Step Outside Posh Boy!

John Niven’s page in the Sunday Mail of what looked like a gallus young girl (but it could have been a boy) holding a home-made placard with the ‘step outside’ sentiment made me smile. Not for long. MORI polls of those under thirty-three show support for Tory leadership has grown. Similarly, one of the poll’s questions:‘is the creation of the welfare state one of Britain’s proudest achievements? And around seventy percent of those over forty-five agree but, with the under thirty-three grouping, the figure falls to just under twenty percent. I’m sure it shows uneven regional and local disparities, but young people don’t give a fuck and that’s depressing.

Riddel’s View, The Observer’s cartoonist shows Posh Tory boy George Osborne wolfing down a Big McAusterity Blame-Grilled Burger in a Spite-Seeded Bun, a ‘Maggie McSnatcher' snack with the logo: ‘We’re Winging It’ on the box. Lying beside the box is a carton of Extra Large Lies chips. George has blood or tomato-ketchup on his chops as he bites into the oversized bun and in a cartoon bubble, declaims –‘DELICIOUS!’ Will Hutton in the same-day paper notes: ‘Osborne has taken the Orwellian misuse of language to new levels’. I’m not sure why he’s surprised. Osborne is a Chancellor of the Exchequer with an interest in economics only in so far as the facts fit in with his ideology. Politics isn’t about fairness. It’s a Machiavellian blame game and that old story of the poor people done it guv is good press. I’ve been thinking about these things since watching on Film4, midweek, Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ‘45’.

After the First World War there was a concerted campaign to get those returning from the front lines back into service positions. Now the fighting was finished the aristocracy wanted things to be the way they were. Servants should be servants and they should be grateful for that. In Loach’s documentary in the 1930s a mine owner sacked a mineworker and evicted his family from tied accommodation because his boy had been caught scrumping apples from his orchard. It was a them- and-us world drawn along class lines. Middle-class doctors would not enter slum housing unless five shillings was paid up front. This was the weekly wage of a farm worker, often with large families. One woman recalled her father walking about with the bottom of a bottle and using it as a magnifying glass so he could see. Churchill had fronted a government that had won the war, but prior this he sent troops into Glasgow to break strikes and heads and the notion he was universally loved and a national treasure is that of American film-makers (with echoes of Thatcher mythology). Labour nationalised the natural monopolies and those, on camera, spoke of their elation. India was the old jewel in the crown, now it was the NHS. But they did more. They build council houses in there millions. A clearing house in Euston station which employed 400 clerks to pass chits of which railway owed the other for using its tracks and stations was closed down. The cost of administering the NHS was around six percent. Now it’s creeping up the American levels of twenty-five percent. From the old and new Tory posh boy the world is a better place. The number of servants is once again on the up and the mantra of raping the poor so the rich can get richer is a successful brand. Young people can’t seem to get enough of the tautology: if it works we need to do more of it to be even more successful; if it doesn’t work we need to do more. Even the Labour Party is buying into this branding exercise. I think Orwell’s character Winston Smith 1984 would feel quite at home in 2013 Tory land.