Now that the hysteria has died down, the dust is settling and taxes are finally being spent in a constructive manner (on legal-aid appeals overturning reactionary and downright stupid sentences imposed upon the apparent dregs of our country), might it finally be time to turn our attention to our esteemed leaders and those in positions of influence and power who, as they would have us believe, have done such a sterling job in curtailing the violence and restoring the calm, even though the weather may have played just as great a part in this as they did?
The 'us and them' situation referred to in The uprise of the Lidl Classes no longer divides those who chose to violently flout the law from those who did not. That division was always only temporary. Now the divide returns to more familiar territory: the aloof political classes and the proletariat. The man in the street is once again united with his feral, lawless cousins.
The OED defines the word 'feral' thus; 'adjective; (especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication'. It also informs that describing youths as feral has been in the vernacular since the early 17th century. Presumably it is the wild state of a wayward youth and a release from captivity rather than domestication that linguists were thinking of when the phrase was coined. But what happens when you release Thatcher's children from domestication? The answer can be seen every day in an ever more feral Parliament.
It is my belief that a larger than acceptable number of today’s politicians are just as out of control as those they damn. The 1980s me-culture they grew up in has blinded them to the truth and consequence of their own behaviour and nobody, not Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron or Clegg, has attempted to do anything to redress the sins of Margaret Thatcher. Why would they? They, and their economic peers, have the most to lose. For all her crimes against society however, I'm sure a majority of corrupt men and women governing the nation in the years proceeding her premiership was not Thatcher’s intention. (Though, that all three leaders of the UK’s main political parties were privately educated, probably was.)
Thatcher’s unfettered, inexorable exhortation of personal greed and gain has - somewhat inevitably - been wholly embraced by those in power since her not-before-time demise as PM. She gave them the confidence to believe that their perceived personal success (often inherited - whether financial or through nepotism) equates to full justification of their actions, whether above or below society’s belt. They openly cheat, lie and steal and show little and even no remorse. On the rare occasions when they are brought to justice their belligerence shines through with only a few taking the path of contrition, and only then in a desperate attempt to reduce the impact of their wanton pursuit of gain to them and theirs. There is no hint of shame or accountability: just indignation at being the one who had to take the hit, for they are never the only ones. And it is never their fault. Every robotic and insincere ‘sorry’ is followed by a robust and vehement ‘but...’.
Tony Blair, who only led the country into an illegal war without any serious repercussions to himself, makes no secret of his lust for the dollar. When Hazel Blears repaid the money she illegally and fraudulently claimed from the state she felt it expedient to wave the cheque - for more than £13,000 - to the media and smile cheerfully as if she were making a charitable donation. That it might be bad taste to repay what amounted to a year’s salary for her lowest paid administrative assistants in such a flamboyant manner, making clear it did not affect her fiscal position one jot, clearly did not enter her head. Her ability to repay the money in such a crass manner was actually a personal reflection of her overall success.
Meanwhile, as the Daily Mail barks and howls like a rabid dog, the government of the day makes conscious decisions to come down ever harder on low-life benefit cheats who con the public purse out of whatever they can get in whatever underhand ways they believe they can get away with - while all the while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge they have led by example. They cannot see their part in the steady corruption of society. When they themselves cheated their own, vastly superior, benefit system only a handful were punished. The rest just paid it back with a nervous yet dismissive laugh, accompanied by an emphatic, if somewhat tedious, speech about how mistakes can happen. If only we were all given that chance. One can’t help feeling they have already worked out all the loopholes in the new system and are already milking it for all they possibly can.
Amid the ridiculous sentences called for by David Cameron, handed out by the courts, appealed against and revised, there is a call for a more restorative form of justice; community servitude of some sort. But we cannot have confidence that the more feral of our politicians will not take advantage even of this: today we learn that Jacqui Smith used two day-release inmates from HMP Hewell in Redditch to decorate her £450,000 house. This is the same Jacquboot Smith who put in a £116,000 expenses claim which included two pornographic flicks, apparently for her husband (who in turn was once discovered to be behind a series of letters written to various newspapers, praising the work of his wife but failing to mention that he was married to her or that he managed her constituency office).
