Word: britain
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...European Airlines placed the firm near the bottom of the region's carriers for punctuality. In a ranking of lost luggage, BA performed worse than any other airline that provided data, losing 75% more bags than Air France or Lufthansa (archrival Virgin Atlantic did not participate). Even worse, Britain's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the U.S. Department of Justice fined BA more than $500 million in August after determining that it had colluded with rivals to fix prices. Two former BA execs, commercial director Martin George and communications chief Iain Burns, resigned last year in connection with...
...what had been considered the virtues--the Roman virtues, an earlier generation would have called them--of restraint, stoicism and quiet, private mourning were tossed overboard. For Diana, you were allowed public gestures and declamations usually reserved for the final act of an Italian opera. That this happened in Britain of all places--home of the stiff upper lip and the sort of strangulated emotional life that has provided Hugh Grant with endless paychecks--only added to the oddity of the events. Those in other nations who thought they knew the British wondered what sort of people they had become...
...upper-middle-class men (not women) who dressed for dinner in the far reaches of the Empire to keep up appearances in front of the natives. They stressed the benefits of order, hierarchy, muscular Protestantism and good sportsmanship. Even in its Victorian heyday, of course, not many in Britain behaved in this way. The world's first mass working class, shuffling from factories to boozy music halls, reveled in a raucous sentimentality. In the cities, Protestantism (or any religion), be it rugged or weedy, rarely got a look, and sportsmanship meant cheering on your local soccer team after downing...
...modern, undeferential Britain that celebrated Diana as a rebel against authority, scandalizing those who still clung to Victorian ideas of order. Tony Blair, a new Prime Minister in September 1997, instantly understood what was going on and, by eulogizing Diana as the "people's princess," skillfully aligned himself with the politics of emotion. It was that sort of time--one when politicians proved their authenticity not just by being in touch with their (and your) feelings, but also by telling you until you were sick of it just how in touch with their bloody feelings they were. Less than...
...wonder if we are not seeing the age of emotion come to a close. Anyone who was in London on July 7, 2005, when terrorist bombers hit the transit system, would testify that stoicism and the stiff upper lip are not dead in Britain. That day they were quietly but thrillingly on display as the city went about its business uncowed. Britain's new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is a son of a minister of the Church of Scotland--Protestantism does not get more muscularly reserved than that--and his political appeal is based much more on experience than empathy...