Slogans, claptrap and cliché - half hair-gel and half snake-oil
A lot of David Cameron’s speech in Birmingham was either weary sloganizing, crude electoral claptrap or cliché, so I don’t propose to do a complete analysis of the text (which is currently available here http://press.conservatives.com/ )
But I thought I would look at some of parts of it that seemed to me to be interesting, not necessarily in ways that Mr Cameron or his aides and speechwriters would want them to be interesting. By the way, anyone watching the BBC news channel’s coverage of the speech would have noted that the commentators selected to comment on it afterwards were *both* from the heart of the Tory project, and both from the Blairite ‘Times’ stable. They were Lord (Danny) Finkelstein,long sympathetic to the Cameron project; and Tim Montgomerie, of ‘Conservative Home’. Wouldn’t it have been a touch more balanced to have included a person sympathetic to UKIP, and a person sympathetic to Labour? Also there was a curious segment in which representatives leaving the hall were asked for their opinions. The first two were gushing, one of them embarrassingly turning out to be a keen EUphile. But the third was quite rude about it. It seems to me that it’s quite remarkable to find an activist , who has probably paid to be there, being rude about his own leader’s speech on live TV. The BBC commentator seemed to me to be anxious to portray the speech as a success, and to have been discombobulated by the critic.
What is Patriotism really?
I would first of all note that the Second World War is still the moral gospel of modern politics. Somehow or other, it is confused in his mind with his (pro tem) victory over Scottish separatism. I think this has something to do with the Union Jack. The straightforward, unashamedly patriotic idea of defending the Union because it makes us strong , independent of the continent and less vulnerable to back-door attack ( a clear and honest reason for doing so) is obviously unattractive to him. He doesn’t see the Union in this way, and is very happy with Britain’s post 1945 return to continental entanglements and dependence. Any wars we may have fought, therefore, must be for similarly non-patriotic, idealistic purposes.
He described his constituent, Patrick Churchill, as having been ‘fighting fascism’ in Normandy in 1944, a curiously leftish description of that conflict. Very few actual ‘Fascists’ were involved by 1944, Italy having got rid of Mussolini and changed sides by then. I suspect Patrick Churchill thought back in 1944 that he was fighting ‘Germans’. Many people in Europe, who had done the same before, came to that conclusion. It was a rather particular experience, unlike fighting anyone else. My mother, who was bombed by them, and my father, many of whose friends were killed by them and whose life was in ceaseless perils from their aircraft and ships for months on end, both referred to them as ‘Germans’ during my 1950s childhood when the subject was still all-embracing.
My mother in particular could never abide hearing the German language spoken, saying that it made her shudder. I think she was exaggerating a bit, but not much. Years later we had a German ex-PoW as a neighbour, and ny parents got on perfectly well with him as far as I could see (in fact I think my father had some respect for him as a fellow fighting man from the war) . But that was the 1960s.
It only became an ideological war later.
Mr Cameron unwittingly employs the language of the Comintern
But I don’t think Mr Cameron knows that, Having grown up since the 1960s, he probably uses these Marxoid categories himself without thinking, not knowing that the Soviet Union and the Comintern popularised the term ‘Fascism’ for the Axis enemy (and later as a general boo-word and all-purpose anti-conservative smear) for very specific reasons.
The first was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, as it was widely known ( a recent book on this astonishing alliance, reviewed on this blog a few days ago, can be purchased here
http://www.mailbookshop.co.uk/StoreFront/Product/Roger-Moorhouse/The-Devils-Alliance--Hitlers-Pact-with-Stalin-1939-1941/16038859 )
This made the Comintern and the Kremlin a little nervous about the word ‘Nazi’, which would trigger, in millions of minds, memories of the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty.
