The Bleeding Heart Show

Since the (hurrah!) next American President is on his way over here and looks set to meet the likely (boo!) next British Prime Minister, here’s Andrew Sullivan on David Cameron & Barack Obama:

His policy prescriptions - more autonomy at the bottom of public services, more accountability within the public sector, a gentle tax incentive for marriage - are more in line with traditional conservatism than wage subsidies, for example. And there’s an Obamaite tinge to Cameron as well: a young, eloquent, inexperienced and culturally modern individual emerging to replace a period of rule by the other party. One similarity: both are gay inclusive. One Cameron difference: he, like any Tory should, places more emphasis on environmentalism than Obama does.

[...]

What Obama is to race in America Cameron is to class in Britain: cultural game-changers. (emphasis mine)

So America gets a black man to usher in a postracial future and Britain gets an old Etonian to usher in a post-class future? Great. It’s a wonder there are no Cameron murals in Barnsley.

Policy-wise, there are sure to be some similarities between Obama & Cameron. As a community-organiser, Obama has experienced what can be achieved by empowering people at a local level and the way America was devised means it’s very difficult to have the kind of large, centralised delivery of public services we have in Britain. If elected, both men would find their hands tied somewhat by our countries’ respective borrowing and budget deficits.

But I think Sullivan continually overstates the symbolic value of a Cameron premiership. Sure, a postracial America could only emerge with something as symbolic as a black man being elected President. By the same measure, Britain isn’t going to overcome class antipathy by electing yet another Prime Minister who attended Eton. If you look at the two men’s biographies, Obama mixed race and multiracial upbringing meant he was able to identify the antipathies and resentments that exist between black and white Americans - as a result, his campaign has made overcoming these divisions a key theme. Cameron, on the other hand, was reared in great privilege and has spent his entire life amongst wealthy conservatives who resent that their taxes go to such undeserving lowlifes as single parents and the unemployed. Until becoming leader of the Tories, he’s never been anywhere near the deprived side of Britain and can’t hope to speak of it without sounding like a dillettante.

Maybe Cameron is sincere, the Tories are serious about helping the poor and they all honestly believe this is best achieved through localism and decentralisation; only time will tell whether this is a real change or just ‘back to basics’ with superior presentation. But you won’t see a postclass Britain by electing someone for whom class has brought nothing but benefits; it’ll be by electing someone as Prime Minister who, like Obama, had to break a great many barriers just to get there

Let tories be tories! End discrimination against the rich! Jonathan Freedland on class and the Crewe by-election:

Class has been a factor in the byelection campaign, with Labour hounding Timpson for his silver-spoon upbringing, despatching volunteers to the constituency in top hats and tails. And class has become a factor in our national politics, with Labour proving that it has, as yet, no idea how to handle it.

At least the Tories clearly understand their vulnerability in this area. Note their forceful efforts to have a Labour flier, featuring a mocked-up photo of Timpson in a topper, suppressed. Note their more serious, and successful, campaign to have that now legendary - genuine and undoctored - photograph of the Bullingdon Club circa 1986, featuring Cameron and Boris Johnson in full regalia, withdrawn from circulation. (Luckily for them, newspapers have complied with this edict, even though the image is just a Google away.) These are pretty strenuous exertions for a party that says it’s relaxed about background, insisting that it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s where you’re going that counts. As Stefan Stern wrote in the Financial Times last week: “If David Cameron is so proud of the ‘great school’ he attended - it was Eton, by the way - why does he never mention it by name in public?”

Aye, if only the country weren’t so crippled by inverted snobbery - whatever have the mega-rich done to deserve being made to feel embarrassed by their extravagant wealth? Well, over in this small corner of blogtown, we celebrate diversity wherever it may be, which means that when we give this image another outing…

…we only do so to celebrate expert tailoring, 70’s hairdos and good breeding. 

For those keeping score, Boris is #8, whilst #2 is Tony Hadley David Cameron.

From the Telegraph:

As members of the Bullingdon dining club, which dates back more than 150 years, David Cameron and his friends were obliged to wear the outfits for their annual photograph. But within hours of the photo being taken, the 10 young men were wreaking havoc on Oxford, where they were all at university. One of them, said to be Ewen Fergusson, threw a plant pot through a restaurant window and the police were called. Some tried to make a getaway but were arrested and thrown in police cells overnight.

“The party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens, and trying to escape police dogs,” said Boris Johnson, who was among those arrested. “And once we were in the cells we became pathetic namby-pambies.”

Twenty years later most of the young men in this photograph are facing their 40s. Ewen Fergusson is a successful corporate lawyer and Boris Johnson is the shadow spokesman for higher education. Cameron is the leader of the Conservative Party, who said recently: “Like many young people, I did things when I was young that I should not have done and that I regret.”

He was probably referring to his youthful involvement with cannabis rather than the Bullingdon Club, but the destructive activities of the club mean that many of the members have developed an appropriate amnesia. “The blissful sponge of amnesia has wiped clean the slate of memory,” said Mr Johnson.

“Until I saw that photograph I had really forgotten all about it,” said another former member.

The Bullingdon modus operandi is to book a restaurant under a false name, smash it up, and throw large amounts of money at the upset owners — a form of behaviour which dates back to Victorian times.

See, they’re just ordinary folk like you and I - behaving like ‘rascals’, getting into ‘japes’, committing ‘tomfoolery’. The only difference is that most students vomit on the street after a ‘back to school’ party or think it’s hilarious to steal a traffic cone, whereas this lot just happen to smash up restaurants. Absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about…

For the past two elections, Labour had the Conservatives caught in a masterful political trap: if you want to slash taxes, they said, you’ll have to slash spending, and if you’re going to slash spending, you’re going to starve our schools and hospitals of the money they need to save lives, or give kids the best education possible. The argument evoked images of crumbling schools, hospitals with 12-month waiting lists and a beds shortage that left patients lying, unattended, in corridors. Though the argument alone didn’t win these elections - the Tories were being led by reactionary weasels who stoked fears about immigration in the hope that some random bigot might decide to vote for once - it was still one they didn’t have an answer for.

But you can only use a winning argument so many times before it loses its power to persuade; the Conservatives have been much wiser in how they attack Labour’s spending, sniping about the amount that’s wasted to bureaucracy and pointing out that for all the billons our government receives from tax payers, it still can’t stop them from losing the personal details of millions. Now, not only has the ‘tax cuts = spending cuts’ meme lost its power, but the Tories are already innoculating themselves against it:

Senior Conservatives have said they would not be able to offer immediate tax cuts if they won the next election. Tory leader David Cameron told the BBC’s Politics Show that tax cuts would be impossible at first because Labour had “left the cupboard bare”.

[...]

Mr Cameron said: “We have to recognise as an opposition that if we win the next election, it will be tough and there will not be some large kitty of money to spend and we will have to say no a lot, as well as hopefully being able to say yes to some of the things we want to do.”

He’s being disingenuous, of course - the guiding principle of Conservative government is saying ‘no’ and stopping the government from doing things. Still, it’s a very smart move; not only do they neuter New Labour’s attack that Tory tax cuts will equal big spending cuts, but they also hold out the hope of allowing tax cuts in their second term, if the conditions allow. In one deft move, he’s placated his base and reassured those in the centre. I miss the good old days when the party was ruled by idiots…