Accept me for who I am: Posh people are humans too

In Glasgow, you’re sneered at and snubbed if you don’t have an overtly working-class heritage


In my first freshers’ week, we were on the ironically-named party bus back to halls from some overcrowded and sweaty event at the union.

And suddenly some bloody pleb started berating me for being, as he perceived it, posh.

Admittedly, my red trousers and blue check shirt, coupled with my clipped accent, may have been a poor choice for first impressions. But equally — shut up, you should be able to dress how you want to dress.

Imagine if he had found out my surname because, let’s be honest, that really is a product of my own pursuit of superiority. To clarify: it’s not, that was sarcasm.

Had I turned around and started shouting about how much of a scummy little state-schooled vermin he was, it would have probably started a fight. Perhaps rightly so. It would have been rude and insensitive.

Benedict Cumberbatch, fed up with posh-bashing, recently labelled it “predictable” and Lord Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, claimed poshism was “the last acceptable form of discrimination”.

I lead a life like any other, don’t I?

In Glasgow, you’re sneered at and snubbed if you don’t have an overtly working-class heritage. The bohemian bourgeoisie  or west-end wanker  is merely an invention of Glasgow’s part-time population as a means of shaming the supposedly posh folk.

Deriding people for the way they speak  probably the most obvious indicator of class  has become so out of hand, there is even a Facebook page titled I Hate the Pretentious and Extremely Fake Glasgow University accent (whatever that means).

My trusted tweed will protect me from the power of your words

Yes, posh people are generally privileged  another ridiculously relative concept. And as a result, they seem a natural target as a minority with an expected ability to protect themselves from taunting, sticks and stones and all that.

It may be extremely frustrating there is a group of overly privileged monkeys running the country, yes, we mean you Bullingdon club chums. But why does that give anyone the right to call them monkeys  or call them out on their privilege? It’s not their fault they’re posh.

By marginalising posh people all you do is reaffirm they are different, and basically they are better than you. Otherwise it wouldn’t be acceptable, would it? You only succeed in undermining the egalitarianism you probably claim to strive for in the first place.

Universities are hilarious places, veritable melting pots of scummy miners’ daughters and spoilt little lords. You only need to wander down Byres Road to soak in the different walks of life evident in Glasgow.

This becomes increasingly problematic at Scottish unis, where posh people aren’t only deemed too privileged to exist  but are usually casually considered to be English too. Apparently it’s the accent.

Not only that, but in Glasgow the poor little bunnies from the English home counties can be state-schooled up to the eye-balls, but because they have an accent confirming they live in the dreaded south, they too must be sidelined as posh.

At this point, we feel we should apologise for referring to that guy on the bus as a pleb, but it’s no less offensive than the definitions and examples of posh, which is the tamer half of what he was calling me, on Urban Dictionary.

‘Mon over here and have a drink

Then again, I probably should have just punched the idiot, or drowned him with the Veuve Clicquot I bought in Tesco.