he is not a zealot. In this book he shows how policies developing out of the agrarian revolution which came to Prussia in the 1850s and 1860s became a founding perspective for the German Empire created in 1871. 

Particularly promoted by the capable Imperial Chancellor, 1871-90, Otto von Bismarck these became ingrained in German politics and society. The policies of Bismarck and his successors was to ensure that the attitudes favouring the elites, notably large landowners, but latterly big business too, kept up the primacy of these attitudes to the political and economic detriment of the large parts of German society. It was not only legislation and subsidies, but also the promotion of conservative civil servants especially in the legal profession, the linked lionisation of the state and the use of patriotism and aspirations to the elite that brought the middle classes to support the favoured policies of the elites. The successful wars of 1864-70 and the militarism promoted by policies, education and propaganda, did not guarantee the empire would go to war, but constantly made it seem a feasible step to take to resolve internal social pressures.

Wehler not only looks at these parameters and calmly demonstrates the difficulties that they made for Germany, but also shows convincingly how much danger they stacked up for the future. Given a legal profession and a military that had been filled with men of a particular outlook in an unchallengeable poisition, combined with the use of xenophobia and anti-Semitism as polices to connect people to the state, the reader comes away quite surprised that the Weimar Republic ever got off the ground. The advent of the Nazis was clearly well established as early as 1918 by what had gone before.

Wehler makes a very convincing case based on perceptive analysis. He does not overplay his hand and cautions the reader not to jump to easy assumptions, bringing out the nuances in what was said and done. Despite being 50 years old, I feel this book remains a very valuable analysis of Imperial Germany and indeed feeding into analysis of later periods in the country's history. It seems very apt especially now when issues around the political parameters that elites can establish and maintain speaks to what is happening both in democracies and dictatorships around the world.

Audio Books

I moved house in August so now have a longer commute to work. That means the revival of me listening to audio books as I have a good stash remaining from the mid-2010s when I commute so much.

'Agatha Christie. Three Radio Mysteries. Volume Four' by Agatha Christie; Radio Plays

Keeping with the policy I adopted previously, if the audio book is based on a book, I still review it, even if it is acted out as a play rather than read. This is a rather strange BBC collection from 2003, featuring a range of well-known actors including the late Richard Griffiths, Dervla Kirwin, Adrian Dunbar and the disgraced Chris Langham, who was imprisoned two years after these recordings were made. Though original short stories published by Christie in 1933-34, for the dramatizations they have been updated. Thus in 'The £199 Adventure' it is for a masking substance for performance-enhancing drugs that the character is sent to Milan to retrieve. The £200 he possesses would have been quite a lot back in 1933, at least equivalent to £15,000 today, if not two or three times that, nowadays even in 2003 the amount seems paltry. This first story is rather frantic and almost comical, with lots of charging around and shooting.

The second story, 'The Gypsy' is much more Gothic in tone and is well handled, bringing in questions about premonitions and reincarnation. The use of moorland and the sense of claustrophobia when one is trying to escape from what seems to be fated is well portrayed by the actors. The final drama is 'The Last Séance' which again is successful in terms of hitting the Gothic tone well, though the updating does raise some issues. Dervla Kirwan and Adrian Dunbar are an Irish husband and wife who work for an English noblewoman, as housekeeper and butler, which shows up the origins. The woman who comes to them for a séance, however, is an Afghan refugee, injured by an airstrike and wanting to contact her daughter injured in the attack who died as a result. However, the acting is convincing and it has a chilling edge, especially as Kirwan's character, able to contact the dead, is pregnant.

Overall, a rather strange package of plays, but generally handled reasonably well, if rather over-dramatically at times. Like good short stories, especially the latter two, make you think about them afterwards.

Is It Time To Revive The Concept Of Class?

Working in London I come into contact with a far wider range of people than was the case when in an office in a medium-size town in southern England.  There are many more opportunities, especially on public transport, for eavesdropping.  One thing that has become very apparent to me returning to London properly (i.e. being here on a sustained basis rather than for one-off visits) for the first time in over a decade is just how many universities there are.  The number of actual institutions may not be much higher than it was in the late 1990s but certainly the number of students is, and, whilst staff:student ratios may have altered, the number of lecturers and administrators must be higher.  Consequently, travelling between home and work or going out for an evening you stand a good chance of having students and even academics around you.  A lot seem to head to central London, I guess they have evening seminars, lectures, meetings and things.  As readers know, having attended university in a very different time for education and the UK as a whole, I am interested to see what is happening to them these days.  Is eavesdropping an invasion of privacy?  Some people talk so loud it would be difficult not to hear what they are saying and academics seem to get into lively debates wherever they might end up.  I suppose I should be grateful that that remains true, not least as an antidote to the 'I don't want to hear that', silo approach in which everyone seals themselves off from each other, from life itself with their ipods.

Anyway, this posting is less about the potential for interaction in academic discussion on public transport and more a debate sparked by some of this eavesdropping as well as talking with acquaintances of my own.  It seems the concept of social class is so out of fashion that anyone who writes an academic article featuring the term is very likely to have it rejected.  The term 'culture' is acceptable apparently, though I guess something like 'working class culture' would not be.  I suppose we should not be surprised.  Margaret Thatcher claimed she was 'working class' because she worked 'jolly hard' (there is interesting analysis online about how much of a Victorian she was in attitude, maybe this is what distinguishes her brand of societal destruction from that of Cameron).  She further denied that there was such a thing as society, saying there were just individuals and families.  John Major trumpeted that the UK had developed the 'classless society', though that seemed to be on the basis that under his administration middle class people started having their houses repossessed like poorer people once had.  John Prescott as deputy prime minister in 1997 claimed 'we are all middle class now', though I think that was more a comment on the styling of the Blairite New Labour than on society.  Parallel to these political developments, it is clear that universities threw out class along with the the leather patched jackets and the 'History Man' beards.  Yet, they cannot really turn their backs on it entirely as there is still the OFFA - Office of Fair Access, which seeks to have those from 'under-represented' sectors of society gain equal access to higher education; part of the deal over the increased fees is tied to supposedly widening this access.

