Live coverage of a speech by Britain's Trade Union Congress general secretary Frances O’Grady was cut off minutes after she had warned of a return to a “Downton Abbey” society, The Independent said on September 8, “for a newsflash announcing that the Duchess of Cambridge is expecting her second child”.
The royal pregnancy was “deemed to be so important that nothing more was heard of Ms O’Grady’s speech, in which she expanded on her theme that the British class system is being reinvented, as the gap between rich and poor widens”.
The BBC’s news channel broadcast her saying: “Are we going to settle for a nastier and poorer Britain - a Downton Abbey-style society, in which the living standards of the vast majority are sacrificed to protect the high living of the well-to-do?”
But The Independent said, “they missed the bit where she went on to warn against returning to a class system like the one described in Evelyn Waugh’s postwar novel, Brideshead Revisited”.
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