DJ Taylor: Mubarak's thugs aren't a patch on these

The protesters of Tahrir Square want both our freedoms and our lifestyle...but they might think twice if they saw 'Neds'

(Picselect )

Monitoring last week's news from Tahrir Square, it was impossible not to be reminded of an essay George Orwell published in an obscure monthly magazine called The Adelphi shortly before the start of the Second World War.

The piece seldom gets reprinted these days, doubtless due to its somewhat bracing title: Not Counting Niggers. In it, Orwell makes the, by now unexceptionable, point that in a prosperous country left-wing politics is always partly humbug, because a thorough-going reconstruction of society would lead to a drop in living standards, which no politician of any party is ever prepared to countenance. He also points out – this was in 1939 when the Empire's working-class population included several hundred million Indian labourers – that Britain's standard of living was linked to the exploitation of people earning a few pence a day and dying before they were 40.

Fast-forward 72 years and a very similar piece of moral sleight-of-hand applies to our relationship with the autocracies of the Middle East. Undoubtedly President Hosni Mubarak, along with half-a-dozen of his neighbouring potentates, was a tyrant on a Brobdingnagian scale, whose regime had maintained its supremacy through bluster, guile and thuggery. But the implications of the Cairo protests are as much cultural and economic as political. Educated, fresh-faced and festooned with all the latest gadgetry, the Egyptian protesters were clearly bent on acquiring a version of western democracy. At the same time, they are also in hot pursuit of western lifestyles, that consumer-materialist package that seems as attractive to an indentured labourer on £10 a month as it is to a member of parliament you can throw out if he fails to represent your interests.

Whether we like it or not, given the increasing strain on resources, a "Free Middle East", just like a "Free China", is eventually going to mean lower living standards in Europe, another incremental adjustment in the vast, tectonic shift of power between West and East that is going to be such a feature of the 21st century. One wonders quite how many of the people zealously pronouncing on "Egypt's quest for freedom" have grasped this point.

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Reading reports of the continuing row about university tuition fees and Nick Clegg's insistence that major universities do more to attract students from poor homes, I remembered two little parables from the class war that have stayed with me for nearly 30 years. One was staring at the college notice-board at Christchurch, Oxford and registering the fact that someone called Daffyd Jones (Treorchy Comprehensive) had won a scholarship to study Medicine. The other was looking up during History finals and seeing a candidate called something like the Honourable Humphrey Sotherton-Gamage glaring at his paper with akind of seigneurial exasperation, as if its failure to conform to the expectations he had of it was the violation of some natural law.

In each case, I knew on which side of the barricade I stood. Hats off to Daffyd Jones, I thought: I hope this intrepid Cambrian keeps coal in his bath. As for the Hon Humphrey, well you should have done a bit more revision, pal, instead of sunning yourself on the lawn and plundering the college port. Unfortunately, widening access to the Russell Group of universities needs more than a conviction that comprehensive education is automatically a good thing and a private school old boy's a kind of metaphorical leper bell rung by the "elitist" rich.

Seizing on the statistic that 7 per cent of children are privately educated, one or two commentators have proposed that pro rata arrangements should apply, and that a mere 7 per cent of Oxbridge places should be reserved for them. But as private schools, like the old grammar schools, select their intake, presumably a decent fraction of this 7 per cent is likely to be better at passing exams than the other 93 per cent? Ah but, the reformer will hastily reply, children are essentially social constructs: the C grade A-level candidate at the state school would very likely get an A grade were he or she to be nurtured in the educational forcing houses of Eton and Harrow. To which the private-school parent will reply: yes, but academic institutions ought to base their entry procedures on academic criteria. If I have three As at A-level and you don't, then how can I be denied a place? The only solution to this increasingly futile debate is for the state educational system, and if it comes to that the Labour Party, to stop regarding private schools as an affront to their moral dignity and work out ways in which they can benefit from the one thing private schools are very good at – teaching.

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There are few enough films these days that stir any genuinely popular response, so it has been amusing to watch the spectacle of leftish-leaning commentators gnashing their teeth over the enthusiasm shown by audiences of The King's Speech, screenings of which have apparently been met with outbursts of applause. On the other hand, the reaction to Peter Mullan's low-budget Neds, a no-holds-barred account of gang warfare in 1970s Glasgow, has been a bit too genuine for comfort. Apparently, showings at Glasgow's Cineworld had to be halted when gangs of swearing youths, no doubt taking their cue from the events unravelling on screen, began to throw popcorn and spray lager at each other.

"Neds", in case the acronym has escaped you, means "non-educated delinquents", and as one newspaper helpfully glossed "is a derogatory phrase applied to Glasgow's white working-class youth ... comparable to the English pejorative chav." The importance of a film like Neds can hardly be overstated, simply because it describes a way of life and a set of behavioural assumptions that are excluded from mainstream culture and sociology textbooks. Exactly the same feeling was inspired by a recent feature in the local paper about a youth cult in early 1960s Lowestoft, in which teenage fishermen laid out their wages on extravagantly tailored bright blue suits. One can see it in a Victorian slum novel like George Gissing's The Nether World (1889), right, in which, every so often, Gissing will drop his trademarked disdain for feckless East End low-life and supply fascinating details about late-19th-century back-street hair-styles and café menus. For a brief moment, one glimpses something that has all but disappeared from our national life – the scent of a fundamentally popular culture rising, however temporarily, to displace the mass-cultural tide that would otherwise sweep over us 24 hours a day.