I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that people think Karl Marx invented class.  Consequently with Thatcher, Major, Blair and their adherents keen to make Socialism, which in some elements is based on Marxism (though it surprises some people to find there are other things like mutualism and even Christian viewpoints in the mix), a thing of the past, felt that they had to purge the UK of the very concept of class.  This shows a lack of historical knowledge or more likely a deliberate misinterpretation of it.  The Greek cities had citizens and some had helots.  The Roman Empire had slaves, freedmen (and -women) and citizens.  Even among the citizens you had to have a certain wealth to be able to be appointed to particular political office.  India had its caste system, China had a very hierarchical structure from the emperor down, (though there were some opportunitie for meritocratic progression), and until the destruction of the Shogunate in the mid-19th century Japanese society rigidly enforced class immobility which interestingly, from a Western perspective set peasants above merchants who languished just above the 'untouchables' despite them being wealthier than the average member of the samurai class.  Medieval society was clearly full of class divisions like the serf, the cottar, the yeoman, the knight, the nobleman and so on.  In addition, many of these society had parallel classes, for example, the structure of the church from the Pope all the way down to a lay brother.

The 19th century portrayals of society as a vast pyramid with each in his or her 'station' probably crystalised the perception of class that we have still lingering in many of our minds despite the efforts of politicians over the past 30 years.  In addition, the social upheaval, especially rural-urban migration and the success of factory owners in raising themselves into the higher levels of society previously held exclusively by large landowners.  In the context of burgeoning capitalism, its exploitation of workers through longer hours, low pay and unhealthy conditions, combined with an apparent new fluidity of people rising and falling through the social classes, ideas around working class, middle class, etc. came common political currency.  Of course, it was never as simple as that.  Even Marx spoke of the lumpen proletariat of unskilled workers as opposed to the proletarian aristocracy of the skilled workforce.  In the UK for over a hundred years there have been numerous sub-strata within classes, the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled working class; the lower, middle and upper middle class, with the really only the latter being the bourgeoisie of property owners in the way that Marx had seen the middle class.  Whilst of little interest to the mass of the population, the British upper class also sub-divided itself on many different bases, into 'old' and 'new' money, connections to particular schools and regiments, location in the country and proximity to titled nobility and the royal family.

The concept of class was hardened in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century on the basis of class-based parties.  Left-wing parties had opinions ranging from outright violent revolution to bring about change across to gradual modification of the capitalist system rather than its abolition on the lines Marx and his adherents proposed (or in fact, felt was inevitable no matter what people or parties did).  This meant that politics shifted from two parties of similar social backgrounds arguing over economic policy such as free trade vs. protectionism to the dominance of a party seen as upper class - the Conservatives and one seen as working class - Labour.  It panned out similarly in much of democratic Europe, though typically with a wider spread of parties falling under these two designations.  In Canada and the USA, however, the model has remained very much like that of Victorian Britain with Liberals and Conservatives; Democrats and Republicans with even working class parties let alone revolutionary ones making minimal impact politically.  Thus, it can be argued, as many British counter-factual commentators were doing in the 2000s that even in Britain there was no inevitability about class-based politics.

Does this suggest that it is only really an accident of history combined with alarm at a political philosophy which could have easily faded into obscurity along with so many others (One Nation Toryism, Whiggism, Social Darwinism, Guild Socialism, Syndicalism, anyone?) that meant that the concept of class continued to persist in Britain as long as it did?  I guess that, in fact, the opponents of class-based politics actually sustained the view of Britain as a class-based society through their rhetoric.  The Conservative Party are the main culprits in their insistence about moving away from class-based politics, partly because they always knew that workers would outnumber their natural base of support.  In many ways they need not have been as fearful as they were.  For 64 years of the 20th century the country had a Conservative government or a coalition led by the Conservatives and even the New Labour government of the last years of the century owed much more to Conservative values than it did to anything the Labour Party had stood for since its creation.  In addition, the Conservatives have always attracted strong support from the so-called 'working class Tory' voter, someone who labours but supports their views on control of society balanced against reduction of regulation; the role of the police/justice system, military and the monarchy; the culture of British society and Britain's standing in the world, even though at times to others these can seem damaging to the interests of those in such a position in the economy and society.

Whilst on one side the political rhetoric has perhaps sustained conceptions of class, on the other shifts in the economy, society and culture may have reduced the acutality of distinct social class.  When the language was developed there was a lot of commonality between millions of people.  Manufacturing had replaced agriculture as the key economic activity in the UK and, as a result, the experience for the bulk of the population: living in houses surrounded by people who did very similar types of work to themselves, fitting with a common daily, weekly, annual pattern, wearing basically the same clothes and eating much the same food, formed a basis.  Of course, the British like to emphasise their differences and group themselves in tribes.  Distinction between people from different regions and ethnicities, distinction between skill levels and gender were all used to show shades of difference between people at a time when, in fact, the life path for the bulk of them was very similar.  The similarities can be grouped into what can be termed the class culture.  In many ways it was little different for those in the various ranks of the middle class, where the only distinctions really came down to whether you worked in a protected profession or not.  Of course, that economic pattern has gone and so have the similarities that permitted useful grouping of people in certain categories.  Particularly notable is 1974 when service-sector jobs exceeded those of manufacturing jobs for the first time and those who once had operated heavy industrial machinery began the progress to being call centre staff.  Yes, they wear a suit to work, but the control of their working lives and the 'minding' aspect of their work is no different; purely a cosmetic change, trumpeted by too many as representing a shift to a classless society.

