After the recent election of Mary
Lou McDonald as the Sinn Fein MEP for Dublin , I got
to thinking about the middle classes and my attitude
towards them, which can best be summed up as one of
absolute contempt. The reason being is that Ms McDonald
is about as middle class as they come. Born into the
affluent Dublin suburb of Rathgar, she attended a
fee paying private school, in her case at Notre Dame,
Churchtown. After this she went on to study at Trinity;
throughout her time their her parents continued to
fund her education. After leaving University she did
the usual middle class kid's flop around Europe with
the help of her parents' bank balance and from time
to time found employment on the professional old pals
act. Whilst working class kids may get a job on a
local building site because the general foreman knows
their dad, middle class kids do the same but end up
in one of the countless think tanks or media outlets
that have been spawned these days. After returning
to Ireland she joined FF in 1998. Somehow she caught
the eye of the SF leadership and moved over to that
party and was fast-tracked into her current position.
Apart from the very real question about why the leadership
fast-tracked an individual with such a background,
when the overwhelming majority of their supporters
live in a different world if not planet from Ms McDonald,
it is difficult to see how with her brief party membership
she will be able to emphathise with SFs constituency.
What is it about working class politicians, once they
gain any power, that they feel the need to surround
themselves with young middle class women? Of course,
only the lookers get an invite. True, some middle
class people come over to the side of the masses and
immerse themselves within the struggle. But is there
not enough for them to do without them being fast-tracked
and by being so depriving some promising working class
youngster of a political career? After all, the benches
of the Dail and European Parliament are hardly groaning
with the weight of politicians who come from working
class backgrounds. Both places are full of middle
class apparatchiks whose life experiences consists
of a brief spell being employed in this or that think
tank.
Still the above did get me thinking as to why I have
such strong emotions against a whole class, it hardly
seems logical, even to me. So where does it spring
from, what has made me feel like this about a class
of people, with whom in my daily life I rarely consciously
rub shoulders? Except perhaps when I go to the Doctors
or Dentist, the odd politician or journalist I may
come into contact with, a comrade who has gone over
to supporting the struggles of the working classes.
As a child growing up at the end of WW2, I saw the
middle classes in much the same way as my peers and
indeed as most working class people did at that time.
They were distant to us, cleverer due to their education,
or so we thought, in positions of power over us. There
really was no interaction on a social level between
working class adults, let alone kids with members
of the middle classes back then. Something that has
not changed a great deal in the proceeding years,
it seems to me. It was almost a thank you kindly sir
and god bless you attitude if they so much as sneezed
in our direction.
For a start the middle classes owned their own houses,
something in those days a worker could not even aspire
to do. When local councils agreed planning permission
for the desperately needed homes to be built for the
vast numbers of homeless working class people in the
1950s and 60s, the middle class people who advised
and sat on these planning committees were quite prepared
to pass these applications as long as the proposed
council estates where built on green field sites,
not within sight nor smell of their own leafy suburbs.
There was, after all, money to be made for the middle
classes during this building boom and once the homes
were occupied, there would be a ready supply of cheap
labour.
When as kids we became sick, we went to the local
doctor, or if we had tooth ache the dentist. Both
of whom were of course middle class. Little did our
parents believe that these people might not have had
our best interest at heart? The dentist by pulling
and filling teeth that were perfectly healthy, so
that they could claim a larger fee from the newly
formed NHS; the GP by prescribing medication to us
that they had either received as a job lot from a
rep or enrolling us without our parents' knowledge
as participants in drugs trials on which we unknowingly
were to be the guinea pigs, with the doctor receiving
a hefty fee from the pharmaceutical companies for
recruiting his patients. No one ever mentioned the
word fraud, nor questioned these medical practitioners'
competence. When a member of the working classes had
all their teeth pulled out for no better reason than
to fill the dentist's wallet, as happened to my own
mother at the age of 20, more often than not they
went through their entire lives believing what the
dentist had told them, they had weak gums so it would
be better for them to have the lot pulled. After all,
the dentist is an educated middle class person, they
know what they are doing; they would not be dentists
otherwise, now would they?
I suppose the closest contact we had with the Middle
Class as kids was our schoolteachers, the overwhelming
majority of whom were either lower middle class or
middle class. Or if our luck was out, those members
of the local Middle Class community who sat on the
local Magistrates Bench. As to the school masters
it would not be unfair to say that those who passed
my way hated us, regarding the kids they taught and
had responsibility for as dirty, ignorant, lazy urchins
and in their opinion it would be better for the nation
if they stayed that way. Discipline is all we needed
to understand. Once we had learnt to accept that,
we could go forth into the world of work like a cart
house, trained to haul their load. It was brawn, not
brain, that we would provide the British economy with.
