Letters | 5 January 2017

Yet another kind of snob

Sir: May I offer another definition of a ‘snob’ to the one described by Bryan Appleyard (‘A different class of snob’, 31 December)? I have always believed that a snob is someone who has risen in the world and now looks down with disdain on those they have left behind. This is an altogether more cynical and divisive form of elitism than that of the serial narcissists Mr Appleyard describes in his article.

In the United Kingdom the abolition of grammar schools and the incursion of cheap foreign labour have damaged the legitimate aspirations of those wishing to improve their lot in life, stalled social mobility, and polarised society.

We can tolerate Mr Appleyard’s snobs because, for all the irritations they may arouse, they are basically harmless. But the breed of snob I have described is not. The bitter resentment that is felt towards those who escape fair taxation, who exploit their workforces with zero-hours contracts, and who deny their employees a just pension, is a significant threat to social cohesion.
Tom Blackett
London W1

What the USSR gave us

Sir: Max Hastings’s catalogue of Soviet failings (‘Red with the people’s blood’, 10 December) overlooks one crucial benefit the western democracies derived from the very existence of the Soviet Union: that is, the various forms of social democracy they virtually all adopted in the wake of the second world war.

Social democracy may not have represented the most efficient or desirable form of societal organisation, but there can be little doubt that it saved most western states. It obliged the propertied classes to compromise, and obliged the left to come up with reasonable and pragmatic solutions to the challenges of communism.

It may also be true that it was the disappearance of communism as a plausible alternative to western capitalism — broadly in the late 1960s — that freed up the loopier elements of the right to mount their crusades against reason, while condemning the left to the charlatanism in which it currently wallows.