Just want to remind everybody that when the Snowden Revelations came out, not only was the UK’s NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) more abusive and extensive in its civil society surveilance that the NSA, but whilst the US government actually walked back on some of the abuses, the UK government simply retroactivelly legalized it and probably issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK’s Press censorship scheme) to quiet it down (certainly the UK press went real quiet on it really fast).
Also the chief editor at the British newspaper that brough out the Snowden Revelations - The Guardian - was kicked out some months later and that newspaper has not mentioned that subject since.
The country is way more authoritarian than people outside of it think: just because the “upper” classes are generally trained to be posh and project a gentlemany image (that and being inducted into the “old boys network” are the main selling points of private schools in the UK, curiously called “public schools” over there even though they’re £30k per year per pupil) doesn’t mean they don’t think everybody else are plebes that need to be kept in their place and share the “lower” classes’ belief that foreigners are inferior.
So many famous Brits are private school grads, seeing John Oliver and Richard Ayoade went to the same schools as the likes of BoJo and Thatcher is insane. So much of their public face is made up of this tiny population of people.
Well, if I remember it correctly 11% of the population attends Public Schools, though the most exclusive ones are attended by a tiny fraction of the population which are overwhelmingly represented in the Media, amongst High Court judges and in Politics.
The system that preserves power and wealth across generations through limiting opportunities for the rest also includes Cambridge and Oxford, were public school educated students used to be 70% not long ago (though nowadays its better and and they’re only about half) even though they’re 11% of all pupils, no doubt due the unmeritocratic selection process which relies on interviews rather than independent educational assessment (one of my acquainces was refused entry into an Architecture Degree because, as he was told, “he did not went to the right school”, an impossible barrier to entry for most, more so for somebody of Arabic ancestry who had grown up in a Single Parent home because his father died when he was a child).
Just want to remind everybody that when the Snowden Revelations came out, not only was the UK’s NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) more abusive and extensive in its civil society surveilance that the NSA, but whilst the US government actually walked back on some of the abuses, the UK government simply retroactivelly legalized it and probably issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK’s Press censorship scheme) to quiet it down (certainly the UK press went real quiet on it really fast).
Also the chief editor at the British newspaper that brough out the Snowden Revelations - The Guardian - was kicked out some months later and that newspaper has not mentioned that subject since.
The country is way more authoritarian than people outside of it think: just because the “upper” classes are generally trained to be posh and project a gentlemany image (that and being inducted into the “old boys network” are the main selling points of private schools in the UK, curiously called “public schools” over there even though they’re £30k per year per pupil) doesn’t mean they don’t think everybody else are plebes that need to be kept in their place and share the “lower” classes’ belief that foreigners are inferior.
So many famous Brits are private school grads, seeing John Oliver and Richard Ayoade went to the same schools as the likes of BoJo and Thatcher is insane. So much of their public face is made up of this tiny population of people.
Well, if I remember it correctly 11% of the population attends Public Schools, though the most exclusive ones are attended by a tiny fraction of the population which are overwhelmingly represented in the Media, amongst High Court judges and in Politics.
The system that preserves power and wealth across generations through limiting opportunities for the rest also includes Cambridge and Oxford, were public school educated students used to be 70% not long ago (though nowadays its better and and they’re only about half) even though they’re 11% of all pupils, no doubt due the unmeritocratic selection process which relies on interviews rather than independent educational assessment (one of my acquainces was refused entry into an Architecture Degree because, as he was told, “he did not went to the right school”, an impossible barrier to entry for most, more so for somebody of Arabic ancestry who had grown up in a Single Parent home because his father died when he was a child).