Category: Sunday

I have up till this point restricted myself to talking about England because the authority of William the Conqueror did not extend into Scotland. The separation of these two countries went back thousands of years and their physical separation had been established way back before Roman times when  Hadrian the ruling Roman emperor of the time built his eponymous wall which separated the two countries one from the other. In spite of the wall however, the two countries maintained an adversarial relationship which was always smouldering and catching fire from time to time. Incidentally, all throughout this period, the Scots were always allied to the French who themselves were always politically and then religiously opposed to English interests. This is in spite of the fact that the rulers of England were originally French! That the Scots voted to remain in Europe when their English neighbours voted for Brexit in that famous or perhaps infamous referendum shows that the Scots still have their eyes fixed on alliances across the English Channel.

The two countries carried on their affairs as separate countries until 1707 when a treaty of Unification was signed and the countries stretched their respective hands across Hadrian’s wall and nominally at least,  became one. The Union has not always been amicable and even now, moves are afoot to achieve what has been described as the independence of Scotland from Britain because England with her large population and stronger economy has been by far,  the dominant partner.

In the case of Ireland, the relationship has been clearer because England had colonised that country as far back as 1649. This being the case, the Irish had been dominated by England in the same way that Nigeria or Ghana, when it was known as the Gold Coast were dominated when more than two hundred years later, they were colonised by Britain. The point to be made here is that the dominant culture in the British Isles has been overwhelmingly English and so the class relations among the British was recognisably English. That is, an all powerful ruling class for whom the vast majority of the working class toiled for little reward.

The polity may have been ruled by English mores and customs but things worked out quite well because there was little difference between the modus operandi of the ruling classes in both England and Scotland. It was indeed, almost identical. The Scottish Lairds or tribal chiefs like the English dukes not only owned all the land but also the people who lived on them. It was therefore easy for the Lairds to chase the crofters who lived within their area of jurisdiction away from the land when they needed the land to raise sheep on. This was at a time when sheep wool became a prime commodity. Many of those who were chased off the land had no choice but to migrate to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA which is why today, you have a sizeable Scottish diaspora in those countries. A few of them can even be found in other countries which is why  names like Ruggieri Brown and Alexis Macalister have turned up on the Argentinian football team list in recent years.

As for the Irish under English occupation, their fate was comparable to that of the serfs in England in the Middle Ages. They had nothing they could call their own outside their Roman Catholic Church adherence in a place where to be Catholic was to be classified at best as being third class. Their extreme vulnerability was shown up in 1845 when the potato crop failed. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, one million Irish men, women and children perished of hunger and another million hot footed it across the Atlantic to America in a bid to avoid certain death. A large number of those refugees settled down in Boston and surrounding areas and today, many of their descendants are policemen but, that is another story.

A great deal has been written about the Irish famine of that period, but a great deal more remains to be talked about as far as that sorry episode is concerned. For example, many in Nigeria talk about Irish potatoes without knowing that there is nothing Irish about those potatoes which are indeed native to the Americas from where they were first imported. It was found that potatoes grew in great abundance in Irish soil and was a convenient subsistence crop for Irish peasants who needed only a little plot of land and a pig to provide food for their large family all year round. The humans ate potatoes and their pig was fattened on potato peels. The pig was then butchered and eaten in turn by the people who got a replacement piglet which was fattened and consumed in its turn at the appropriate time. In the meantime, the English employed most of the inhabitants of Ireland  to grow wheat on their estates. The hot and steamy conditions which destroyed the potato crop were favourable for the growth of wheat and so, in that terrible year of the Irish famine, the English gathered in a bountiful harvest of wheat which they loaded into heavily guarded railway trucks that took the wheat to the docks from where they were shipped across to England. There, it was consumed by the gentlemen and their ladies who could pay premium prices for fine wheat bread. In the meantime, over in Ireland where the wheat was grown, people were starving to death in their many  thousands everyday.

The Irish as a group or class  formed an easily identifiable underclass which existed below the general British working class. They swarmed over from Ireland in the period immediately after the Industrial Revolution and came to dig the canals,  build the roads and carried out other muscular but menial and dead end jobs which the English, down trodden as they were, were not minded to do for the wages on offer. Expectedly, the Irish who came over to do those jobs were not just looked down upon but shunned like so much vermin that they were held out to be by their reluctant English hosts.

