Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

Tittle Tattle

In last month's edition of Tatler, there appeared a useful article on how not to shame oneself by signing a visitor's book incorrectly.

Apparently there is an unspoken code that one is just expected to know.

'It's very naff to write a comment,' says David Cameron's brother-in-law Robert Sheffield.

...and then, later in the piece...

Statesmen can be the worst offenders. John Major not only embarrassed himself but the country when he signed 'John Major, 10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA' in the visitors' book in the embassy in Riyadh.

David Cameron should be less embarrassing- his wife Samantha, as creative director of Smythson (maker of the smartest visitors' books) knows a thing or two about getting it right.

'Be creative with visitors' books with unlined pages. While visiting the country house of a family friend I was delighted to find one with all sorts of cartoons, poems and even watercolour paintings.'

If Gordon Brown gets nervous about wearing white tie, one shudders to think how he would negotiate an elitist social minefield like a visitor's book. Especially when he sees how impressed all the voters are with the Camerons' poems and watercolour paintings in visitors' books in country houses all over the UK.

Alice Fordham

Equality of sexes leads to greater inequality between classes

This morning the Today programme's estimable series on social mobility came to an end with a debate involving Simon Jenkins and Jeff Randall (listen to it here, it starts 20 minutes into the clip). They were discussing, among other things, whether social mobility had stalled or was continuing to increase.

One important point seemed to be missing from the discussion and, unless I missed it, from the series too. The increased mobility of women in the last decade.

Greater equality between men and women is welcome and means that we are an opportunity society today in at least one way we have never been before.

One consequence of greater sex equality though, will be to entrench class and reduce economic equality. As high-earning men marry high-earning women the multiplier effect lifts the wealthy family even higher above the low-earning counterpart.

Sex equality is one explanation for what many believe has been a slowing in social mobility.

Julie Burchill: Working-class hero

There’s nothing quite like a bit of class warfare. Julie Burchill, talking about the “obesity crisis” on the Today programme this morning, made me choke on my porridge. She said:

At a time where the gap between rich and poor is growing bigger, when state schools are much worse than they used to be, it’s so easy to blame these awful chav working class parents for stuffing turkey twizzlers down their kids faces. And not actually tackling the real root of the problem, which is the filthy class system of privilege and nepotism in this country, which means that even jobs that used to be open to bright working class kids – like being actresses or journalists – are being completely overrun by dumb middle class brats, whose parents have got them their jobs.

You don’t have to agree with her view to appreciate her fire. Entirely refreshing stuff. Hear the rest of the self-confessed redneck’s brilliant interview here.

Murad Ahmed

Living the high life

It's a compulsory middle-class thing. I love Paris. It just feels so much more civilised, so much more chic, so much more, well, so much more bourgeois than London, where ugly high-rises and ugly lowlifes menace the streets. But, I suspect, the price of central Paris being so lovely and bourgeois is that life out in the concrete suburbs is miserable. Charles Bremner's superb Times blog has kept a steady eye on the car-torching rituals (tomorrow is the anniversary of the last big riots) of those bits of France that the middle classes rarely see. Despite the ferocity of the disturbances, they made no impact on the day-to-day life of middle-class Parisians. The riots, like the rioters, were effectively segregated.

I cannot help but wonder whether the French, like the Americans, have stumbled across geographical apartheid as a way of dealing or containing their underclass. This provocative article by Charles Murray , first published in The Sunday Times, has always stuck in my mind. It's worth reading. Here's a money quote:

The underclass, the most important domestic policy issue of the 1980s, is no longer even a topic of conversation in the United States. The American underclass isn’t any smaller. The underclass is no longer an issue because we successfully put it out of sight and out of mind. Consider the presence of the underclass in American cities. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the homeless, panhandlers and street hustlers were everywhere. Today they are virtually gone in most cities (San Francisco remains the exception). The social segregation of the underclass has been nearly perfected. We have not learnt how to compensate for the parenting deficits that cripple the lives of children of the underclass, but we have learnt how to avoid dealing with the consequences.

In London though, the middle class and the underclass live cheek-by-jowl. It is harder to "avoid dealing with the consequences". The horrible question is whether Paris-style social segregation might be desirable? My reaction is that penning the urban poor into isolated ghettos is immoral. But I know if I was mugged tomorrow I'd change my mind.

Robbie Millen