Smith, who was serving as Home Secretary at the time, claimed the prisoners ‘didn’t have anything else on’, which, in turn, would suggest that she believes her Worcestershire constituency is in pristine condition with no work required. I don’t need to go there to know this was not, is not and has never been the case. And true to the nature of the modern politician, she sees no need to apologise for taking free labour out of the community and utilising it to her own gain, instead indignantly declaring that The Sun (who put the story on their front page) are ‘having a go at me’. The quotes attributed to her make two things clear: she does not take it seriously and she has a victim mentality. Unfortunately both these traits are synonymous with this current generation of politicians and, though many onlookers will sigh and shake their heads, few will be particularly surprised by her remarks.
Our MPs allow the most outrageous events to unfold, stopping only to give soundbites to the press and greater power to the police, while imposing stringent cuts on the poor - with whom they have very little direct contact. The decision to waive Vodafone’s £6bn tax bill was followed by the revelation that cuts to the tune of £7bn were being made to benefits - of the welfare variety. It is absolutely unthinkable that the day will come when an MP hands in his/her expenses claim and is told, ‘sorry, there’s no money left. Cuts see?’. It is almost as if they do not understand what the word ‘welfare’ means.
Last year, in the run up to the election, I wrote to my then-local MP, the not necessarily right but possibly honourable Ben Bradshaw, to ask why two 6-month tax discs cost considerably more than one 12-month disc. I expected him to tell me it was due to two annual administration charges as opposed to one -–which I would not have accepted - but he instead referred me to the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling. So I asked Darling why I couldn’t pay for my tax disc in monthly installments as I do my TV license and he replied that it was because people ‘sell their cars more often than they sell their homes’. I wish I had asked why I couldn’t pay my tax disc in installments as I do my car insurance, though I’m sure his answer would have been just as nonsensical. Reading between the lines, both MPs effectively told me this; ‘Thanks for taking the time to write to me. Now piss off’. Earlier this year, two letters to my current MP, Mark Lazarowicz, on a different subject, yielded the same reply. I posted both letters, and his replies, on Facebook.
When Bob Frost, a councilor on Dover's District Council in Kent, called rioters ‘jungle bunnies’ on his Facebook page on August 7th he did, for a millisecond, buck the politician’s trend by apologising ‘unreservedly’. But the automated gesture was lost when, in an attempt to justify himself, he said;
‘Looking at the dictionary it would appear that the term jungle bunnies is pejorative and is a racist slur relating to African-Americans. Needless to say I did not mean to use any offensive racist term and was referring to the urban jungle. [Needless indeed] As for the bunny bit it was originally 'animals', but I thought people might object to me calling fellow humans this so I chose something I thought was innocent and also cuddly.’
Mr Frost is either a racist liar or he is so removed from the modern world that he should never have been allowed to get involved in politics and represent real and decent people in the first place. Given that this is not the first time Frost has been chastised for his Facebook idiocy - in a previous posting he complained of having to foot the bill for single mothers’ ‘beer and tattoos lifestyles’ and referred to their children as ‘push-chaired spawn’ -–I have no doubt he is both. That he would not pay any less tax were there no single mothers, or that what he pays is just a percentage of what he earns (the same percentage that anyone else in his wage bracket pays), is lost on him.
We are told, with an air of ‘look what you’ve done’, that the cost of the recent riots to the taxpayer will be £100m. (This, in part, can be attributed to the government’s willingness to stand by and watch while insurance companies once again wriggle out of their whole raison d’être.) We also have access to figures that show that the cost of Britain’s involvement in Libya, where we are far from finished, reached the £100m mark long ago. The cost of the 120 cruise missiles alone, fired at Libyan positions in just four days between March 18th and March 22nd, was more than £60m - and this is before you account for servicing, crew, fuel and training costs. These are not trifling matters. Yet David Cameron has recently cut short his fourth holiday of the year. In any other job the prospect of a holiday would not arise but for this generation of politicians, personal satisfaction and entitlement to what is thiers is without doubt their most pressing agenda. The idea of Cameron telling his wife, ‘I’m afraid things are a bit hectic at work right now’ is laughable. In truth, if he thought he could get away with it, he would probably be grandiosely pointing out that he’s now cut short two holidays in one year.
Politicians, by the very nature of their jobs, believe they should be heard. They must possess a level of ambition, self-confidence and ego not required in many other jobs. But all these traits need to be kept in check and when they are not... well, there is no need to speculate. The likes of Boris Johnson, with his affected buffoonery and unkempt hair, are the product of a society where only the top tier is evolving. Like the 17th century youth in a wild state, recently released from captivity, our future MPs are released from the domesticity of university (if that is how some MP’s student antics can be described), where the seeds of superiority first began to flourish, and are set free in a world where personal progress is directly linked to where you were born and who you know - both of far greater significance than what you know, or even what you have done. When David Cameron said of his equal and peer, Andy Coulson, ‘everyone deserves a second chance’, he did not envisage these words returning to haunt him. And how right he was! He lives in a world where he can change his mind from day to day with impunity, as he expected Nick Clegg to do on the issue of tuition fees, and as Nick Clegg humbly did in order to keep his job. This unbridled freedom and wholehearted lack of responsibility and accountability has gone to the modern politician’s young head.