The brain was already being provided by the likes
of them and theirs. In any case I have no doubt they
had as a group long ago concluded it was hard enough
for their own children to get decent jobs in the professions,
they could do without competition from the brats of
great unwashed.
If we had run out of luck and found ourselves before
the Magistrates Bench, then the middle class magistrate
would peer down contemptuously upon us, reflecting
to themselves and at times in our direction that as
we had clearly not learned to respect authority, we
will have to be taught the hard way in an approved
school, borstal or a detention centre, in which we
would be beaten and bullied by the staff, which of
course had the full support and encouragement of that
nice, softly, well spoken, university educated, middle
class Governor. Endless PT and bunny hops were the
order of the day; they would soon knock the backbone
out of us delinquents. Self-fulfilment through education
would be lost on the likes of us, after all is said
and done; it went against the natural order of things.
Then after ten years of mis-education accompanied
with a good dollop of perversion and sadism the world
of work beckoned. What joys and adventures awaited
me I wondered. As in my school days, apart for the
masters, members of the middle classes were rarely
present during the first few years of my working life.
From time to time they would appear on the horizon
in the person of management checking on the progress
of their workforce's output, or as time and motion
men standing over us with their stop watches attempting
to think up even more devious ways to make us work
harder and thus produce more. It was only after a
fellow worker encouraged me to read the Guardian newspaper,
that bastion of the liberal English middle classes
and from that I graduated to reading books, that I
began to realise the pernicious influence the middle
classes had in my life.
As I became more knowledgeable I was asked by my work
mates to become their trade union shop steward, thus
for the first time I came face to face, as equals
and in adversity with middle class people in the form
of the management. This experience was to open my
eyes and gradually play a part in replacing the hatred
I felt for the middle classes with that of absolute
contempt.
For the first time I realised that
although they were better educated than me there brains
were no better, if anything their moral values were
far weaker than those I had instilled in me as a working
class child by my uneducated parents. They felt nothing
of lying and cheating if it brought the company and
thus themselves advantages. This made me look at the
political history of this class or rather those members
of it who I had come across who back then were mainly
English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish.
They like to look upon themselves
as civilised, decent people, when in reality the overwhelming
majority are the exact opposite. Sure, my own class
can behave in a low manner, at times expressing low,
racist or homophobic comments. But in their defence
they had never been educated to know any better. Whereas
the middle class had been educated to university level,
in the process having read some of the finest works
mankind had ever produced; yet still they put personal
advantage over all else. Not only do they hold racist
views but also unlike the working classes they have
the power to put them into practice. For who else
made the London Metropolitan police institutionally
racist, the treatment many asylum seekers receive
in Ireland from the Guards shows they are no better.…
Who thought up the disgusting referendum about the
rights of children born in Ireland to those seeking
asylum, who to this day blacklists ethnic minorities
from the Judiciary, senior civil service etc., who
in the past financed the fascist parties of Hitler
and Mussolini?
It was the British middle classes who were the backbone
of the British Empire, which cannot be described as
anything but legalised theft with a fair amount of
murder, assault and battery thrown in for good measure
or indeed down right pleasure. If anyone believes
they have changed with the ages, forget it. Who writes
and propagandises the jingoistic crap that British
and Irish newspapers and the electric media spew forth
daily, especially over the illegal war in Iraq? Of
course to read middle class journalists such as the
liberal Polly Toynbee in the London Guardian newspaper,
one would think it is the working classes who are
jingoistic or down right racist, solely responsible
for the rise of racism within the EU. Who puts such
filth into our minds, I ask. Who administers public
organisation, Government Departments and large businesses
that are in the words of the writer of the report
on the death of Steven Lawrence, "Institutionally
Racist"? In any case in my experience the racism
and homophobia of working class people is only on
the surface. Whereas with the middle classes it is
carefully thought through and often deeply ingrained
over centuries, covered over with a thin veneer of
civilisation. Of course as I have already stated there
are exceptions, members of the middle classes who
have by fighting for justice and equality placed themselves
on the side of working people, but sadly they remain
a tiny majority. In the main they beaver away in the
engine room of progressive movement the world over,
recognising if working people are to fully liberate
themselves they themselves must be their own tribunes
in the political chambers, not delegate this responsibility
to members of the middle classes, no matter how sincere
they may be. If Ms McDonald had any true understanding
about Irish Republicanism she would have understood
this and declined the ego trip the current SF leadership
offered her.
