I will be celebrating a very special anniversary in September. By the end of that month, I will have officially spent more of my life in Britain than in France. That’s incredible, isn’t it? My dad mentioned it to me recently, and we got to talk about the sheer absurdity of it all. Because I moved at 17, before even becoming an adult, there are many ways in which I am more English than French.
Often, I’ll go home and find that “home” no longer is a concept that can feasibly apply to me, as my heart and my roots do not lie in the same place now. If anything, the French are usually the ones who baffle me, or make me laugh with their odd, idiosyncratic ways.
Well, with one important exception: class. I just… good lord, where to even begin? I don’t even know what class I’m meant to be: my background is that of a mongrel, and you could probably make a case for me sitting on at least three different rungs of the ladder. I am often told this doesn’t matter, however: I wasn’t born here, so I don’t count, at least not in this way.
I should feel offended by it, but I don’t because, if I’m honest, the British class system terrifies me. It is a relief to me that I don’t belong in this one particular way. I can listen to you people discuss this or that working-class custom, or this or that sign that someone clearly is unbelievably posh, and it makes me feel as if I just stepped off the Eurostar.
Most recently, I silently gawped like an ape as Bluesky users argued about the content of a woman’s house. Hannah Spencer, the Greens’ candidate for Gorton and Denton, recorded a video with Caroline Lucas. A picture of the conversation was posted on social media, which prompted a reasonably high-profile Labour activist to call the living room “very middle-class”.
Now, you may be expecting me to describe said living room, so you can judge for yourself. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what to say: it just looked like… well, a room to me. It had furniture, walls, a floor – usually what you’d expect from a place where humans live. Still, people went at it: chewing on every single detail in order to try to decide where Spencer fit within that labyrinthian system of theirs.
Again, it just made me feel like an alien. It was amusing and, in some ways, quite endearing. I discussed it with some friends – other long-term immigrants to Britain – and they confessed that they just didn’t get it either.
Who can possibly discern the slightest changes in someone’s vowels, or the very words they use? Who has the time to inspect someone’s clothes, car, where they shop, what they called their children, how they speak about money and their family, and then decide, with some certainty, that they must belong to this or that minuscule social subgroup? Obsessing over class is clearly something you just have to be born with.
Though I do enjoy poking fun at the inherent silliness of it all, recent events did offer a reminder that all manner of horrors can be hidden within this rigid, oppressive class system. Seeing Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the artist formerly known as (etc) finally, maybe, perhaps suffer some consequences for his actions initially felt quite cathartic.
Over the days that followed, that satisfaction turned sour. There are countless reports out there outlining the many, many ways in which Andrew behaved appallingly over the decades, starting in childhood. Was he ever stopped? Was he ever curtailed in any meaningful way? Pah! Of course he wasn’t.
Sure, the schadenfreude involved in watching him get arrested on his birthday was welcome, but why did we have to wait for him to enter his 67th year for it to happen?
Oh, and though people may soon start arguing that Andrew’s downfall shows that, in 21st-century Britain, even being born a royal doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to behave as you wish, let’s talk about his mother, shall we? I can’t see into the future, but I’d be ready to bet that, in a decade’s time, Elizabeth II’s legacy won’t have been tarnished one iota by her son’s actions.
Now, you may or may not argue that a mother can’t be responsible for everything her children get up to, and parents may sometimes shield their relatives even though they shouldn’t, because that’s what humans do, but who gets to get away with that? Would that logic work in favour of a working-class mum?
British people love order and they love knowing where they and everyone else stand, which is an understandable impulse in some ways, but the nightmares hiding within the ruling classes just cannot be swept under the carpet. Soon I’ll have spent more time in London than in Nantes but, even in another 17 years, I doubt I’ll truly understand this slavish devotion to a system that benefits so few.