The public loves a rags to riches story. But the government recognise this as fairy-tale. They prefer a riches to further riches story. But they are not averse to a rags to dirtier rags story either.
I say again: our politicians are out of control, and it transcends all parties. When Thatcher first set about installing the ‘every man for himself’ attitude that is now destroying once great parts of our society, the country did at least have a few assets that she could offer out to those closer to the bottom of the pile. People who had never dreamt of owning their own home were suddenly able to do just that. Privatisation, whatever you may think of it (and I’m not a fan), offered people the chance to own shares in utility and transport companies and make some money. Her model appeared to work because the state was able to sustain it. But the price, as common sense surely dictates, is that, with many of the nation’s assets now long gone, the same values towards greed and material possession can no longer be sustained. And that to attempt to sustain them will result in a two-, three- and even four-tier society, with more and more people slipping down the social ladder as it gains more and more rungs. Most Prime Ministers will, at some point, pay lip service to the idea of a classless society. David Cameron has already tried to peddle the myth that we live in one. But it is more than a myth. It is an outright lie. And Cameron himself cannot believe it for one second. Yet he openly says it. He denies that raising tuition fees will preclude people from certain backgrounds from going to university, safe in the knowledge that his own children’s university education is not at risk. These are the ramblings of a madman and/or the lies of a politician. Unfortunately we now accept that the two go hand-in-hand.
Thatcher’s children now run the country. They stand by as the police corrupt themselves by taking payments from the press, granting them further powers when, with the cases of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson and Mark Duggan, to name but three, fresh in our memories, some sectors of the public feel they are unable to cope with the power they already have. Thatcher’s legacy of greed means that today’s MPs openly do not care about anyone but themselves and will happily break the law in pursuit of their goals, without any realisation that they are supposed to be setting an example. They are feral. We can’t seriously be expected to vote for out-of-control narcissists, who routinely tell lies, act only in their own best interests and will go to great lengths to cover their duplicity, can we?
The 'us and them' situation referred to in The uprise of the Lidl Classes no longer divides those who chose to violently flout the law from those who did not. That division was always only temporary. Now the divide returns to more familiar territory: the aloof political classes and the proletariat. The man in the street is once again united with his feral, lawless cousins.
The OED defines the word 'feral' thus; 'adjective; (especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication'. It also informs that describing youths as feral has been in the vernacular since the early 17th century. Presumably it is the wild state of a wayward youth and a release from captivity rather than domestication that linguists were thinking of when the phrase was coined. But what happens when you release Thatcher's children from domestication? The answer can be seen every day in an ever more feral Parliament.
It is my belief that a larger than acceptable number of today’s politicians are just as out of control as those they damn. The 1980s me-culture they grew up in has blinded them to the truth and consequence of their own behaviour and nobody, not Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron or Clegg, has attempted to do anything to redress the sins of Margaret Thatcher. Why would they? They, and their economic peers, have the most to lose. For all her crimes against society however, I'm sure a majority of corrupt men and women governing the nation in the years proceeding her premiership was not Thatcher’s intention. (Though, that all three leaders of the UK’s main political parties were privately educated, probably was.)
Thatcher’s unfettered, inexorable exhortation of personal greed and gain has - somewhat inevitably - been wholly embraced by those in power since her not-before-time demise as PM. She gave them the confidence to believe that their perceived personal success (often inherited - whether financial or through nepotism) equates to full justification of their actions, whether above or below society’s belt. They openly cheat, lie and steal and show little and even no remorse. On the rare occasions when they are brought to justice their belligerence shines through with only a few taking the path of contrition, and only then in a desperate attempt to reduce the impact of their wanton pursuit of gain to them and theirs. There is no hint of shame or accountability: just indignation at being the one who had to take the hit, for they are never the only ones. And it is never their fault. Every robotic and insincere ‘sorry’ is followed by a robust and vehement ‘but...’.