They had another difficulty, too. ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’ and once again makes that awkward connection between the two murderous, utopian dogmas of the 20th century, whose profound similarities the Left have always wished us to ignore - and which we all had to ignore anyway when we became Stalin’s ally in 1941. They had so much in common - power worship, leader-worship, militarism, censorship, secret police, destruction of private life , thought control, torture, perversion of the young, turning of children against their parents, hatred of Christianity, means-and-ends ‘morals’, single parties, uniforms, shouting, people’s courts, show trials, labour camps, controlled media, cowed academies, intellectual apologists. One wanted to exterminate on the grounds of race, the other on the grounds of class.
But if we say we were fighting ‘fascism’ in 1944, we don’t have to think about that.
Anyway, I think it culturally interesting that a Conservative Premier should use such language.
Is there really any link between World War Two and Afghanistan?
Then there was this elision : ‘The heirs to those who fought on the beaches of Northern France are those fighting in Afghanistan today. For thirteen years, young men and women have been serving our country there.’
Is that really so? The Afghan War , futile by any measure, was a war of choice in which professional soldiers did as they were told by politicians they don’t respect (and were of course thrown to the wolves if they ever got caught doing anything nasty) . The 1939-45 war, whatever its many faults, often discussed here, was not in the same category in nature, cause, importance or scale. To try to cover up the fact that, for five long years, Mr Cameron sucked up to the Murdoch press by continuing our Afghan engagement, by equating it with the liberation of France in 1944 is, in my view, a bit much.
If politicians knew what servicemen really thought of them, they would never try to pose in the reflected shine of military glory. They would be too embarrassed.
Can we afford to drop these bombs?
Now, again with the frantic encouragement of the Murdoch press, we are using World War Three equipment and weapons to bomb a few 4X4 pick-up trucks in Iraq. I gather each of these missions costs something like £210,000 an hour ( see http://news.sky.com/story/1342768/how-much-will-airstrikes-on-is-cost-taxpayer , and yes, I know this is a Murdoch outlet. He’s not all bad ) , but that’s if they bring their bombs back. If they use them, the mission cost can rise far higher. And yet we are a bankrupt country. How can we afford this?
The only purpose of this war is political, to try to look good at home to the few dim people who think Britain is still a world power, and to suck up to the Americans (who I suspect don’t care whether we turn up or not).
Shamelessly, Mr Cameron intoned ‘The threat is Islamist extremist terrorism – and it has found a new, hellish crucible – with ISIL, in Iraq and Syria. These people are evil, pure and simple. They kill children; rape women; threaten non-believers with genocide; behead journalists and aid workers.’
Well, what does he think is going in Libya, whose fate is his personal responsibility for the rest of his life. Or in Nigeria? Has he studied the governance of our ally Saudi Arabia? Or noted that Western air-attacks on Libya undoubtedly (though accidentally)killed children, as was reliably reported at the time?
As for ‘These people are evil, pure and simple.’, so are the IRA, with whose frontmen he willingly does business.
Did Oxford make a mistake?
All these points have been made many times about his vapourings, by many others apart from me. He must be aware of the criticism. He is supposed, by the examiners of Oxford University, to have a first-class mind. Yet he does not moderate or adapt the crude, Sun-type language. Is this because he is shameless, or because Oxford made a mistake?
As for ‘There is no “walk on by” option. Unless we deal with ISIL, they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets,’, this is simply untrue. The Iraqi Sunni fanatics probably have as little idea of where Birmingham is as Mr Cameron does of where Mosul is. Most major countries have indeed chosen to ‘walk on by’. I don’t think that will make the Islamists any more likely to attack them
Then there’s a lot of macho bluster about taking passports away from, and locking up, people who , more consistently than Her Majesty’s Government, have stuck with the (admittedly mad and unwise) policy of aiding the Syrian rebels which Mr Cameron (and the interesting Brooks Newmark) wanted to adopt so much - until Parliament got in the way.
For the Syrian rebels were and are of course the same people as ‘ISIL.’
England is, well, a lot bigger than the other members of the UK, yah?
Then we have a section on ‘English votes for English laws’ - The fact that England is far bigger, more populous and richer than any of the other nations of the UK, and has different religious and political traditions as well, still seems to escape Mr Cameron and other Tories. Once you’ve accepted that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different from England, then you’re going to have to live with anomalies like the West Lothian Question. If you don’t want to live with them, then why encourage these nations to stay in the UK at all, let alone claim you love them so much that they mustn’t go?