Culture is an important element in defining class in Britain, often far more than income.  Skilled working class people would often exceed the income of lower and middle-middle class people and yet because of their dress, language and pastimes would never be seen to be on the same level.  With the erosion of real salaries for over four decades now (except among the top 10% earners) and insecurity of employment and property ownership even for those in what were once secure professions, culture is often all that remains for someone to use to distinguish themselves from someone they feel remains 'beneath' them.  Interestingly, I feel that consequently we have moved a little in the direction of E.P. Thompson's view of class.  This is summed up, if I remember rightly in 'The Making of the English Working Class' (1963).  Now, despite Thompson being an avowed Marxist, he eschewed Marx's view of class as this almost rigid, society-spanning structure, I think, in part due to his aversion to Stalinism.  Thompson's view of class that it is almost in constant fluidity, shifting almost moment to moment as we define ourselves in relation to the others we interact with.  Thus, it is a perception that we generate of ourselves and our family in relation to the perceptions we hold of others.  This is different from people having a kind of label as being working class based on what work they do.

Thompson's perspective seems to fit well in modern Britain in which the nature of work has changed so much and has become fragmented.  The commonalities have disappeared, hence the great importance in so many jobs on the title of the job and who can be described as an 'operative', an 'assistant', an 'officer', a 'team leader', a 'manager', 'middle management', an 'executive', 'senior management' and so on.  After all, if I can be a senior manager in a company of five people but am probably earning less and have to use fewer skills and have less reponsibility or control than a team leader in a mult-national.  We generally have no idea what other people earn, and anyway, with the vast difference in pay rates, house prices, loans you can get, debts we have to pay back, income is no indication actually of the level or standing of the job you do. 

As a consequence, we fall back on the cosmetic, the 'cultural' aspects and categorise people by the size of their house; but also the clothes they wear; how they have their hair done or what make-up they wear; what television programmes they watch, if they even still watch television; whether they go to the theatre or a gallery; what food they eat, what they call their children and what clubs the children are members of, which schools they go to; where they go on holiday (not simply due to the cost but the perceived 'quality' of the location, it may be more expensive to fly to Florida than stay in a house in the Dordogne region, but the latter has a far higher class cachet).  When driving there is a constant judgement of 'class' by the type and age of the car driven and on this basis much driving behaviour in the UK is based, notably which cars you flash to have them move over on the motorway; which you feel you can intimidate into letting you into the flow of traffic even when you have no right of way.  Class is alive and well in the UK but it is no longer really an economic category, it is more a cultural category which has its roots in how much money you have but beyond that, what things you choose to buy to manifest your wealth and their own perceived 'value'.

Value is certainly itself up for contest.  There was always pride in working class culture, but there is now a more active assertion that a certain brash culture is somehow better or at least more correct.  I think Britain is unique in seeming to value in popular culture an approach that is not based on acquiring education.  The often vocal assertion that the 'school of hard knocks/university of life' is better than attending a real university is very common.  The disparaging of geeks, boffins and nerds is prevalent; people are ridiculed too often for their learning in a way they would not be even in the USA.  The privileged actually are now promoting this attitude as they feel that universities have been filled by too many of people who, in their view, are not the 'right kind' and that this has reached a level at which it is impacting on those who 'should' be at university.  Yet, no-one has managed to make alternatives, despite the periodic statements that vocational courses are as valid, gain any value.  This is because status in UK business still derives not from your skills or aptitudes but from your background and family.  Those with power rarely have technical or strictly vocational skills, they generally have skills about simply asserting authority or bullying, such as sales.  Those with technical skills are rarely a full time part of the body which runs a company, they are simply called in to answer specific questions and then dismissed.  Consequently, from the highest mult-national in the UK down to the man who runs a carpet-cleaning company, the view that education is of no benefit rules supreme and the emphasis on simply asserting yourself, generally through being loud and aggressive is raised even higher in its place.

So, when I say that the concept of class should be revived am I simply saying that we should detail categories based on what people possess and make it clearer that you can move from C1 to B if you buy a 4x4?  Of course, that is not what I am saying.  Instead, I think class should return in a great measure to what it was once about: opportunity.  Opportunity comes from where you stand at the present and then what restrictions prevent you from moving from that position to something 'better' whether you personally define that in terms of what you can learn or do or simply what you can own.  The most privileged have ample opportunities, they can go wherever they want, they can do what they want, they can pick out their lives very easily.  The least privileged have no opportunities, they have minimal choice over where they live, where they can go and what jobs are open to them.  When living in Poplar and Mile End I was struck by how few people living there strayed outside a 3 Km radius of their house, about the same radius that a medieval serf would have had as their horizons.  Occasionally they would go to the mill or into the woods; occasionally my neighbours in the East End would go down to the slightly larger supermarket or to the park, but generally this was all within walking or short bus ride of their house.

