Kevin McKenna: Royal wedding reminds us we celebrate unearned privilege and inequality

This polite prejudice has happened stealthily over many years, the social equivalent of boiling a frog, where gross inequality goes largely un-challenged in exchange for a few scraps to subdue any discontent. Those who benefit the most from it ridicule the very notion of its existence while those on the acquiescent Left rarely call it class prejudice because, well … such terms are so unhelpful and belong to an era when Arthur Scargill was in his pomp and CND was on the march and Socialism hadn’t yet been banished by Tony Blair and newly-gentrified Labour.

READ MORE: Lord Martin’s son tells of inspirational father who rose from humble beginnings

There was no mistaking that which greeted Mr Martin when he was dragged to the chair in October 2000. Almost immediately, the epithet “Gorbals Mick” was bestowed upon him by the political and media elite who had trouble dealing with the concept of an authentic working class chappie occupying one of the UK’s most bejewelled offices of state.

If it had been anyone else the fact he was the first Roman Catholic to become Speaker since the Reformation would have briefly caused some ripples. This, though, was Michael Martin, the sort of Labour MP who that nice Mr Blair had assured us was extinct: one who looked and sounded like the people in Springburn who voted for him, and who made no effort to disguise the fact.

He was uncouth, lacked intelligence and didn’t even have a degree, they said. How could someone such as he have been allowed to rise in this place? For nine years he became the butt of a thousand political sketches from insufferably jumped up Oxbridge types in the Right wing press for no other reason than he didn’t speak in the way that you ought to if you were to be considered clever.

The “Gorbals Mick” sobriquet was telling for many reasons. Mr Martin wasn’t brought up in Gorbals but in Anderston further west and then Springburn in the city’s north-east. The reason why they associated him with Gorbals is because, to a certain type of English political commentator, this neighbourhood is associated with all those scary stories they heard in their dormitories about the worst types of Scottish people.

Just the very look of the word Gorbals and the way it sounded seemed harsh and guttural. It is a word which can only be spoken in a Glaswegian accent and which bore an uncanny resemblance to Mordor, JRR Tolkien’s Land of Shadow in Lord of the Rings. Nothing civilised or sophisticated could come from a place called Gorbals.

Ironically, Michael Martin and many others from his working class, Irish Catholic background would have been proud to say they had been reared in Gorbals. This was a community which produced many fine men and women who went on to contribute greatly to Scotland’s prosperity despite decades of unremitting prejudice and high levels of multi-deprivation. Anything achieved from this sort of upbringing had to be against the odds. It was the very antithesis of that experienced by many of its privileged detractors who were handed prosperity on a plate and will never know what it means to earn something honestly and by their own labours.

READ MORE: Lord Martin’s son tells of inspirational father who rose from humble beginnings

The death of Michael Martin last week is mourned by those who knew what challenges he had to overcome to attain the privilege of representing his people at the highest chamber in the UK and by those who appreciated the wit, intelligence and kindness he possessed to get there. They won’t dwell on his political downfall after nine years in the Speaker’s Chair when he was forced to resign after being caught up in the expenses scandal of 2009. In the end he had come to love Westminster too much and had striven too hard to defend the indefensible, feeling naively that the House could reform itself.

Even so, a frenzied posse of dreadful little Liberal Democrats and Tory backwoodsmen lined up to condemn him. He could have been saved by Gordon Brown but by this time the Prime Minister was a pathetic shadow of the politician he once was and eager to satisfy the braying hordes. Loyalty only worked one way in Brown’s inner sanctum.

For me, though, Michael Martin was the embodiment of the Labour Party with which many of us had grown up. This was a party which stood with the poorest and, facing down all opposition from those who felt threatened by true equality, brought in real reforms which improved the lives of the vast majority of citizens.

In Scotland that party has long since been replaced by a rump of counterfeit Socialists who for the last decade or so have been happy to join forces with the Tories during the independence referendum and have been prominent in undermining Jeremy Corbyn, the first authentic Left wing leader of the party since 1983.

This week we buried a man who overcame severe disadvantage and inequality to reach the top. Next week a significant percentage of the UK population will bow and scrape as Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle, one of the many gilded houses the British state provides free of charge to maintain a dysfunctional family of dodgy lineage in permanent luxury.

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Harry seems an affable and personable young man who may well have succeeded elsewhere in life without the benefit of a lifetime’s supply of state gifts. We’ll never know this though because in 21st century Britain we still think it’s acceptable to pay for the Hollywood lifestyle of this dull family and its lickspittles.

With every royal birth, death and marriage the notion that honesty, integrity and hard work will be rewarded becomes a little more distorted. Next Saturday’s royal wedding will remind us once more we don’t merely tolerate unearned privilege and inequality in modern Britain but that we celebrate them.