If London starts demanding autonomy, as well it may, will the Tories take the same view, denying London MPs a vote on English laws? I don’t think so. Well, in that case, it’s not a principle.
The First Thumping Terminological Inexactitude
Then we get the first really thumping terminological inexactitude of the speech:
‘Believe me: coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do.
And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies……based on Conservative values……leading a majority Conservative Government.’
Mr Cameron was never forced by anyone to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He did not ‘have to’ do it. He could have tried to run a minority government, proposed a programme, been defeated, gone to the country and won or lost.
He could have let the Liberal Democrats and Labour form a minority coalition and let them tear themselves to bits before forcing a confidence vote and again causing an election.
He could have negotiated far more fiercely with the Liberal Democrats, who would have sacrificed limbs and organs to get into office for the first time in peacetime for about 90 years. The LibDem negotiators have said since that they were astonished how readily their Tory negotiating partners gave in to their demands, and even asked them if they wanted anything else on top.
He could have proposed a three-year partnership with the freedom to dissolve it before the election. But no, he went for a rigid and detailed pact, and then guaranteed it for five full years with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act.
All these actions were matters of choice. The choices he made suggest to me that he wanted office above all ( he certainly seems to enjoy it) , and was ready to pay a very heavy price for it .
They also suggest that he had known for some months that he was going to lose, and had thought deeply about what he would do if so. And the deal that he made suggests that he saw the LibDems as an important ally against his own conservative faction. Like the absent Jorkins in ‘David Copperfield’, fear of a LibDem walkout could always be employed to browbeat anti-EU, pro-grammar school types into giving way. Mr Cameron and his allies have always had far more in common with Nick Clegg that they do with ‘Cornerstone’ and its members.
But the arrangement was founded on the belief that Tory conservatives had nowhere else to go. This was true in 2010. It isn’t now. They have dug a tunnel called UKIP since then, and more and more of them are scurrying along it to freedom.
Mr Cameron misses a bit out of his speech
Mr Cameron’s speech was like Ed Miliband’s in two ways. One (in practice rather than rhetoric) he totally ignored the vast deficit which his government increases every week with profligate borrowing. Despite this position of hopeless indebtedness, in which tax receipts cannot be stretched to match the government’s outgoings, he blithely promised tax cuts worth (I believe ) £7,000,000,000 a year. At the same time he promised to safeguard the NHS’ vast budget, which is a bottomless commitment and will strain every other area of spending. Where *is* all this to come from? We are already borrowing £2,000,000,000 a week just to make ends meet. And every penny of that adds to our huge budget for debt servicing.
Two, he spent most of it apparently ignoring another vast and important fact – the existence of UKIP, daily taking form him more votes, more members and more donors.
He did not mention UKIP at all until the last few minutes of his oration, and then not in a serious fashion. Yet his whole purpose was to damage UKIP He pretended throughout that his real opponent was Ed Miliband, a man who struggles to find and show any difference between his plans and the policies of the present government. In fact his main opponent is Nigel Farage, a man who actually disagrees with him and appeals to many of his voters and supporters, and whose breakthrough offers a long-term threat to Mr Cameron and all who sail in him.
Two Phantom Governments are described
Mr Cameron displayed to the electorate two imaginary governments – one a sort of Bolshevik Milibandite spectre which – he implied – was against private education and would ruin the country even more than it has already been ruined by Mr Osborne’s debt-driven housing bubble boom, the bill for which must come in pretty soon.
And the other a sort of Angelic Ghost of Christmas Past, an actual majority Tory government of the type that hasn’t existed for 17 long years, because the Tories can’t win a Commons majority.
This phantasm will fulfil all the ‘promises’ that Tory central office feeds every few months to what’s left of the Tory press . There’s all that stuff, dredged up in great scoops near elections, about being tough with the EU. There’s that ‘British Bill of Rights’ that has been roaming round the edge of the playing field waiting to bat for years now, but whose face we never see (I suspect that if we could see it, it would look remarkably like the Human Rights Act, only with a different name).