Opportunity does often stem from wealth, but there is not always a direct correlation.  Rich celebrities often find this when they try to get into or get their children into a specific school or club.  This comes back to the use of the cosmetic to separate us from others and to know who are the 'right' kind of people.  From the other side simply being offered a place at university even with all the bursaries, does not mean a young person or even a mature person will be able to take it up, because of the lack of opportunities that they have in terms of living expenses, the extras needed for study, factors like care for their parents or children.  Let alone cultural aspects put up in their way because of how they dress or speak or even their attitude to the world.  The lines are hardening as all the fuss about people having to have unpaid internships first to get an unpaid job.  For every breach of the barriers put up to personal progress by the less privileged, the privileged, especially in the current climate, set up new ones. To complain about the way of the world and demand opportunities was once seen as radical and expected of students; these days it is seen as rude and ungrateful, thus, undeserving.  These days you have to do a lot of forelock tugging even if given an opportunity, so suppressing the range of attitudes and cultures that are deemed 'acceptable' in our society.

Social class has always cut across gender and ethnicity.  This is why David Starkey is simply not just bigoted, but entirely wrong in his assessment of the recent rioting.  What we saw was unrest from a class of people who have had the last fragments of opportunity snatched from them by government policies added to which are many people from what may still be called the 'middle class' seeing such restrictions increasingly imposed on them after over a decade of them and their parents feeling that the UK was being engineered to best benefit them.  The coalition government, headed by those clearly from the upper class, both David Cameron and Nick Clegg are closing the door even on people who would naturally be Conservative supporters but are on a social par with Margaret Thatcher, let alone John Major.  As Marx warned, the greatest danger to stability comes not from those at the bottom of the capitalist system, but from those feeling that changing circumstance are thrusting them down into that pool.  In addition, when so much of our status in UK society is simply defined by the model of television or mobile phone we own is it of any surprise that people go and loot these things?  The riots were a protest about closing off opportunity in so many ways whether ending the EMA or simply saying to people that they will never have even the chance to afford the consumer goods our emphasise so much.  This is why Cameron has so strongly emphasised the 'criminality' to detract from the actual political motivations, even if these are distorted by the consumerist viewpoint on life that has been so imbued into our society.

To address the tensions in Britain on the basis of the old economic perceptions of class would fail.  As it is, despite his rhetoric, Cameron has no desire to 'fix broken Britain' he simply wants to secure the position of the elite and ensure that the little ethnic shop they buy their spices from is not boarded up.  Class needs to be defined by what it really was a century or so ago, about opportunity.  This means that we move away from the superficially divisive aspects like whether we watch 'The X Factor' or the Danish version of 'The Killing', there is no need for cultural uniformity in the way George Orwell might have demanded.  We need to get back down to the perception of people on the basis of whether in this capitalist society they have any chance of altering their situation or whether to a greater or lesser degree they will die pretty much the way they were when they became an adult and when their parents became an adult and so on.  This means that even in families you will find different classes.  As I went to university in the 1980s, I have been in a higher opportunity class than the 9-year old who lives in my house who, it appears will have no chance at getting a degree even if we superficially live in a 'middle class' house.  I had the opportunity to travel abroad with my family, he never does this.  I had the opportunity to go on school trips and join any club I wanted.  Now, for this he is worse off than me, but far better off than many of his contemporaries; both of us are worse off than my parents.  Of course, opportunity does not mean the same as receiving.  Both my parents could have gone to university, my brother too, but for various reasons none decided.  In addition, my parents retired with a much higher opportunity standing than when they became adults, the difference between the 1950s and the 1990s; if they had been twenty years younger that progression would have been reversed, i.e. from the 1970s to the 2010s.

The goal of governments should be, if they truly believe in equality and justice, to pursue policies that enable people to progress from say opportunity category 40 to opportunity category 30 or 25 or 20, in the course of their life.  This forms a useful basis on which to judge people's progress broadly.  Of course, individuals will pick something different to what they are offered.  However, if we can see that a child born in opportunity category 40 is now only likely to make it to 38 whereas two years ago he had a shot at 32, then we know something is wrong.  When we know that people who are in opportunity category 40, 50, 60 see only a chance now to end up in category 75, 80 or 90+ (I define someone as 99 who is living on the streets), as is happening Cameron's 'hammered Britain', then we should have no surprise if we witness rioting and looting, perhaps to raise them a couple of points, but mainly to rail against the realisation that in the 40-60 years of their lives ahead of them, it is never going to get any better than this and most likely, far worse.

In the myth of Pandora's Box it is said that when she released all the evils from the box, Pandora closed it to keep 'Hope' trapped inside.  It might seem odd that hope was stored among all the evils.  This is because the popular renditions of the story have made an error, in the original it is 'Foreboding' that she traps.  Foreboding is an evil, because with it you feel that there is absolutely no point in continuing if everything will just end up badly.  Now, throught their policies especially towards young people, the coalition government has unleashed the evil of foreboding, by making it so explicitly clear that for millions of us only circumstances worse than what we are experiencing now lie ahead of us.  It is an evil to snuff out any prospect of improvement and as a consequence it has received a virulent reaction as seen in the rioting.

The Anger Grows

Over the past decade people have often commented in the media around the question of how educated, intelligent people from an Islamic background, but previously without fundamentalist tendencies have become 'radicalised' and have ended up doing violent acts such as stabbing an MP at his constituency session or driving a 4x4 into Glasgow airport with the intention of causing an explosion. As I watched the fourth day of rioting in central London in four weeks, I began to understand how thinking people can go down the path to turning their back on civil society and see the only way forward as being to engage in violence. Intelligent, well educated people, especially in the medical professions, are often filled with self-confidence which can in many cases turn into at least intellectual snobbery and very commonly, arrogance. If there were not people who felt that society was wrong and that they knew a better way for us to live, then there would not only be no politicians, but also no-one working for charities and, in fact, no clergy. We accept being told how to behave by certain sets of people, whose challenges to us have somehow been 'normalised', but feel free to ignore or even resist others.

