Rude Britannia? Not Here

The main London attraction for me is not the pubs or the tube or the Abbey, but the people.  There is something about their charm, wit, the language they use, the appreciation of good humor (not mine).   When I lived here 24 years ago I was a college mutt, so the charm I remember was nothing more than the young Pizza Hut waitress who served me my first legal beer.  

So I took notice of the John F. Burns piece in the New York Times entitled “Rude Britannia” lamenting the “eroded sensibilities and courtesies, the coarsening of life in the public sphere and the rough-tongued disdain that seemed to have seeped into our streets… and the abandonment of standards that touched even great national institutions like Parliament and Scotland Yard.”

Burns spent most of his adult life in the US before recently moving back to the UK.

He goes on to discuss the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal as he sidles up to Labour leader Ed Miliband who suggests the scandal is a “symptom of a wholesale corruption of values in Britain’s public and private life.”

Burns’ list of lamentations includes policemen behaving badly, high salaries for soccer players, coarse language on the BBC, and a “beer culture” that has made public drunkenness a scourge.

With this article in my back pocket I arrived in London just days after the riots and I just don’t see it.  Like the great television shows that criss cross the Atlantic, these social maladies that he sees as so dire are like re-runs of the Office.  Not as good as the original.  The things that trouble him have been in the US for years and here in London they seem less so, less dangerous, less rude, less coarse, less bad.

The people of London that I  encounter, whether at the Pub, the Post Office, the Marks & Spencer, the barber, the Pret, the Costa Coffee, the Tube, the ticket booth, the guitar player in the Tube, the security guard, the cabbie.  They are as I remember.  The charm is there, but it’s bolstered by a sincere interest in trying to help.  They apologize for their slow technology, long delays and broken pieces, but the personal side is anything but broken.  It’s their best export.