As a blogger you get pretty used to reading the odd piece of utter bilge below your posts. But rarely have been quite so nauseated and shocked as I was by some of the comments yesterday on the piece I wrote about my Oxford days with my old mucker Dave Cameron.
After twelve years of Blair and Brown Britain is, I think we can all agree, in the most terrible mess. Our economy is in ruins thanks in good part to an outrageous spree of deficit spending by an irredeemably socialist Chancellor. The tax burden has risen (largely by stealth). Our freedoms have been circumscribed by ever-more-intrusive bureaucracy and legislation, governing everything from how we are allowed to illuminate homes and dispose of our rubbish to the way we arrange our childcare. Health and safety regulations have made harmless, traditional past times like the village fete or the school trip a nightmare of red tape, form filling, overcautiousness and needless expense. Dotted all over Britain are ghettoes – sorry “communities” – a worrying percentage of whose members believe it is their holy duty to destroy us from within, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally.
I could go on, but that’s enough for the moment. What leaves me truly gobsmacked is this: that after twelve years of utterly disastrous mismanagement by a ruling caste made up of socialists, liberals, progressives, grievance-mongers, rabble-rousers – all of them on the left, none of them exactly motivated by a desire to make life easier for the silver-spoonfed and privately-educated – there are still pillocks out there so stupid as to believe that the problems of Britain are essentially to do with the facts that people like David Cameron and Boris Johnson went to Eton and Oxford, that some people have more money than others, that some people have bigger houses than other people, and that it’s all jolly unfair.
Get real, you unutterable tossers! Normally I’m quite good with words and insults, but in this instance I find it all but impossible to express how much I despise you for your ignorance, your refusal to see the glaring evidence before you, your chippy repellance, your stale, cliched view of the world, your bitterness, your wrongness and puke-making fatuousness. Go to North Korea, you twonks! Enjoy what it is to be classless and free!
Now the Cameroon analysis of this situation would go something like this: “Aha, so you finally get the problem. Against all reason, there really are still lots of people out there whose analysis of Britain’s problems is rooted in class resentment. Therefore, we can never be as boldly ideological as some of us might like to be. We must catch the monkey softly softly, for example, by adopting fiscally brain-dead policies like sticking to Labour’s 50p upper rate tax band, not because it will bring more money into the Exchequer’s coffers but because it will appeal to the mob’s desire to see rich people suffer.”
Naturally, I disagree. I don’t believe that surrender-monkey nonsense about politics being the “art of the possible.” Anything is possible, but first you have to make your case. The best thing about Conservatism – the reason I’m a conservative – is that the facts of life are Conservative. It’s really not that difficult to argue the conservative position because its also the best position, the one that most accords with reality and human nature. Conservatism is the philosophy of “It’s not where you’re from; it’s where you’re at.” In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you were born in a stately home or the lowest ghetto: a conservative believes as far as is reasonably possible that EVERYONE should be afforded equal opportunities.
But equality of opportunity – note – NOT equality of outcome.
There. I’ve solved the problem of Conservatism and class in one par. Why couldn’t those spineless Cameroons?
By the way, don’t forget to laugh at me being ridiculed in When Boris Met Dave on TV tonight. I really recommend these outtakes too. Especially the ones with me in:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/when-boris-met-dave/articles/exclusive-video-clips
Related posts:
- David Cameron at Oxford University: the truth
- Maybe we’d be better off if David Cameron had gone to Harrow
- An open letter from my old mate David Cameron to the people of Britain
- David Cameron skippers Morning Cloud, conducts LSO, etc
