We’ve all been there. A commute home with loud-mouthed, irritating people screaming and bawling shamelessly. Hell, I’ve probably been that person on a few occasions. We all roll our eyes and wish they’d shut up. I have also enjoyed slagging these people off, meanly and with sharply-constructed insults, especially at infuriating people who ruin my journey. So why has Tom Utley’s article in yesterday’s Daily Mail, ‘How a train ride with two foul-mouthed Waynetta Slobs taught me a very painful lesson about our failing schools’ pissed me off so much?
Initially, despite being the Daily Hate, I didn’t expect to have any issue with it; the piece is well-written and, at first, amusing. Utley presents himself as an affable, cultured Wilde-esque ‘chap’ compared to the two, tawdry, Dickensian wenches. I empathised with Utley when adopting the ‘mustn’t grumble’ English attitude to causing a scene in public but, unfortunately, he did not stop there. As the article went on, the language and his creeping Tory, right-wing perspective seeped in more and more until the agenda of that vile and unholy paper was evident. It’s the Daily Mail, of course it did.
Although initially used for comic effect, the piece persisted in heightening, almost to the extent of justifying, the class gap difference issue. For comedy writing purposes that’s ok, but The Daily Mail, as we know, always has an agenda. Every one of this type of article assert the existence of an unassailable class gap between them (the grammar-schooled intelligentsia) and us (the illiterate, rude proletariat). He suggested no reason for this behaviour of theirs other than that state schools are awful. The fact is that every population is broad and diverse, with polite, rude, smart, dumb, ugly, pretty, etc, etc people throughout. I’m sure there are more than a few thick, impolite people in the Grammar school system too.
As I said, I didn’t want to dislike the article but by the end I did. Utley intoned all the typical Tory epithets; blaming schooling and, while generously admitting that ‘it’s possible they have jobs’, suggesting they had ‘welfare claimant written all over them’. His mimicking of their accents ended up seeming just mean-spirited snobbery on Utley’s part. He asserted that it is welfare-types like these, and their ‘betrayal’ by the British State School system that forces businesses to ‘look overseas for low-skilled jobs’. Hell, even the observance of the two sister’s different skin colours seemed to confirm to Utley the class gap that The Mail so ardently insists exists.
The piece is supportive of the Government’s attempt to further weaken support for state schools. On a day when the National Teacher’s Union was on strike this article connected two, admittedly annoying, women with a ‘failing’ school system. Was Utley suggesting a grammar school style education for all though? No; not in the slightest.
The spurious comments at the end that apparently ‘everyone accepts’ that grammar schools are great for ‘clever children’ conveniently sidestepped the issue of being able to afford a grammar school education. In the light of two such seemingly hopeless individuals, Utley suggest that state schools and comprehensives, such as the ones the vast majority of us attended, might as well be done away with, in favour of ‘separate schools’. These ‘separate schools’ seem to be aimed at basic literacy and etiquette – I presume to more politely serve his grammar school children their lunches later in life – and Tom Utley suggests that the ‘unacademic’ would profit (although not financially of course) more from this. He even refers to them twice as the ‘underclass’…
Unacademic, underclass, separate schools, basic manners and vocational skills; this sounds like some form of social eugenics, a Daily Mail English Apartheid school system in the making.
It is this perceived and contrived class divide which is so hideous and pernicious. Can Utley not entertain the idea that though the two sisters may not have struggled in the same way Michael Frayn did in the post-war years (‘humph, if he could do it, why can’t they?’) but it is possible that it is their social situation which has denied them the same opportunities that Utley has had. Money is the great divide. If you want a better class of worker to come through the state school system, (in itself a hideous insult on the majority of our populous) then you must fund those schools better. If you have a financially-tiered school system then you are depriving the majority of people the same beneficial start that you had.
Tom Utley, insulting these two women (sorry, ‘Waynettas’…) for lacking those social graces that your more privileged schooling instilled is mean. Tapping into and scapegoating this stereotype in order to suggest that all of state schooling is to blame makes you a Daily Mail lackey, and a dangerous one. Furthermore, to my mind, if on this logic you suggest that state schools should therefore be replaced with some form of manners-based, retail and food industry boot camp in order to turn the unacademic underclass into more acceptable minions, and less aggravating company on your commute back to the Home Counties, then you, Mr Utley, are a proper shit.