The Labour MP Chris Bryant suggested that the arts in this country were "dominated" by performers from privileged backgrounds. Bryant - the very model of a privileged left-liberal pillock - was educated at Cheltenham College (a private school) and at that bastion of classlessness, the University of Oxford. He named hyper-posh singer-songwriter James Blunt (née Blount), formerly an officer in the Life Guards cavalry regiment, in which capacity he served in Kosovo, as an example of the dreadful unfairness of Britain's class-bound society. I expect Bryant now wishes he'd picked a less bellicose target, or at least checked that he had sufficient firepower before attacking. Here's Blunt's rather magnificent response:
Dear Chris Bryant MP,
You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. I bought my first guitar with money I saved from holiday jobs (sandwich packing!). I was taught the only four chords I know by a friend. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker. So alien was it, that people laughed at the idea of me going into the music business, and certainly no one was of any use.
In the army, again, people thought it was a mad idea. None of them knew anyone in the business either.
And when I left the army, going against everyone’s advice, EVERYONE I met in the British music industry told me there was no way it would work for me because I was too posh. One record company even asked if I could speak in a different accent. (I told them I could try Russian).
Every step of the way, my background has been AGAINST me succeeding in the music business. And when I have managed to break through, I was STILL scoffed at for being too posh for the industry.
And then you come along, looking for votes, telling working class people that posh people like me don’t deserve it, and that we must redress the balance. But it is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting ideas which make our country crap, far more than me and my shit songs, and my plummy accent.
I got signed in America, where they don’t give a stuff about, or even understand what you mean by me and “my ilk”, you prejudiced wazzock, and I worked my arse off. What you teach is the politics of jealousy. Rather than celebrating success and figuring out how we can all exploit it further as the Americans do, you instead talk about how we can hobble that success and “level the playing field”. Perhaps what you’ve failed to realise is that the only head-start my school gave me in the music business, where the VAST majority of people are NOT from boarding school, is to tell me that I should aim high. Perhaps it protected me from your kind of narrow-minded, self-defeating, lead-us-to-a-dead-end, remove-the-‘G’-from-‘GB’ thinking, which is to look at others’ success and say, “it’s not fair.”
Up yours,
James Cucking Funt
Bryant's response is too mealy-mouthed and limp for me to even bother linking to it. If he's that bloody concerned about privilege, maybe he should resign as Shadow Arts Minister to make way for a working-class Labour MP (if he can find one, of course).
What a complete and utter Blunt!
No comments:
Post a Comment