The poor are low achievers

by Rick Johansen

Anyone else watching the House of Commons debate on the Panama papers? I know, I’ve got too much time on my hands (it’s been chucking it down all day), but this is probably a new low. It’s not a new low because, as usual, Jeremy Corbyn was woeful (has he learned nothing about parliamentary performances in a mere 33 years in the Commons?), but because class war is up and running and it’s only coming from one side: the Tories.

I know that Corbyn pointed out that there is one rule in this country for the super rich and one for everyone else. I agreed with him on that, of course I did, and he was definitely not speaking by way of some kind of envy. He was stating what many of us regard as an absolute truth. But it was a contribution from Sir Alan Duncan MP, the Tory member for somewhere leafy, who launched into a cloying, buttock-clenchingly, cringeworthy defence of Cameron, which ended with him ranting that the PM’s “critics should snap out of their synthetic indignation. Their real point is that they hate anyone with a hint of wealth”. Ordinary people without wealth, he added, were “low achievers”. And finally, the multimillionaire who went to two private schools and then the finest university money can buy added that anyone in Labour had no idea what the “outside world” looked like.

Sir Alan, whom I used to think was a decent sort, has gone right down in my estimation. His was a breathtaking assault on attack on people who were not as rich as him. Their wealth was the only way of measuring their lifetime achievements.

I fear that we are morphing into a country of several unconnected parts. At the top, a wealthy elite who not only have most of the money, they control the government and most of the press. And they all seem to interact, too, with a media parroting the government’s views verbatim. Sir Alan’s comments were bad enough in themselves, but once he finished making them dishonourable members on the government benches were ‘hear, hearing’ and Cameron was agreeing with every word.

We do not all have wealthy mothers who are able to hand down the odd £200k to us when we are down to our last £12 million or so, but Cameron did not choose his parents. He was born privileged, knows it and remains privileged and then one of his chief lieutenants then adds that you are a low achiever if you are not as rich as the PM.

I do not “hate anyone with a hint of wealth” and I certainly know a few people with more than a hint of wealth and some with a lot of it. What is the point in hating people who have a lot of money? Is that the measure of man and woman, that we should actually like them if they have money? Perhaps it is better to judge on what people are like and how they live their lives?

Far from being ‘One Nation Tories’, Cameron leads a Tory Party that is in it for itself. Duncan let the cat out of the bag with his bizarre contribution to the date, making the quite bonkers assertion that only people like him knew what life was like in the “outside world” and the rest of us, who are not spending our holidays in Aspen or Bali, don’t have a clue. His low achievers must be NHS staff then, whose pitiful contribution to our society involves nothing better than making sick people better, or firefighters who contribute nothing more than saving people’s lives and stopping their properties burn down. Losers one and all.

Labour’s Dennis Skinner was thrown out of the House of Commons today for referring to David Cameron as ‘Dodgy Dave’ and repeating it rather than withdrawing it. Dave had a good smug grin about that too, he is always tends to do.

But this is not all about Dodgy Dave, not really. It’s a version of the Broken Britain Dave vowed he would repair. Instead, the country, gripped by low pay and limited social mobility, is heading backwards to the days of the rulers and the ruled. One day, people will get really angry about it because a new kind of class divide is on its way and that’s what the Cameron/Osborne project is all about.

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