Tony Blair, who only led the country into an illegal war without any serious repercussions to himself, makes no secret of his lust for the dollar. When Hazel Blears repaid the money she illegally and fraudulently claimed from the state she felt it expedient to wave the cheque - for more than £13,000 - to the media and smile cheerfully as if she were making a charitable donation. That it might be bad taste to repay what amounted to a year’s salary for her lowest paid administrative assistants in such a flamboyant manner, making clear it did not affect her fiscal position one jot, clearly did not enter her head. Her ability to repay the money in such a crass manner was actually a personal reflection of her overall success.
Meanwhile, as the Daily Mail barks and howls like a rabid dog, the government of the day makes conscious decisions to come down ever harder on low-life benefit cheats who con the public purse out of whatever they can get in whatever underhand ways they believe they can get away with - while all the while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge they have led by example. They cannot see their part in the steady corruption of society. When they themselves cheated their own, vastly superior, benefit system only a handful were punished. The rest just paid it back with a nervous yet dismissive laugh, accompanied by an emphatic, if somewhat tedious, speech about how mistakes can happen. If only we were all given that chance. One can’t help feeling they have already worked out all the loopholes in the new system and are already milking it for all they possibly can.
Amid the ridiculous sentences called for by David Cameron, handed out by the courts, appealed against and revised, there is a call for a more restorative form of justice; community servitude of some sort. But we cannot have confidence that the more feral of our politicians will not take advantage even of this: today we learn that Jacqui Smith used two day-release inmates from HMP Hewell in Redditch to decorate her £450,000 house. This is the same Jacquboot Smith who put in a £116,000 expenses claim which included two pornographic flicks, apparently for her husband (who in turn was once discovered to be behind a series of letters written to various newspapers, praising the work of his wife but failing to mention that he was married to her or that he managed her constituency office).
Smith, who was serving as Home Secretary at the time, claimed the prisoners ‘didn’t have anything else on’, which, in turn, would suggest that she believes her Worcestershire constituency is in pristine condition with no work required. I don’t need to go there to know this was not, is not and has never been the case. And true to the nature of the modern politician, she sees no need to apologise for taking free labour out of the community and utilising it to her own gain, instead indignantly declaring that The Sun (who put the story on their front page) are ‘having a go at me’. The quotes attributed to her make two things clear: she does not take it seriously and she has a victim mentality. Unfortunately both these traits are synonymous with this current generation of politicians and, though many onlookers will sigh and shake their heads, few will be particularly surprised by her remarks.
Our MPs allow the most outrageous events to unfold, stopping only to give soundbites to the press and greater power to the police, while imposing stringent cuts on the poor - with whom they have very little direct contact. The decision to waive Vodafone’s £6bn tax bill was followed by the revelation that cuts to the tune of £7bn were being made to benefits - of the welfare variety. It is absolutely unthinkable that the day will come when an MP hands in his/her expenses claim and is told, ‘sorry, there’s no money left. Cuts see?’. It is almost as if they do not understand what the word ‘welfare’ means.
Last year, in the run up to the election, I wrote to my then-local MP, the not necessarily right but possibly honourable Ben Bradshaw, to ask why two 6-month tax discs cost considerably more than one 12-month disc. I expected him to tell me it was due to two annual administration charges as opposed to one -–which I would not have accepted - but he instead referred me to the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling. So I asked Darling why I couldn’t pay for my tax disc in monthly installments as I do my TV license and he replied that it was because people ‘sell their cars more often than they sell their homes’. I wish I had asked why I couldn’t pay my tax disc in installments as I do my car insurance, though I’m sure his answer would have been just as nonsensical. Reading between the lines, both MPs effectively told me this; ‘Thanks for taking the time to write to me. Now piss off’. Earlier this year, two letters to my current MP, Mark Lazarowicz, on a different subject, yielded the same reply. I posted both letters, and his replies, on Facebook.
When Bob Frost, a councilor on Dover's District Council in Kent, called rioters ‘jungle bunnies’ on his Facebook page on August 7th he did, for a millisecond, buck the politician’s trend by apologising ‘unreservedly’. But the automated gesture was lost when, in an attempt to justify himself, he said;
‘Looking at the dictionary it would appear that the term jungle bunnies is pejorative and is a racist slur relating to African-Americans. Needless to say I did not mean to use any offensive racist term and was referring to the urban jungle. [Needless indeed] As for the bunny bit it was originally 'animals', but I thought people might object to me calling fellow humans this so I chose something I thought was innocent and also cuddly.’
