Cameron’s remark about ‘effing Tories’ hints at what he really thinks

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/26/cameron-effing-tories-hints-really-thinks

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When I was young, the funniest column in journalism was by a man with the pseudonym of Peter Simple, who wrote whimsical regressive fantasy in the old Daily Telegraph, full of attacks on motoring and housing estates. He pined for an England peopled by sheep, aristocracy and peasants, and unspoilt by psychology, materialism or the weakening of the class system. He was so reactionary that he would have thought Downton Abbey the work of the progressive devil. But when I read an interview with the column’s author, Michael Wharton, he said that what had plagued him since his days at Oxford was the assumption of his friends that such feudal attitudes must be a form of camp. It was amusing, of course, to want to take Britain back to the 18th century. But surely he couldn’t be serious. Nothing annoyed him more than being asked: “You don’t actually believe that stuff, do you?”

That same question has been both raised and resoundingly answered by David Cameron’s reference, in the heat of the Scottish campaign, to his own unhappy membership of the “effing Tories”. It is a coining which looks like having as long and as devastating a currency as “There is no such thing as society” or “Crisis? What crisis?” Already brick-built histories of the coalition can be imagined to be amassing on the shelves of Waterstones with the same effing title. Cameron’s admirers will no doubt argue that, with this timeless phrase, the prime minister was only seeking to characterise his government in a way others saw it. But I suspect his willingness to admit nationwide visceral hostility took him rather further than that. Round the word “loathed” hovered the unspoken word “rightly”. Cameron seemed ready to signal to the Scots that he well appreciated their reasons for hating everything his administration was doing.

It’s understandable. This has been a government which no member with an inborn faculty of shame will ever look back on without blushing. The most striking vox pop of the last few weeks came from a Scot who observed that she’d lived under eight Westminster prime ministers and each was worse than the last. As someone who had lived under 12, I thought her judgment unfair to Harold Wilson, who was a distinct improvement on Alec Douglas-Home, and to John Major who, in spite of the disaster of rail privatisation, had a sympathy for the general run of humanity which his predecessor Margaret Thatcher lacked.

But who, looking at the precipitous graph falling away from the towering achievements of Clement Attlee right down to the squirming shiftiness of Cameron, could doubt that the sweep of her historical view was broadly correct? And by talking of his own effing Tories, our prime minister was surely admitting that the cultural divide between those in Scotland who admire social democracy and those back in London who have fired up the unregulated free market yet again is just as profound as the national one.

At a simple level of competence, it’s very hard to remember any other administration which had no singular successes. Usually in any government of whatever stripe, there are at least individual ministers who are agreed to have done well in their jobs. But ministers who are way out of their depth – like Chris Grayling as justice secretary forbidding prisoners the right to be given books, as in fascist countries, or Iain Duncan Smith at work and pensions whose ignorance of working-class life has left him penalising those whom he most wished to reward – seem outnumbered by those for whom the coalition’s governing seediness tips into something more sinister.

A prime minister who appointed a criminal as his press secretary must not be surprised when his defence secretary feels free to invite lobbyists without security clearance to confidential meetings on the grounds that they’re friends. I imagine the prime minister appointed his home secretary knowing full well that she would have no default instinct for freedom. But even Cameron must have been amazed to have bred a business secretary who would, at a knockdown price, give away a Royal Mail that belongs to us, and in which we, the taxpayer, have generously invested, for no other reason but to ingratiate himself with predatory profiteers.

The progress of the Scottish referendum dramatised what most of us already knew. The political class of SW1, its nose still stuck in the un-British ramblings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, has lost all touch with the needs and interests of the people it affects to serve. The swivel-eyed faction in the English Tory party fights to end European influence on domestic legislation but is suddenly mute in the face of a far more damaging subservience to the US in its serial war-making.

In opinion polls, even a conservative English public regularly opposes the backdoor privatisation of the health service and approves the renationalisation of the energy companies and of the railways. Yet where, even in the Labour party, do we find a politician with the nerve to stand up and advance views which, among the electorate, are accepted parts of common wisdom? Cameron is a PR man to his marrow. His professional gift has always been for distraction. Less than two weeks ago, on cue, he was abject and self-pitying at the imminence of a referendum defeat. Now in victory, he has switched to sneering and devious. His attempt to divert attention from Scotland, where democracy is vital, back to England where he sniffs personal advantage is too crude to matter.

But the far larger diversion of the last four years has been more deeply damaging. By the brutal exercise of blackmail – “We got you into this, only we can get you out of it” – the financial sector, entirely responsible for the crash of 2007-8, has been rewarded for its greed even as its countless victims have been punished. The public at large has been ordered to endure a diet of low wages, rising prices, failing public services and job insecurity, while banks and financial institutions have been lavishly subsidised at our expense and refitted to precipitate the next crisis by the same old means. Only George Osborne, the true believer of this government, its effective leader, its Peter Simple, regards this repampering of the over-pampered as anything but outrageous. Unlike Cameron, he actually believes this stuff.

Of one thing you may be sure. Whenever a public figure speaks of “learning their lessons”, they are certain to be lying. Cameron at his effing conference next week has no more intention of acting on the proper lessons of the referendum than Tony Blair had when claiming to have learned the lessons of invading Iraq, or Rupert Murdoch had when he said he had learned the lessons of lawlessness in his business. Take no notice of anything Cameron says. Look only at what he does. You may think it’s an advantage to have a prime minister who is at least aware that he and his colleagues richly deserve a “kicking” for the austerity which has made an unjust country more unjust. But what will he do about it?