Which came first....

The chicken or the egg?
By which I mean, did the British character lead to socialism today, or did socialism create the modern British idiom?

What about all this 'back-biting' I have been comenting on? Was it ever thus?

Well, from the few uncorrupted sources I can glean out of the stream of disinformation that assails the modern spectator, I deduce that at the turn of the 19th/20th century, British culture was in rudely rational health; the monarchy was a hair's breadth from being swept away by Republicans in Parliament, along with the House of Lords.
Tower Bridge was being built, and the engineering press was campaigning for the essential aesthetic honesty of leaving the structure visible.

Yet....the monarchy and Lords remain, and the bridge was completed in absurdly Gothic style.
This was the triumph of 'Romance' over 'Reason', as if there was a difference.

So.
We have some regression, and the advent of the Union Movement.
And yes, they had to fight for their Rights, and yes, it was a battle. They won.
But socialism?Socialism?
The Great War came and spread grief throughout the land, grief because the world had changed and youthful Death was not normal anymore. Into this tired and sobered population was injected the message that the bosses were fools, culpable fools, warmongers and arms dealers.

Socialism claimed to offer peace, brotherhood and plenty.
Few believed it.

Meanwhile, what of the British idiom?
Well, a class system had been embraced by the Victorians, possibly because they had an exploitable desire to echo the structure of industrial life in a more general social context, but by now it was under attack by the socially mobile, immigrants like (Sir) 'Montague Burton', who founded the largest tailoring factory on Earth in Leeds.
In order to survive the system had to admit people like him, with Knighthoods and so on.
But it was the refuge of snobbery and the source of the 'trickle-down effect' regarding derision and sneering about alleged position.

This remains.
Came the Second Great War, and people rebelled against this abominable repression; but rather stupidly they chose to replace social disfunction with Political Repression, and voted the Labour Party into government, a government promising the Garden of Earthly Delight, but rather giving the game away when it proclaimed "We are the masters now!"

And since then, the snob clique has had to adapt again, by showering honours on the new 'elite'(ie politicians), and giving a nod to popular 'culture' by giving the Beatles OBEs and making Geldof 'Sir Bob'.
Industrialists were honoured a little for a while, in obeisance to the 'forces of conservatism', but this happens less and less now, even as the cultural icons like Richard Branson are paraded more and more, like an Italian village Divinity parade every Christmas.

Meanwhile, the actual struggle goes unreported, ignored and sidetracked, a huge blind-spot covering the viciousness that grows unchecked, reflected only in the crime figures until they, too were covered over and prevented from contributing to the general neurosis by way of justification for it.

The rulers and the class-conquerers sit and chatter and drink Chianti, arrogantly callous about the fate of the British, and the British suffer because they have nowhere to go except as reviled intruders, tolerated for their tourist pounds, and overall it's "only the fear that keeps us standing up".