This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Three minutes after ten is the time. A very good morning indeed to you. The phrases that you think everybody agrees with and then you

realize as you get older, I suppose it's one of the many elements of getting older, you

realise as you get older that they don't. So I would have thought when I were a lad,

I would have thought that the phrase, it's one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us,

would annoy everybody, you know, but particularly when you're talking about the people in charge.

Even at school, you know, the fact, sorry, I've said you know twice there in a very demotic fashion.

I do apologise. I shall excise that for my vocabulary for the rest of the program, too sweet.

But even at school, I had a sort of abiding sense of resentment that the teachers got to obey different rules from the rest of us. I thought that old do as I say, not as I do line,

was absolutely appalling. So the teachers are allowed to, I don't know, smoke during morning break

or go and have a nice cup of coffee in the common room.

Well, we have to stand outside in the freezing cold, hoping our fingers don't drop off.

But I appreciate that in those sort of circumstances, with a formal hierarchy, it's one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us.

Even, I suppose, in service, in military service or in a police service, officers are going to have privileges that are not enjoyed by the rank and file.

That's why they call us.

That's why they are called the rank and file.

But one rule for us and another rule for the rest, one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us is one of those phrases that I used to think was kind of universal.

Including, of course, up to and including the point where I realized that verse from that song that I keep hitting you over the head with and misquoting horribly almost every time I do it,

actually proves that this country, this society, our civilization

is built upon the premise that it's perfectly fine to have one rule for the rulers and another

rule for the rest of us. How it works, I do not know. Is it that you never think that you're a

pleb? Everybody thinks they're on the side of the, while you sort of go along with the,

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