On the whole, those of the British working class were in their turn a stratified demographic group with the Irish at the bottom of the pile. This position was reserved for them until after the Second World War when the British, full of the conquering spirit engendered by their victory in the war reached out to their colonies overseas and imported workers from the Indian sub-continent,  the Caribbean and later, to a little extent, East Africa to join the Irish in powering certain sectors of their economy. Things have not however worked out according to plan in this direction as the children and grandchildren of those immigrants are now running those countries, many of them holding top cabinet positions with the British Prime minister being an Indian with roots in Kenya. The Scottish first minister is an ethnic Pakistani whilst the shiny new Welsh first minister has roots in Zambia. Up till very recently, the Irsh Taoiseach or Prime Minister was also of Indian descent. Where are ethnic Britons to be found in leadership positions in the land of their birth? There are also the odd Nigerian and Ghanaian in powerful cabinet positions in the British government. It is apparent that this trend will continue, meaning that somewhere down the line, the British government will be dominated by formerly colonised peoples from all over the world with the occasional ethnic Briton finding themselves holding a cabinet position here and there. The indigenous working class people there, after centuries of breeding to their lowly status will only be relieved to yield ground to those immigrants who have not been brought up to kowtow to the home grown descendants of William the Bastard and company. These are people who have been primarily concerned with dealing with basic existential matters namely the provision of food, shelter and clothing for themselves and their children. The housing situation in Britain for example is the worst in Europe as they still live  mainly in terrace houses from Victorian times which are mostly impossible to be kept warm in winter. It is often said that spoils of Empire flowed into Britain but the members of the working class do not seem to have benefitted much from this largess as everything flowed into the cavernous pockets of their ruling class made up of only a small fraction of the population. Those nobles have been inter marrying for so long that they are now in danger of creeping idiocy which is the ever present danger in maintaining such relationships. In the midst of all these, the working class cannot be much concerned with basic morality so that in Britain,  they now have an amoral ruling class and an immoral working class trying to get on with life as best they could.

Read Also: Class formation

Sandwiched between these classes is the middle class which can be described as the conscience of the country. Recruitment into this class has been going on for a couple of centuries now and for part of the working class, climbing into the middle class has been a recurrent ambition over a long period of time. A great many have been successful in this endeavour but a middle class classification is not inheritable so that not all who reach this goal can pass it on to their offspring some of whom slide back into the chaos and anonymity of the working class within a single generation. In addition, the moral burden of the country is carried on the shoulders of the members of the middle class seeing that the denizens of the upper class are not burdened by any moral sensitivity or responsibility and those in the working class cannot afford the luxury of bowing to moral principles.

The backbone of Britain is maintained in its entirety by members of the middle class who are to be found in the liberal professions, the officer class in the armed forces and the government. From this definition it is clear that the recruiting grounds for the middle classes are tertiary institutions where they work towards picking up those qualifications required for people in middle class occupations.  From this point of view,  British universities have been very successful at initiating a lot of Britons into the middle class. It has to be said that these recruiting institutions are restricted to the universities because most of the institutions reserved for members of the working class were once described  by Ralph Miliband, the great socialist intellectual as custodial institutions from which pupils are released after a prescribed period to take up the lowly jobs assigned to them practically at birth by their society. However, the golden era of this recruitment exercise into the middle class appears to be coming to an end as a very significant minority of students in British universities are now foreign students whose school fees are keeping the British university system afloat. With less money coming in from Indian and Nigerian students, the future of a number of British universities can however no longer be taken for granted.

An interesting aspect of the recruitment of members of the middle class by British universities is that an overwhelming number of the members of the current  British government are Oxbridge graduates. For example, since the end of the Second World War virtually all British prime ministers, irrespective of their antecedents have been graduates of one of either Oxford or Cambridge. Most of them have in fact been graduates of a single hybrid course, Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). It appears that there is very little room in the British cabinet for those who have not gone through the PPE degree programme in either Oxford or Cambridge. And this is set to continue for long time to come.

To be continued.