The British 'need' to judge all things by snooty standards is both a credit to their esthetic, and a blot on it. It's a plus in that it has driven them to set their own high standards in certain endeavors.
But the negative outweighs the positive, in that the nexus of such snootiness extends from their societal class system, topped by royalty, and extending right on down the the striving class of cockney who've made good enough in business to buy the finer things.
For, if all you aspire to is to "be" a higher class, such that even when you succeed, you mark your achivement by garnering the trappings of that lording class...then are you really even free of them?
It almost doesnt matter now, as they've allowed themselves to be so colonized the foreigners who could care less about 'pax Britania'...and have at the same time so gutted themselves and their institutions with self immolating beliefs, that in a couple more generations the English will be spoken of in Britain the way Native Americans are regarded in the United States.
As an almost dead festage of a bygone time...supplanted by ungrateful and unapologetic people who have no need for or connection to anything recognizably "British" other than bad weather, worse food, and gangly teeth.
It's almost hard to believe they once ruled 2/3's of the world from that little gray island.
