'The English working class is, I think, uniquely disinherited, and the most important ways in which it is disinherited are the more crippling because they are largely hidden from us. We are fairly well aware of how little the worst off have had in the way of independent material resources throughout the past two centuries of history: until recently scarcely any savings to speak of, not much in the way of valuable chattels, and for the most part no financial stake in their own home. But there are other sorts of capital to which they have also had little or no access - social, cultural and spiritual. And it is because the rest of us are so uneasily conscious of this other poverty without being able or willing fully to articulate it that our attitude towards "them" oscillates between pity and disdain. Above all, it is difficult to show or feel respect towards people who are so embarrassingly impoverished.
We are often told that deference has disappeared from modern Britain. Yet the adulation of the rich and famous is surely as fulsome as ever. In hotels, restaurants and aircraft - the sites of modern luxury - the new upper crust is fawned on as egregiously as old money in its Edwardian heyday. All that has happned is that the composition of the upper class has changed, as it has done roughly once a century since the Norman Conquest. The pop stars and IT tycoons are the equivalent of the upwardly mobile mercants and lawyers of Tudor times and the cottonocracy and beerage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What has almost disappeared is deference to the lower classes. Throughout the two world wars and the decades following both of them, the lower classes were widely revered for their courage in battle and their stoicism in peace. Values such as solidarity, thrift, cleanliness and self-discipline were regularly identified as characteristsics of them.
That is no longer the case. By a remarkable shift in public discourse, the middle classes have come to regard most of those virtues as characteristic of their own behaviour, indeed as largely confined to themselves. For the ultimate deprivation that the English working class has suffered - in fact the consequence of all the other deprivations - is the deprivation of respect.'
Ferdinand Mount, Mind the Gap, p.120.