I am trying to cling to my faith in democracy but as the weeks go by and I witness act after act of a government which seems bent on harming as many ordinary Britons as possible, it proves to be increasingly hard. David Cameron can argue that he won some kind of mandate for the actions he is carrying out, though, of course, the bulk of them never appeared in the Conservative election manifesto, and the Liberal Democrat manifesto, in fact, outlined some policies completely opposed to what is being done now. Ed Miliband, Labour leader, clearly has learnt Cameron's trick and said yesterday that it was 'better to under-promise and over-deliver', in other words, do what the Conservatives have done, and spring policies on the population once you have the power.

I am increasingly drawn to issues highlighted by the historian E.P. Thompson (1924-93) certainly in 'Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act' (1977) and to an extent in 'The Making of the English Working Class' (1968). Thompson highlighted how populations behave when they feel that the ruling group has lost its moral mandate. He highlights examples such as bread riots in which the rioters seized the bread but rather than simply distribute it, sold it at what they felt was a fair price. This is a very British characteristic, we yearn for what we see as the establishment of what is 'right' and 'proper' rather than anything more radical. This can play into the hands of the left, as witnessed in the poll tax riot of 1990, but it can also play into the hands of the right as seen in the pro-fox hunting demonstrations and attacks against refugees. Moral indignation can bisect with politics and when it does, it can bring out responses from those who feel apolitical. In the UK many people take pride in 'I'm not political', but when it moves into a moral area of their world view, then they do feel they should become involved. The government's policies are cutting so hard into the everyday life of ordinary people that it is even beginning to radicalise those who in the past would have given no thought to being 'political'. Remember those elderly people who put themselves up for imprisonment rather than pay the poll tax? We are going to be back to that soon.

I certainly feel that the current government is carrying out acts which neither have 'right' in a moral sense, nor are proper for British society. The speed and severity of their actions makes Margaret Thatcher's policies, which in themselves were unacceptable, seem mild and considered. If you feel that the government you are dealing with is morally bankrupt then you look around for methods to challenge it. When the government retains the loyalty of the forces of control, primarily the police, but also the armed forces, who use violence to counteract any form of protest as we have seen with baton charges, horse charges and kettling, then it is not surprising that, in time, even intelligent people see a violent approach as the only way to even simply unsettle the bankrupt government. This seems to be the path I am currently going down. I suppose it is because I have lost my faith that anything can stop the crumbling of our society. The current government policies are rapidly creating a highly divided, very hierarchical country where ordinary people have no opportunities to advance themselves and struggle to find work opening up opportunities for the wealthy to exploit them to a scale not seen for many decades.

To some degree the rioting by students and young people (many of the rioters and protestors are too young to attend university yet) who are actually going to suffer more than current university students, especially with the cutting of the EMA, has had an impact. The coalition government's majority should be 84 but in last night's vote on university tuition fees they only won by 21 votes. This is the kind of narrowness of margin John Major experienced as his government began its limp to its death. Five Conservative MPs and 21 Liberal Democrat MPs voted against the government they are part of; 8 Liberal Democrat MPs abstained. Two Liberal Democrat government aides, Mike Crockart and Jenny Willow resigned as did on Conservative aide, Lee Scott. I wonder if there would have been such opposition if week after week we had not seen thousands of protestors in London. The Liberal Democrats are in trouble anyway, with their popularity at only 11% of the vote. They seem to be reliving the 1920s when they went from being part of a coalition with the Conservatives to fragmentation into three parts and almost disappeared as a party in parliament by the 1950s. If, as seems likely, they do not get proportional representation after the vote next May, then they could be back to a handful following the 2014 general election. In many ways, the Liberal Democrats' blunders are helping to make politics more extreme. Meanwhile David Cameron is shifting constituency borders and reducing the number of MPs by about 8% in order to engineer an automatic majority for the Conservatives and, with fixed term parliaments of 5 years, we will find it far harder to have unpleasant/incompetent governments removed.

Rioting did not overturn the decision in the House of Commons but it reduced the majority to a quarter of what could have once been expected. It should be noted that this was on an issue, which despite the fact that 42% of 18-year olds now go to university, in fact, does not affect the bulk of the UK population. Even with the rise of university attendance 58% of 18-year olds do not go to university; Scottish students do not pay fees; Welsh and Northern Irish fees will not rise. Families without children and people who have finished their education will not be affected. Yet, already the government is struggling to get a majority and trying to work out how to deal with riot after riot. Now, what will happen when the legislation removing the EMA comes up? What happens when the reduction in housing benefit really starts biting, especially in London where it is to have the most impact? What happens when hundreds of thousands of public sector workers are out of work, especially in places like South Wales and North-East England where in some towns the public sector makes up 40-55% of the workforce? What happens when the 2011 equivalent of the Jarrow Crusade reaches London? As I have noted before, the extremity of the government's policies has triggered off such a reaction far faster than any government of the 20th century. It may believe that the worst of the unrest is over, but I think that this is only the beginning. If we have had such a severe response to policies which only hits a slice of the population, can you imagine what will happen when the policies that affect so many more of us begin to come into force?