Mr Frost is either a racist liar or he is so removed from the modern world that he should never have been allowed to get involved in politics and represent real and decent people in the first place. Given that this is not the first time Frost has been chastised for his Facebook idiocy - in a previous posting he complained of having to foot the bill for single mothers’ ‘beer and tattoos lifestyles’ and referred to their children as ‘push-chaired spawn’ -–I have no doubt he is both. That he would not pay any less tax were there no single mothers, or that what he pays is just a percentage of what he earns (the same percentage that anyone else in his wage bracket pays), is lost on him.
We are told, with an air of ‘look what you’ve done’, that the cost of the recent riots to the taxpayer will be £100m. (This, in part, can be attributed to the government’s willingness to stand by and watch while insurance companies once again wriggle out of their whole raison d’être.) We also have access to figures that show that the cost of Britain’s involvement in Libya, where we are far from finished, reached the £100m mark long ago. The cost of the 120 cruise missiles alone, fired at Libyan positions in just four days between March 18th and March 22nd, was more than £60m - and this is before you account for servicing, crew, fuel and training costs. These are not trifling matters. Yet David Cameron has recently cut short his fourth holiday of the year. In any other job the prospect of a holiday would not arise but for this generation of politicians, personal satisfaction and entitlement to what is thiers is without doubt their most pressing agenda. The idea of Cameron telling his wife, ‘I’m afraid things are a bit hectic at work right now’ is laughable. In truth, if he thought he could get away with it, he would probably be grandiosely pointing out that he’s now cut short two holidays in one year.
Politicians, by the very nature of their jobs, believe they should be heard. They must possess a level of ambition, self-confidence and ego not required in many other jobs. But all these traits need to be kept in check and when they are not... well, there is no need to speculate. The likes of Boris Johnson, with his affected buffoonery and unkempt hair, are the product of a society where only the top tier is evolving. Like the 17th century youth in a wild state, recently released from captivity, our future MPs are released from the domesticity of university (if that is how some MP’s student antics can be described), where the seeds of superiority first began to flourish, and are set free in a world where personal progress is directly linked to where you were born and who you know - both of far greater significance than what you know, or even what you have done. When David Cameron said of his equal and peer, Andy Coulson, ‘everyone deserves a second chance’, he did not envisage these words returning to haunt him. And how right he was! He lives in a world where he can change his mind from day to day with impunity, as he expected Nick Clegg to do on the issue of tuition fees, and as Nick Clegg humbly did in order to keep his job. This unbridled freedom and wholehearted lack of responsibility and accountability has gone to the modern politician’s young head.
The public loves a rags to riches story. But the government recognise this as fairy-tale. They prefer a riches to further riches story. But they are not averse to a rags to dirtier rags story either.
I say again: our politicians are out of control, and it transcends all parties. When Thatcher first set about installing the ‘every man for himself’ attitude that is now destroying once great parts of our society, the country did at least have a few assets that she could offer out to those closer to the bottom of the pile. People who had never dreamt of owning their own home were suddenly able to do just that. Privatisation, whatever you may think of it (and I’m not a fan), offered people the chance to own shares in utility and transport companies and make some money. Her model appeared to work because the state was able to sustain it. But the price, as common sense surely dictates, is that, with many of the nation’s assets now long gone, the same values towards greed and material possession can no longer be sustained. And that to attempt to sustain them will result in a two-, three- and even four-tier society, with more and more people slipping down the social ladder as it gains more and more rungs. Most Prime Ministers will, at some point, pay lip service to the idea of a classless society. David Cameron has already tried to peddle the myth that we live in one. But it is more than a myth. It is an outright lie. And Cameron himself cannot believe it for one second. Yet he openly says it. He denies that raising tuition fees will preclude people from certain backgrounds from going to university, safe in the knowledge that his own children’s university education is not at risk. These are the ramblings of a madman and/or the lies of a politician. Unfortunately we now accept that the two go hand-in-hand.
Thatcher’s children now run the country. They stand by as the police corrupt themselves by taking payments from the press, granting them further powers when, with the cases of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson and Mark Duggan, to name but three, fresh in our memories, some sectors of the public feel they are unable to cope with the power they already have. Thatcher’s legacy of greed means that today’s MPs openly do not care about anyone but themselves and will happily break the law in pursuit of their goals, without any realisation that they are supposed to be setting an example. They are feral. We can’t seriously be expected to vote for out-of-control narcissists, who routinely tell lies, act only in their own best interests and will go to great lengths to cover their duplicity, can we?