There are those tax cuts that can’t possibly be afforded (though what happened to the old inheritance tax promise from 2010?) .
We are proud of our Green Belt Policy and we are building on it
There are those cheap houses. This pledge at least is partly being fulfilled. The Tories’ friends, the developers, are chewing up great tracts of countryside to build more rows of mean, cramped hutches, from which mortgagees can then commute vast distances on choked roads and decrepit railways, to underpaid, insecure jobs, pausing only to stash their infant children in state-subsidised day-orphanages. British liberty reborn, eh?
Actually, anyone who *can* remember the last Tory majority government will recall that it was pretty much the same as the one we have now, monstrously politically correct, hopelessly pro-EU, obsessed with flashy gimmicks and centralisation in education. Its only good policy was the one it was forced into totally against its will – departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which boosted the economy just in time for the Blairites to plunder it again in 1997.
Trying to re-fight the 1992 Election, but without Neil Kinnock, and with UKIP
The election Mr Cameron wants to fight is the 1992 one which extended the Major era. To do so he has to portray Ed Miliband as Neil Kinnock, which he isn’t, and to pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist, which it does.
He also has to pretend that people like me, and I suspect there are quite a lot of them, are as willing to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt as they were in 1992. And he has to pretend that the Tory Party membership, voting reserve and organisation are anything like as good as they were in 1992.
If his recovery were real, he might manage it. As it is a matter of ‘meagre ‘self-employment’, zero-hours contracts and a housing bubble, mostly confined to the better-off bits of the South of England, I think he may be in for a surprise. Certainly, no opinion poll suggests a Tory majority government, or has done for many years.
We all went to bed with David Cameron in 2010, and woke up with Nick Clegg. After that experience, waking up with Ed Miliband isn’t really going to be much of a shock. Mr Cameron would much rather lose to Ed Miliband than to Nigel Farage, because his project, such as it is, would be safe in Mr Miliband’s hands. And ask yourself this, honestly: In a seat where the Tories can’t win, do you think Mr Cameron would rather it fell to UKIP or to Labour?
Their hypocrisy drives me mad. Our hypocrisy doesn’t
Now we come to the section on education.
‘The biggest risk to all this is Labour. You know what drives me the most mad about them?
The hypocrisy.’
There then follows this confused passage about Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman, who has struggled throughout his tenure to find any substantial policy differences with the Tories
Mr Cameron said :’Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary – like me – had one of the best educations money can buy.’
This true. But look at what comes next:
‘But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.’
Really? I know of no plan by Labour to abolish private fee-paying schools. If you can pay the fees ( and few can) Labour’s happy to let you do so, just like the Tories.
The Prime Minister then mangled facts and logic out of all shape and sense, saying:: ’He (Mr Hunt) went to an independent school that wasn’t set up by a local authority…’
That’s the thing about independent schools. They weren’t set up by local authorities. They are private foundations. Hence the name.
Mr Cameron continued ‘…but no, he doesn’t want charities and parents to set up schools for your children.’
This is the one rather tiny difference between the two parties, which are more or less united on the gimmicky, worthless policy of rebranding comprehensives as ‘academies’ or a something of the kind. Labour doesn’t favour the ‘free schools’ which have, to put it mildly, had a mixed record since they were allowed, and which are as remote as Tibet for most people, since there are so few of them. Not all of us can (or want to) live near Toby Young. And if there are any instances of rich Tory politicians, or Tory politicians living within reach of existing selective state schools, sending their children to Free Schools, I’d like to hear them. Michael Gove himself , living within yards of an academy he had ceaselessly praised, and not all that far from a free school too, chose for his daughter a traditional single-sex Church-based former grammar school. Who could blame him, if it weren’t for his political activities? But Mr Gove’s political hypocrisy escaped Mr Cameron’s fierce eye.
