I do wonder what on earth is going on in our country. Most people, as I always say, are good people, who do what most of us would consider to be ‘the right thing’. They are, essentially, thoughtful, kind and generous. There is far more good to celebrate than bad to mourn and complain about, but I do fear that we are now living in a country in which there is a significant underclass and a large number of people who have simply been abandoned. Worse, I don’t see those who wield the power doing anything about it, or perhaps they don’t even know about it.
I am more convinced than ever that there really is poverty in our country. Real, harsh poverty where people go without basic foods, heating and hot water. Oh, and new clothes, proper bedding, sometimes even electricity. There are a lot of people who, when their key meters run out, can’t afford to top them up.
I have often been critical about our prime minister David Cameron. I also recognise that it is not his fault that he was born into immense privilege where doors were opened for him that remain firmly closed to others. That, until we change this country, is just the way it is. His years as PM have seen the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, by design than by accident. Almost all the changes his government has made, often in concert with the useful idiots of the Liberal Democrats (deceased – almost), have been detrimental to ordinary people in general and the poor in particular. The Tories are not known as the nasty party for nothing. And yet, and yet.
You would think that anyone who had a heart would not condemn the poor to further poverty and yet behind the pursed lips and serious expression, I do believe there is a man who has feelings. I just wonder if he just forgot them for a few years whilst other things were happening.
In opposition, Cameron recognised how and why the Tory brand was so toxic. He spoke in terms of ending poverty, building a more sustainable world, sharing the spoils of economic success, dragging people out of poverty. Then, in government, ideology took over. Instead of investing in growth and building on the growing economy bequeathed to him in 2010, following the worldwide financial crash, he allowed his chancellor to rule by austerity and austerity punished those at the bottom of the pile. It has punished them still further ever since. But now, as the end game in Cameron’s premiership is in sight, he is clear that he wants to remembered for something other than dividing the country in the same way that his heroine Margaret Thatcher did. And he knows that ex prime ministers often leave a tarnished legacy. Thatcher, who in the eyes of many, including me, was positively evil and my hatred for that woman has never changed, probably never will, and Blair, whose Labour government did so much to make this country better, ended up with his reputation in shreds because of Iraq and, in my opinion, the start of the destruction of state schooling and the privatisation of the NHS. What started so badly with Thatcher got far worse, what started well with Blair ended in tears. Cameron, who is not a stupid man, would rather be remembered for making the country better than to see the vulnerable left alone to die and believe me there are a lot of vulnerable people out there.
So Cameron has started in the softer tones of his years in opposition. Improving social mobility, bringing people out of poverty, caring for the sick and the old; all lovely soundbites. The trouble is, he wants to change things by leaving things the same. He will not even address the issue of our housing crisis other than by saying we need to have more houses for people to buy, but how do you buy a house on the minimum wage? We need more council housing but Cameron wants to kill off council housing as a matter of ideology. He wants to lift the poor out of poverty by making them poorer and he will do that by slashing the new Universal Credit (UC) now that the cuts to tax credits have been reversed. He really is asking people who are too disabled to walk to stand on their own two feet.
But we go back to his legacy. Legacy matters to politicians and it show they are remembered when they are long gone. Who would not want to be remembered, as Clement Atlee was, as the man who brought in the NHS? Who would want to be remembered as the man who led the country into Iraq with all the catastrophe that followed? And does Cameron want to be remembered as the PM who presided over a country where terminally ill people do not receive the benefits to which they are entitled and desperately need, until they have died? Or the PM who destroyed the NHS? He would be hated as much as Thatcher was, probably forever. I guess he is more sensitive than that.
After all, Cameron had a severely disabled son for whom he claimed Disability Living Allowance. He and his wife stayed in hospital with him for days, weeks on end, until, tragically, he died. Unimaginable grief for any parent. Surely – surely – Cameron’s personal, unimaginable grief gives him a broader understanding of how other folk live? He will know, too, that there are very poor people with terminal illness or life-shortening conditions who live in terrible housing for whom life is a struggle and they cannot see beyond tomorrow. Genuinely, I feel terribly sorry for Cameron losing a child. No parent deserves that. The point about the PM is that he has the power to make things better for other people who are suffering.
Social care is being destroyed in this country which makes things much worse. If you are poor, living in squalid accommodation in what Cameron patronisingly calls ‘sink estates’ (there are few of these in leafy Witney) you are going to be abandoned, if you haven’t been already. His mate Osborne is not chopping away at the fat anymore, he’s cutting throughout the flesh too. Soon it will be the bones. This is how bad things are getting and as the ‘long term economic plan’ slashes further into our infrastructure, people will die.
If Cameron wants a legacy, he can have one. He can still be the reforming PM that, I suspect, he secretly wants to be. What is happening with austerity is a political choice, it is an ideological decision to remove from public ownership anything that the fat cats can make money from.
He hasn’t got long especially if the country votes to leave the EU, after which he would quickly be replaced and forgotten about, apart from that legacy. At most he has three years.
I think he really does care about the country that he leads. My concern is that he has little in the way of ideas and imagination, beyond slashing vital public services for political reasons.
I don’t like the Tories and I certainly don’t respect them. I don’t think I’ll ever like the Tories but I might respect them, just a bit, if for once they could show a little humility and admit that they’ve got a lot of things wrong and instead put people first. I’m not holding my breath.