This government seems to have no interest in compromise, so the only solution left for it will be repression. The police were out in force across central London last night, but ironically, as I have noted before, just at a time when they will be called on more, they too are being cut. Incompetence seems to already be playing a part. The failure to defend the Conservative Party Headquarters four weeks ago, and the inability, last night, to defend the Treasury and Supreme Court buildings, let alone Prince Charles and Duchess Camila in their car, shows that a lot of work needs to be done. Again, I emphasise, that in contrast to what will come, this was a pretty small incident. I quite expect that a 'Bannmeile', i.e., a German term meaning a zone around government buildings in which no protest is permitted, will be introduced to Westminster and Whitehall, with the kind of gates we see at the entrance to Downing Street, or, at least, a 'ring of steel' as is around the City of London financial district being introduced. I am sure public order penalties will rise. I noticed when in London last week that MI5 is actively recruiting staff. I did wonder if they were using the right media by advertising in the free 'Metro' newspaper, but I suppose if they are looking to recruit homeless people and students to infiltrate the rioting groups, this is probably the correct channel as thousands of copies of 'Metro' are daily littered across London's public transport and streets.

These steps will only address the symptoms rather than the causes of unrest in the UK. I am a left-winger who would be opposed to a Conservative government, but it has taken the leadership of David Cameron to lead me to begin doubting democracy, to sit watching television cheering on the rioters as they smashed the windows of the Treasury and wishing that Charles and Camila had been dragged from their cars and beaten up. This was something even Thatcher took 10 years to achieve. With no hope for my future or that of the 9-year old living in my house, you can see why people are radicalised. Lecturers at the University of London have praised the protests (though not the rioting) and more buildings are occupied by students at the moment than any time in the past forty years. Opponents of government always have levels in their structure. You can see this if you study any revolutionary group or terrorist groups such as ETA, IRA and RAF. There is a small group at the centre who carry out the action, but vital for their survival are the next two layers, far less visible. There is the layer of people who provide funds and active support and then the layer who provide passive support, might hide an operative on the run for the night, etc. Whilst the focus is on the rioters, the government seems oblivious to the fact that the anger they are provoking is rippling quickly through society and rapidly building up these layers of active and passive supporters. I imagine these are people who MI5 will also go against. So, if this blog goes offline, you will know what has happened!

Of course, David Cameron and his cronies have absolute faith in what they are doing. It is clear that they want to reshape society under the cover of addressing the deficit, which ironically was incurred to help out their banker friends. I believe they, but probably not everyone in the state machine, is blind to how they are radicalising the population. As they take away any hope we might have, they remove more and more of what we might lose if we protest or riot. People with nothing to lose are the most dangerous. People with a lot less to lose than they once did are the necessary structure for the active radicals to thrive. The government must stop its harsh policies or the coalition will crumble within a year or two, and this period will go down in history as the one which saw more unrest and public violence than the UK had witnessed in a century.

Camping in the 'Me First' Era

In many ways I am a middle class person.  My parents were certainly middle class, having risen from the skilled working class through study and hard work.  I did not go to private school, but I went on foreign holidays through my childhood and attended university at a time when probably a seventh as many people did as do these days.  My parents were certainly not wealthy middle class, they always drove a second-hand car and owned a black-and-white television when many neighbours had moved over to colour; most of their furniture was second hand and refurbished.  They grew their own vegetables at a time when this was a predominantly working class activity, despite the popularity of the television series 'The Good Life' (1975-8) [about a couple trying to live a self-sufficient life in suburban Surbiton] and certainly not filling the prime time television programmes and bookshelves that it does today.  Despite being a graduate, through bad luck, bullying landlords and bad judgement over buying a flat, my income is far lower than my parents' equivalent was back thirty years when they were my current age.  Being made redundant twice in twelve months has not helped this, especially at a time when we are rushing headlong into a even more unpleasant remake of the 1980s. 

I have always subscribed to E.P. Thompson's view that social class is not a structural thing but a relative thing.  We define our class by comparing ourselves to our 'referents', the people we think we are like, those we want to be and those we want to avoid becoming.  I do have middle class aspirations: that I can replace the things that wear out, that I can own a car newer than 15 years' old and especially that I can continue to have the foreign holidays that I had in my youth, but none of these things seem likely.  According to 'The Guardian' the middle class is dying, though the attributes that the newspaper sees as being the defining ones for that class are well above anything I could aspire to, let alone possess.  Maybe I misplace myself, I am just bumping along certainly in the lower middle class (though eschewing the aggression and chauvinism still associated with such people) and in terms of income, worse of than many working class people.  Of course, skills these days are very different and are as much about computers as using a lathe.  In addition, we have 'labouring in a suit' or 'machine minding at a desk', in other words a lot of jobs look middle class but in fact are just the modern version of factory work; most notably in call centres.  Of course, even in revolutions, a class does not disappear as a mass, it is made up of the failure of family-by-family, individual-by-individual as we each lose the fight to retain what we need, let alone what we want under economic policies which seem to be charging headlong in destroying huge swathes of economic activity in the UK just because it is felt by Cameron and his henchpeople that Thatcher did not impose monetarism hard enough for the good of the wealthy.

Anyway, this is the socio-economic context of now.  What is interesting is how in the past decade at a time when we were all supposed to be becoming middle class and leaving working class jobs to migrants, the middle class may have lost some of its traditional attributes, but has also absorbed much of what was once the preserve of poorer people.  The classic examples have often been commented upon: football and large families.  Large families were once the reserve of rural people and the poorest in cities and yet since the 1990s it has been the sub/urban middle class that has started having the large families and 'family' has become a middle class hobby in a way it was not, say, in the 1970s, when private schools and nannies/au pairs were there to deal with the children while middle class adults went on foreign holidays, to cocktail parties and 'wife' swapped. There has been so much said on the gentrification of football spectating that I will leave it to others.

