The morality of carphone warehouse

Now I’m not a huge fan of Big Brother. Sure I, like most people, have been hooked in the past and on one level I do appreciate the neat social experiment it represents. I usually like to think myself above such pursuits as idle gossip about people I don’t know. Then again, I am insanely interested in politics, which in fairness is probably more sinister.

The recent ‘racist’ allegations have however sparked my interest. From what I have gathered from various websites and newspapers I think I have struck upon an ingenious explanation, which quite helpfully, slots in perfectly with my all to class-conscious world view. I fear that what happened in celebrity Big Brother might well have been a microcosm of Britain in the near future.

Jade Goody has been cast as the ringleader of the racist attacks against Shilpa Shetty. Now, I am inclined to believe that Goody’s comments were indeed racist, if only because my idol Dave Gorman is quoted on youtube as saying as such. So why? Why would a celebrity, obviously conscious of her own reputation and her own brand name, commit career suicide by saying the things she did?

I think she did it because this was not initially about race. It was about class.

What we saw was a working class and uneducated white female, albiet plucked from obscurity by her big mouth and appearance on a reality television show. While she might be a millionaire for producing work out videos for equally obnoxious and ‘plump’ women; she still holds working class values and is still from a working class family (as we also all saw).

Shilpa Shetty on the other hand is a moderately slim and attractive actress who grew up with values firmly rooted in the upper echelons of society. She also happens to be Asian.

What occurred between Shilpa and Jade was a clash of values. Goody was at odds with the bizarre and pompous ways of the born into affluence Shilpa. So Jade, perhaps also feeling threatened or jealous of someone far more attractive than she – looked for a means to strike back. And she found it in race.

This is my worry. If as I previously stated, globalisation is making the rich richer and the poor poorer we can rightly expect to see a little bit of class conflict occurring. It is only to be expected and in many respects is entirely valid. Yet Britain has dealt with this sort of internal strife before right? We usually solve it by stirring up patriotism with a few good wars and then eventually placating people’s demands by throwing some new social policies at them. Yet I feel any future class conflict will be different, because Britain is now different.

Many of the upper to middle classes in 21st century Britain are not ethnically Anglo-Saxon. They are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the children of children of immigrants and most seem to embrace a work ethos far in excess to anything to be seen on the council estates of provincial Britain. This has enabled many of them to climb the social ladder with astonishing speed. Yet their success has also opened up a new dimension in class conflicts.

For when grasping for a means to undermine the higher classes will people be tempted to do a ‘Goody’ and embrace racist rhetoric as a means of unsettling the established order? Possibly.


Note: Please excuse my snobbish arrogance. Again.