Aaron Brady

I agree. When I was staying at a (reasonably nice!) hotel in London a man and his wife tore into the person tending the bar because he didn’t have appropriate notes and wanted to give them 5 x �1 coins. I can see this is inconvenient, but at the end of the day, it’s tender.

They argued for several minutes, got a manager called over, and previously used talked loudly about “cheap immigrant labour”. This was frustrating, watching on, because (while I have no serious problem with cheap immigrant labour, per se) the man tending bar had a badge on showing he spoke four major European languages, alongside English; it’s long been the tradition in hotels to employ multilingual people, many of whom are foreign.

I wonder how many the couple spoke. Between them.

I took the same tack as you, commiserated with the man when came around to serve me, said I perfectly understood the delay and thanked him for serving me.

Jon Roobottom

Interesting and well written, however I can’t understand why you’ve taken the ‘Broken Britain’ stance. Is this a phenomenon restricted just to the UK? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I agree with you totally that this type of behaviour is unacceptable and systemic of too much alcohol – but I think it’s more than that.

In a society where we’ve perhaps lost our moral compass, this type of behaviour becomes acceptable and is passed on from one generation to the next. People simply don’t have the understanding that it’s wrong to hurl abuse at each other.

I’m not sure what the answer is, or even if there is one, but to attribute this solely to Britain is a gross disservice to the (still) majority of it’s people. Its the Sun news paper mentality: “Broken Britain”, where the government is out to get us and society is breaking down at the seams. Sensationalist garbage.