THE best comic sketch of the satirical Sixties was too uncomfortably true to be funny.
The Frost Report's routine on the class system was a bitingly accurate commentary on the social divisions that bedeviled Britain – and still do.
It is worth remembering the script as John Cleese and the Two Ronnies lined up, according to height. B
owler-hatted Cleese looked down on Barker and said "I look down on him because I am upper class." Trilby-hatted Barker looked up and responded: "I look up to him because he is upper class"; then, turning to look down on the diminutive Corbett, he said with self-satisfaction: "But I look down on him because he is lower class. I am middle class." Corbett, in cloth cap and muffler, said resignedly: "I know my place." Cleese, from his lofty height: "I get a feeling of superiority over them." Barker, alternately looking up and down: "I get a feeling of inferiority from him but a feeling of superiority over him." Corbett, still wearily looking up: "I get a pain in the back of my neck."
Both Harold ("One Nation") Macmillan and Tony ("I am a Socialist because it stands for equality") Blair declared after their election wins in 1959 and 1997: "The class war is over." But more than 40 years after The Frost Report sketch, the class war is still being fought.
I was brought up, I suppose, lower working-class by a grandfather who, after a few Wee Heavies, would counsel me: "It disna' matter if the erse is hingin' oot yer breeks, ye're still as good as any other bugger." At school, however, we were taught to defer to our 'betters' and the lesson was 'know your place'. Though we may have been perpetually hard up, there is now a deprived class below even that.
There is still a caste system in Britain – how could it be otherwise when you have a Royal Family and an undeserving aristocracy at the apex of a pyramid of privilege? And, despite more than a decade of Labour Government, there is a deeper division between the haves and have-nots.
The most blatant current example of class-based contempt is the treatment of Commons Speaker Michael Martin. I will not defend him on his expenses and air miles, which are indefensible – not to say downright stupid; but we should all be concerned by the ferocity of the blatant snobbery and crude anti-Scottish racism of his critics.
Instead of confining themselves to his rightly questionable actions, they have attacked his all too obvious working-class roots and his Scottish accent. Actually, it has been one of the glories of British democracy that a metalworker from a slum tenement in Glasgow could rise to one of the great offices of state – but the Establishment has never been able to stomach that. When Martin was nominated for the Speakership, he was subjected to a virulent campaign and the sneering nickname Gorbals Mick. It was both inaccurate, because he was born and bred in Anderston on the other side of the Clyde, and also betrayed an outrageous prejudice.
The journalist who coined it (a metropolitan snob with a pansy public-school accent) makes his offence worse by claiming it is "verbal cartooning" containing the essence of Martin's political identity. In other words, anyone from a poor, industrial west of Scotland background should not get above himself and is to be lampooned for his accent and appearance; for what he is, not for what he does.
Even in egalitarian Labour, there was class division. With Blair's backing, Donald Dewar canvassed Labour MPs not to support Martin's bid for the Speaker's chair but to vote instead for Lib Dem Menzies Campbell – a fellow graduate of Glasgow University with the right airs and graces. And the late John Smith would talk on the overnight train from London about going home to his Coatbridge constituents, "the arse out of the breeks brigade".
Previous Labour Speakers came from lowly origins: George Thomas was from the Welsh valleys and Betty Boothroyd was a daughter of Yorkshire textile workers. But both managed to make themselves 'acceptable', while Martin made no compromises, either in style or accent. Criticisms of his conduct refer to the same handful of slips, yet Boothroyd's many procedural muddles were tolerated, as was one over-sociable Speaker's tendency to doze off or start slipping from the chair.
Martin's origins may explain his present predicament, for he is from a generation of wily Old Labour shop steward MPs. But voters will no longer tolerate exploiting the system. If he uses his remaining time in office to help put the House in order and restore some respect to politics, he might yet rehabilitate his reputation as a basically decent man who failed to realise times have changed.
It is no coincidence that the unprecedented campaign to oust a sitting Speaker has reached fever pitch at a time when the Opposition front bench comprises Old Etonian Hooray Henrys. To look down from the gallery on Cameron and his cronies behaving like sniggering fifth-formers is to realise social privilege is alive and well in the Tory Party.
The class question, of course, is bigger than Martin and more worrying than one man's problems. We are no longer just upper, middle and lower class; in our midst there is an underclass living in extreme deprivation – and, despite Labour's boast of having lifted 600,000 children out of poverty, there are still one million people in Scotland living in hopeless deprivation. Don't let anyone tell you the class war is over. It is still being waged – and being at the bottom of the pile is much worse than a pain in the neck.
