Comments on: What’s it all about, Alfie?

By: kurt9

kurt9 — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:46:04 +0000

I heard things in the U.K. were quite bad in the 70′s before Thatcher came in. The used to call it the “British Industrial Disease”. It sounds like things are returning to those conditions. Also, it is known that 70% of the economy in the U.K. outside of London and the Southeast is government supported. Since London and Sussex was based mostly in financial services, which has now cratered, it is probably safe to say that the U.K. is hosed for the foreseeable future.

By: Laura(southernxyl)

Laura(southernxyl) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:39:02 +0000

Sgt Mom – time to bring back Queen Victoria and Prince Albert? I think it’s too late. Sadly.

By: wayne

wayne — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:01:48 +0000

Ditto a rave for Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom”, if you can bear it. Recommend all of his books, in particular “In Praise of Prejudice”.

Recent semi-best seller: “Stewart, a Life Backward” also covers a lot of the disfunction of the UK in our time.

By: Sgt. Mom

Sgt. Mom — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:30:49 +0000

I had read – perhaps in a Dalrymple piece, perhaps someplace else – that Britain seems to be devolving from the tidy, polite, orderly and soberly middle-class striving place that it was by the late 19th century, into something much more like the 18th century; a rude, drunken-brawling Gin Lane kind of place, where the well-to-do live in their beautiful gated Georgian mansions and try their best to ignore the unruly, lawless, and shiftless lower-classes. Something to think about, anyway.

By: ed

ed — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:13:01 +0000

for monthly Dalrymple pieces, refer to the on-line New English Review.

By: Verity

Verity — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:47:41 +0000

Novus – None other.

By: Alcibiades

Alcibiades — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:02:20 +0000

Maybe they can get Maury Povich to announce the results.

By: Novus

Novus — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:59:42 +0000

Sorry, there’s meant to be a “waves” in pointy brackets before my wink….

By: Novus

Novus — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:58:23 +0000

On “chav”, many people will tell you that it derives from the Romany word “chavi” meaning “child” or “little one”. My belief, however, is that it originated as a soubriquet for someone from the Medway town of Chatham in Kent, a grotty and insalubrious place with, apparently, the highest incidence of heroin addiction per capita of anywhere in the UK. I spent a year in the mid-Nineties living in the neighbouring town of Rochester, and I was hearing Chathamites called “chavs” long before the word came to be a general term for the underclass, which has only happened in the last decade.

Verity, if you’re the same one as on CoffeeHouse, then ;)

By: Verity

Verity — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:31:34 +0000

Marty – He’s compelling. The pieces he wrote for, I think, The Spectator, when he was a prison doctor are very illuminating and a great read. He often writes for City Journal, if anyone wants to follow up on him. He’s a natural writer.

The origins of the word chav aren’t clear at all – especially given that the word wasn’t even known at the beginning of this century.

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:28:19 +0000

What is the derivation of the word, “chav”?

Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom” is a good place to turn–collected essays from the mid- and late-1990s—clearly this all started way before New Labour’s victory in 1997, and Dalrymple offers a better-nuanced theory as to why it is happening. His other stuff (“Our Culture–What’s Left of It” and “Defense of Prejudice” (I think, that may not be exactly right)) offer a whole body of essays on the subject of the collapse of the British family and social system–and a lot for Americans to ponder.

By: Verity

Verity — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:45:53 +0000

I apologise, Jonathan, for failing to have realised that this story would already have been fodder on this side of the Atlantic, too. Just as the British worked themselves up into a stew about the octuplet woman in CA. In an age of reality TV, how could it be otherwise, especially as the Anglosphere is so huge.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:18:56 +0000

The American media ate it up, along with the story of the octuplets in Calif., the killer chimpanzee and various missing and “missing” children. You’d almost think there’s an audience for this stuff.

By: Shannon Love

Shannon Love — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:54:15 +0000

Dang, that’s far, far gone.