Don’t expect a helping hand in the central English city of Birmingham — residents there are the rudest people in Britain, a survey claimed on Friday.
“Brummies”, as they are locally known, are the least likely to pass a series of courtesy tests such as holding the door for someone behind them or stopping to help a person who had dropped their shopping, according to the study by the Reader’s Digest.
Residents in Newcastle, northern England, on the other hand, are most polite, followed by inhabitants of Liverpool, in the north-west, and Exeter in the south east.
The Reader’s Digest sent undercover “civility inspectors” to eight British cities to test them with a variety of politeness trials.
As well as door-holding and help with dropped shopping, they checked whether shop assistants were well-mannered enough to say “please” and “thank you” and whether drivers thanked those who let them merge into rush-hour traffic.
Britons overall were polite 59% of the time, while Newcastle residents passed 77% of the tests.
In contrast, Birmingham natives managed to show common courtesy on only 43% of occasions.
While women were generally more polite than men, chivalry is not dead: 88% of men held the door open for a female researcher, compared with only 44% of women.
“[British Prime Minister] Tony Blair has made the rebuilding of respect in communities an official priority,” said Reader’s Digest editor-in-chief Katherine Walker. “Given some of the results of this test, he has his work cut out.”
The other cities tested were Cardiff, London, Southampton and Edinburgh. — AFP