Originally Posted by HIDDY

You seem to have mellowed as the years have gone by?

You must be disappointed that BA did not "crumble" or "slide into oblivion" as you so forcefully stated they would a few years ago?

Now you go and concentrate your mind on fixing the problems out at AF/KLM and some of the US airlines. BA have been going along just nicely thank you very much.

Originally Posted by redtailshark

But it's true...the British are elitist, colonial and condescending and are well-known as such by many other nations.

The following observations don't apply so much to the actual British upper class, who do at least have a more cosmopolitan outlook, but to the uniquely blinkered and intransigent British Upper-Middle Class.

Imperial mind can be seen clearly in the British attitude towards Johnny Foreigner who speaks English. The most pusillanimous grammar police are always Brits. It totally burns their butts that people want to learn and speak American English (better known to many Asians as plain "American" , that really winds up the stickupass Brits).

Their nasal whining and pompous self-importance is often breathtaking, as are their assumptions about how much they know about the world around them compared with people from other nations.

And as for GEORGE BUSH, well, the British whining about his first election hasn't stopped yet. It makes me laugh loudly to read the musings of the so-called America Correspondents in the UK press. They completely fail to understand the enormous cultural and geopolitical differences, projecting their imperial wish-fulfilment fantasies regarding Bush's lack of legitimacy and their liberal fantasy of what the US "should" be.

The 2004 election coverage was a classic example: "Bush headed for defeat" on several media websites yadayada. Very few British people really understand the US. Few US people really understand the UK, it's true, but at least they don't pretend in such an offensively hypocritical and superior way.

Yet, despite their own enormous lack of knowledge about actual social and political conditions in the US, many Brits hold to the false ideal that they, the well-educated and civilized, know the American way of life better than Americans do. Of course, Brits are very unwilling to reflect on their own social and political shortcomings, like the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes that some tried to brush under the carpet in the usual Ian Fleming cult-of-secrecy way.

Orwell was right. The surveillant society (or, to use one of the favorite British Y-words, the nanny state) is about to arrive in the UK if it hasn't already: more TV cams per capita than any other nation, soon a national real-time GIS/image recognition database capable of tracking the movements of every vehicle on the public road at all times....

Back to the airlines. US airline service staff can be rude and hostile, it's true, but the patronizing arrogance of the Brits fed by their imaginary moral superiority and their false sophistication complex is amazing. This often includes the BA staff and especially managers. The BA loungedragons must really be unbearable. Even KLM are preferable.

RTS