In 2010, we encounter another example of middle class absorbtion of working class culture.  I am not the first to notice it, all I am doing here is highlighting my personal experience of it. As you will have guessed from the title the 'in' holiday this year is not to go to a Tuscan villa or a small Greek island, but to camp in the UK.  Of course, there has always been the 'nerdy' strand of the British middle class, quite often teachers and civil servants (and their conscripted children), who have been the backbone of camping (in the UK this means staying in tents) and caravanning.  However, their ranks, this year, have been swelled by a much broader slice of the British middle class and this is where a lot of the problems are beginning to appear and this stems from a clash of ideologies.

Having laid the background at length, I will explain how I ended up camping.  Like many young British people I experienced camping predominantly as an adjunct to attending festivals (ironically never in the UK) and in the back garden.  I did have friends whose parents were of the 'nerd' middle class who camped as well and my parents experimented with one year of using a tent and one year of using a caravan before settling on renting holiday houses instead.  When I used to cycle on holiday I had enough cash that I stayed in youth hostels rather than camped.  Given how I would struggle with my panniers, I imagine my holidays would have been even more constrained if I had had to lug a tent around as well.  So, that is my personal background with camping, not overly experienced, but not a total beginner either.  The woman who lives in my house, is extremely experienced in camping on two continents and the 8-year old who shares our house, had camped in a rear garden but was certainly up for a proper camping experience.

One reason for picking camping is because it is cheap.  We had managed to get a tent to accommodate us for £35 in a sale and had picked up odd items throughout the year, at a price far less than the travel insurance for just one of us would be if we had flown abroad let alone an aeroplane ticket.  The campsite space cost us only £15 per night, about the same as we would spend for burgers for all three of us.  We had inflatable beds, but no luxury sleeping bags (we took bedding from our beds, pretty necessary to have a lot of it, plus thick socks and jumpers as the woman in my house knows from experience in a British summer it can become bitterly cold at night) and the most high-tech piece of equipment was a wind-up torch and radio.  We drove for an hour to reach our campsite in Dorset.  The one we had intended to visit (which you could not book ahead at) was full and the next one could not accommodate our 3-person tent.  The third site, however, one of four new ones in the area, could fit us just precisely for the period we wanted.  Despite battling the wind while putting the tent up, we got it all sorted and felt immediately to be on holiday.

The camp site is attached to a working farm and it certainly appears that for some little investment a farmer can kit out some fields and then have a solid revenue through the summer.  I think the field of possibly 100 tents probably, even at the rates, we were paying brings in far than a herd of sheep or cows on the same plot.  What was striking was that we so soon felt on holiday.  I realised that having had four days of diarrhoea in Bath and two stressful days in Belgium in the past five years was an insufficient quota of holiday for a properly healthy life. 

The other thing which struck me immediately, though I do not know why I forgot it, given my sensibilities, especially seeing it has been discussed by the commentators of the new middle class enthusiasm for camping, was the communal nature of the activity.  I suppose it is more the surprise for Britons, used to keeping behind closed doors and only interacting with our neighbours when they do something 'wrong'.  However, on a camp site, you cannot avoid having to collaborate with the society around you.  Even on the best equipped you have to share the communal facilities.  I know many caravans have their own showers and toilets but they still have to come out to replenish water supplies, and certainly anyone in a tent has to go and use the communal toilets, showers and dish-washing facilities.  You have to take your rubbish to central points and these days sift the recycling.  No-one seemed to be needed to regulate these activities.  People waited patiently to take their turn with the each particular facility, not elbowing in.  There was sharing of washing up liquid, scrubbing sponges and anything else others seemed to have forgot.  Perhaps simply not having so much of everything was in itself healthy.  It was incredibly easy to slip into this manner of behaviour and I found it incredibly relaxing, though in fact, having to walk 5 minutes to urinate should have made it tiresome.

Unsurprisingly there were an immense number of children in the camp.  That may have been a facet of the particular site which had facilities appealing to children.  The first one we had visited had more teenaged people and the second one seemed almost purely adults.  Camping for children will always be a challenge.  There is the excitement of doing something different, going on an adventure, but there is also a lot of sacrifice.  In one big leap they are suddenly cut off from their television programmes (though most caravans seem to have television aerials) and their games consoles (bar the odd Nintendo DS or other hand-held), their own beds with most of their soft toys, the place where they usually wash in favour of one with tens of strangers in it, food cooked in an unusal way and probably tasting pretty different, and generally new smells and noises.  However, bar a few tears, usually from people not taking turns properly in the games or children falling over, there did not seem to be despair.  I could imagine teenagers being less impressed which may explain why most of the children there were younger than 13.  Certainly for the one child in our party it was an excellent adventure and he seems to have come back seeing the experience camping as different, but not less than the delights at home, and perhaps, more appreciative of those things.  Not a bad lesson in this age of consumerism.