Our premier went on: ‘I tell you – Tristram Hunt and I might both have been educated at some of the best schools in our country.But here’s the difference: You, Tristram – like the rest of the Labour Party – want to restrict those advantages……I want to spread them to every child in Britain.’
American readers baffled by my previous posting on Theresa May’s secondary schooling should grasp the real point here. Until 1965, Britain had many hundreds of first-class state schools, free to the bright children of poor homes, which rivalled the best independent (fee-paying) schools in the quality of their education. By their nature, they were selective, and not everyone could go to them. Entrance was decided by an examination generally thought to be fair.
Tory and Labour parties, influenced by left-wing ideologues who reasoned that if everyone couldn’t have a good schooling, nobody but the rich should get one, shut almost all these schools down. Now, good schooling is only available ( as in the USA) to those who can pay fees, or those who can buy homes in the catchment areas of the better High Schools, or otherwise wangle their children into them. Religion, or simply knowing the complicated rules of admission, is often the ticket to a good High School. For a detailed case of this, see here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/03/more-thoughts-on-michael-goves-school-choice.html
Less emotion, please
I have in the past commented on Mr Cameron’s references in party political circumstances to the heartbreaking illness and death of his son. I will try not to say any more than this, about the passage on the subject in his Birmingham speech. I really don’t think this has anything to do with policy. I have no doubt that the NHS did all that it could for Mr Cameron’s son, and that the doctors, nurses and others involved exerted themselves greatly in kindness and skill. Likewise I am sure that, had the Camerons hired non-NHS help to aid them in the task of caring for the child, they too would have been models of goodness. Nor do I doubt the great devotion of the Camerons themselves to their child. Heaven knows I would not let political disagreement prevent me from seeing common humanity in an opponent, and sympathizing as far as it is possible to do with his grief and pain.
Most people, confronted with a seriously ill child, will behave in this way, and not expect to be thanked for it. It is what we all know we ought to do. But that was because they were good people in highly moral professions, not because they worked for the NHS, not because the NHS is organised as it is or funded as it is.
These are different arguments. I think they should be kept separate from each other. The NHS is a vast political and economic problem for this country, as well as a vital employer in many parts of Britain where employment is very hard to find. It is a problem which cannot easily be solved, either by simply spending more money, or by reorganisation, or by the market. I don’t think any political party wants to destroy it . I am not by any means sure any of them know how to save it. I would favour a multi-party truce on it, myself , and one in which the mighty weapons of emotion are laid aside.
Not exactly crime-busting
Mrs May, whom Mr Cameron described as ‘crime-busting’, is nothing of the kind. The government, ably assisted by a sedentary, centralized and bureaucratic police force, has dealt with crime by redefining it. Much that normal people have long viewed as crime is no longer classified or recorded as such , let alone deterred or prosecuted.
Mrs May’s supposedly miraculous survival in what is always said to be a risky job, Home Secretary, is largely due to the removal of some of her department’s trickiest responsibilities, now handled by the ‘Justice’ Ministry. Much of the rest is down to her use of first-rate spin-doctors to feed an image of cool competence to willing media sources – and of course to Mr Cameron’s pressing need for a senior female figure in his government, to please the politically correct faction. Who else is there?
Our immigration policy? Posturing, bluster and inaction as usual
The speech contained no explanation of what Mr Cameron actually plans to do about mass immigration (the only thing that would make any difference, immediate departure from the EU, is impossible under our current leadership). I have discussed elsewhere the problems of the Tory position on the EU
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/09/a-tory-ukip-pact-would-be-bad-for-britain.html
The choice lies elsewhere
So I would only say that it is deeply misleading to describe the next election as a ‘choice’ between the Tories and Labour. Those two parties are so close that most people’s lives will be unaffected by a change from one to the other, or vice versa. The only change available to us is a revolution in our party system in which both Labour and Tory parties are made obsolete, and new parties arise which actually represent the true differences there are among us. Mr Cameron’s main aim is to prevent that revolution from happening. My main aim is to encourage it, for without it there is no hope of the great reforms we so badly need. Please don’t be misled by this stuff.
