a couple of years ago:

"I have recently been reading Kate Fox's book on the English so passed on a few things that she had reminded me of. "Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour" is, I think, the funniest book I have ever read. It repeatedly has me in tears of laughter. As an Australian who knows the English well, I can recognize the truth of her observations without being embarrassed by them. And there is one sentence from her book that sums up the English well: "Everything is embarrassing"." There is an update of her observations here.

And such is the genius of W.S. Gilbert that, in his madcap and exaggerated way, he too makes the English class system seem hilarious.

Thankfully, the class system in Britainstupidity. The people concerned are mostly not stupid in general but they have a character defect (mostly arrogance) that makes them impatient with complexity and unwilling to study it. So they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot; They fail to attain their objectives. The world IS complex so a simplistic approach to it CANNOT work.

The big British Labour Party blunder from the point of view of someone who genuinely values greater equality was the attack on "Grammar" schools. Britain once had many such schools. They were taxpayer-funded ("State") schools that were run on lines very similar to Britain's famous and excellent "Public" (meaning private) schools such as Eton, Harrow and many others. Mainly because of the cost, only about 7% of Britons complete the schooling of their teenage