Madeleine Bunting
Dalrymple remembers keenly an article in the London Guardian by Madeleine Bunting, one of the newspaper’s writers, because of what it revealed of modern upper-class British attitudes. Bunting stated that underclass girls in Britain got pregnant so young because the only alternative for them to early motherhood was shelf-stacking. Dalrymple comments:
This élite-educated columnist implied that stacking supermarket shelves was the summum malum of human existence, overlooking the fact that stacking shelves is a perfectly honourable and socially useful thing to do, is not unpleasant in itself, may not be the last job the person doing it will have, and is probably suitable for many people.
It is, he says,
the disdain that hurts, and that is what the modern upper class so successfully communicates to those below them on the social scale.
Dalrymple’s message to the likes of Bunting in all their hauteur is that they should
stop pretending that they are tormented by guilt at their own good fortune, which at the same time they do everything possible to preserve.
