There is a revolting photograph in today’s Guardian. It is of the Prime Minister David Cameron posing for a ‘selfie’ at the Tory party conference, surrounded by the hordes of the grey rinse brigade.
As someone who finds the prospect of a visit to the barber quite unnerving because I have to spend a considerable amount of time looking at myself in the mirror, the very idea of the selfie leaves me baffled.
The sight of his sickly grin left me feeling quite nauseous, but even more so after forcing myself to listen to his ghastly speech.
Dave can speak all right, no argument about that, but it’s what he says, and what he doesn’t say, that bugs me.
We purportedly live in a democracy but it seems more like an elective dictatorship because politicians get themselves elected with a welter of promises and do what the hell they like. Then they tell us how great they are for having done it.
We have few enough rights in this country as it is and it is gobsmacking to hear a large audience cheer when the Prime Minister says he is going to scrap human rights legislation. Is this Mr Cameron invoking the spirit of Thatcher’s best friend General Pinochet by intending to crack down on human rights? It certainly sounded like it to me.
And there was the big lie, rolled out yet again, that there are millions of EU migrants queuing up in our Jobcentres for a life of leisure. The immigrants were the problem, and those wretched employment agencies who were importing workers to take our jobs were an even bigger problem. And the hundreds of Romanian gypsies, roaming our leafy suburban estates, raping our women and stealing our cars. Hang ’em, flog ’em, I say. I may have made the last few sentences up, but they aren’t that far wrong. When in doubt, blame a foreigner.
And the devout christian PM then lied through his teeth about how the worldwide economic downturn came about. It wasn’t the sub-prime disaster in the USA, nor was it the banks over here. No, it was all Labour’s fault, even the calamity in Greece he must have meant.
And so it went on. He would cut tax for those on the minimum wage (no talk about raising that, though) and middle earners would not start paying tax at the 40% rate until they earned £50,000 PA. Now I beg your pardon but whilst I would not say that someone earning £50k would be described as rich, but I don’t know all that many people who do. I don’t know many families who earn that much when all their incomes are combined. Does Dave really think £50k is what nurses, ambulance drivers, care assistants, teachers and police officers earn? What planet are these people on?
In opposition, Cameron talked warm words about compassionate conservatism but it has long become clear that he didn’t mean it. He now leads a virtual Neocon political party, lurching closer to the George Bush type of heartless conservatism. The Tories, shorn of centre right giants like Clarke, Heseltine and Howe, are taking us to the far fringes of right wing politics as they try to out kip the kippers.
Cameron world is one where crime is going down because less of it is being investigated, just like benefit fraud is going down because Duncan Smith regards it increasingly as a civil matter than a crime. Smoke and mirrors.
As Dave takes his party increasingly to the right, stealing the clothes of Farage’s nasty little collection of fruitcakes and bigots, threatening to cut us off from the rest of the world, to finally achieve their dream of destroying the NHS and to condemn the lower orders to an indefinite future of austerity and misery the choices will become very clear.
The nasty party is back, if it ever went away in the first place.
