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It is easy to romanticise Britain's past: to look back to a time when we were the 'workshop of the world', to a 'golden age' when youngsters respected their elders and actually wanted to get an education, to a time when our prestige and global presence was unrivalled. The trouble is that today there does not seem to be a unifying sense of 'Britishness', if ever there were such a thing, meaning that it is easier to hark back to the past; to a time when we seemed to be united in our belief that Britain was great, and were more prepared to accept the decisions made on our behalf by the ruling classes. Let us face it; Britain has never been a truly united nation- class, race, gender and provincialism have always provided barriers to us moving beyond our excessive introspection and self-criticism.

At least there is continuity in our self-deprecatory nature which, in actual fact, seems to conceal a real self-doubt and insecurity, with us desperately clasping on to a past that never existed. Class is probably the most persistent issue to dominate discourse in Britain, and it seems to be perceived as being a 'peculiarly' British hang-up. During the Thatcher years we were led to believe that we could all become 'middle class', with a little bit of hard work. Just as with the nineteenth-century obsession with 'self-help' and the Protestant work ethic, it was drilled into us that we must be self-reliant, not looking to the state to provide the answers, or the funds, and that we would be able to decide our own fates. However, manufacturing and other secondary and primary sector jobs did not figure in Mrs Thatcher's plans for us all to be middle-class. Consequently, jobs were lost leaving millions of people unemployed and whole communities decimated. This was a blow to British stability; there was a lack of self-assuredness, there was a belief that you had to be privileged to succeed, and that there was no point in trying. Unless, of course, you were one of the 'successes'; one of the 'yuppies' who were best placed to capitalise on the de-regulation of markets and on privatisation. This divide persists in Britain today; there seems to be the 'ultra-rich', who are fawned over by the government yet seem to pay relatively little tax, the 'middle class' who are aggrieved at seemingly having to pay a disproportionate amount of tax, and the 'underclass' who seem to be trapped in a spiral of poverty and, often, crime.

There is a general acceptance that you get what you pay for,

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