What was striking at the camp site was the autonomy the children had.  They were running around playing everywhere, conscious of cars coming in and out and often warned about knocking over barbecues with their balls, but there was not that every-second concern that they were going to be abducted or injured.  This created a far more relaxed attitude compared to the usual attitude of mewing up children in suburbs.  I assume it does not work all the time, but it did while we were there.  Conversely, children are also set to work.  They tend to dominate the washing-up facilities in the evening and even primary school children are sent to accompany even younger siblings to the toilet and especially to fetch water.  I am not saying that we should try to get children to ape what their counterparts in the Third World would do nor go as far as my parents did in assigning chores that filled the weekend, but there seemed to be benefit in having children do these little jobs.  I suppose it is the 'all mucking in' attitude that has been commented on in the newspapers, in force.  Certainly it restored the woman who lives in my house's faith in humanity to the extent she now wants to go and live in a commune.

When you are living day-by-day with 'walls' as thick as your fingernail, privacy and respect for those around you becomes vital.  You see this in shanty towns and refugee camps.  Whilst it is good to live communally, you also need to be able to absent yourself from it and not have the voice of your neighbour intruding into your conversation and similarly not to think everyone can hear your discussions.  Thus, in line with camp site rules (well, more guidelines, we later found out), people had spaced themselves out properly, leaving 6 metres between tents.  There were a lot of people there, possibly something over 400, but it did not feel crowded or oppressive.  It worked through 'unwritten' rules and the fact that if some was asked to be a little quieter they did not take offence or turn aggressive, they seemed to know that if they were upsetting people it would put a chink in the dam and the structure they presumably were enjoying could crumble.  It was no idyll, but it worked better than society does in most streets I have lived in (the current one is an unusual exception).

Of course, as anyone who has been a regular follower of my blog, something always goes wrong very soon into my holidays and this one was no exception.  We spent a wonderful day away from the camp site in the town of Swanage which is as much of a time warp place as any I have been to.  It seems stuck not in the Victorian era but something like the mid-1960s.  There are some modern eateries and we had some really excellent sea food at a very unassuming cafe, but a lot of architecture and things like dedicated toyshops seem to date from when I was born.  It only has a steam railway (diesel in the evening) running into it so I suppose that adds to the feel.  Families fish by unwinding fishing line sitting on the hard and there is a punch and judy show on the beach assisted by a PA system.

Arriving back from a day in Swanage and seeking to have a doze before firing up the barbecue for dinner we found that four families had moved right into our area.  Rather than the six metres between our tent and theirs, there was less than 10cm.  They had a wide assortment of tents, two of which could have housed our one inside it three or four times over.  I have no problem with large tents, in the 1970s they all used to be heavy metal framed ones with plastic windows and always high enough to stand up in.  The more pod-like strutures of the 1990s are still the norm, but now have grown so the average adult can stand erect within them.  Some now have an atrium with wings off it; one looked like a chapel.  I imagine these appeal to the new category of middle class campers wanting to bring as much of home to the camp site as they can.  I have no problems with that as long as it is not erected, rather than parallel to the already pitched tents but at an angle which leaves the residents bare centimetres from where my head is going to lie.  I could hear them more clearly than the child in the other part of our tent.  These people seemed to have no understanding of what they had done wrong, they seemed to think that because their door faced in a different direction to ours that was fine.  However, they clearly had not paid attention to the numerous signs about spacing nor the pattern that every other tent in the field was laid out along.  The woman from my house was bitter and complained quietly too them.  One offered a bottle of wine as recompense, the others still did not seem to understand what the problem was.

The camp site authority came and like us, realised that with their four main tents and their smaller storage tents around already they could not be compelled to take them down and re-align.  The regulations plastered on numerous signs were revealed to be only 'guidelines' anticipating expected EU legislation.

There was no option but for us to leave which we did in record time, feeling that all that we had enjoyed about the mutual respect had been violated by people who could not see anywhere beyond their own wishes and certainly had none of the communal spirit everyone else seemed to operate by.  I swore at them as we left, because though I had not wanted to let my temper show, I realised that I had to do something to at least raise some attention that they had upset us.  It seemed to beyond their comprehension that they had done anything wrong that I despaired that they would understand.  It is painful for me that these people probably no doubt the children of very selfish parents, cannot even recognise when they have upset others and broken the rules which made the site such a nice place to be.  I suppose it is unsurprising.  I see it every time I go driving.  No-one signals, they drive around dangerously and park carelessly because their own concern is their own ease.  There is no recognition that when you drive or camp or simply live in a town you impinge on others whose rights (though they fail to even comprehend this) are as legitimate as yours. 

Given that the current political culture based on the creed of a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who said (to 'Women's Own' magazine in 1987): '...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'  It is ironic she mentions looking after neighbours, because I think that aspect has been left behind too.  The horizon of far too many people in British people is only 'there are individual men and women and there are families'.  Yes, you see that on camp sites, everyone in their own tent or caravan but they are still inter-linked we cannot live in isolation,  The trouble is that too many take the 'people must look after themselves first' and see that as the justification for not taking any consideration of not only the needs of others but simply how their own behaviour impinges on the human and physical environment around them.

In the space of a couple of days I saw the best and the worst of British society.  I had found an oasis of respect for others and the benefits of communal living and yet it could not keep out the pig-headed inability to comprehend that other people have a right to enjoy facilities too and that means you have to sacrifice a little, just a little of your desires, and think before you act rather than assuming everyone you do, however inattentive it is, is perfectly fine because it gives you the outcome you want.  I hope that next year the selfish middle class move on from camping to some other activity, possibly even one they have not comandeered from other sectors of society to distort to their own tastes and then contaminate with their self-centred perspectives on things.  For myself, realising that I am too unfit to return to cycling, have my eye on hiring a canal boat, but please do not tell the middle class idiots, I want at least one holiday per decade that selfish morons do not stamp all over.