playing

did you know that there was a time when there was no violent crime, no rapes, no binge drinking, no robbery, no riots, no single parents or no divorce? a time when all the police did was rescue kittens from trees and tell people the time (even if they didn’t want to know) and the workers doffed their caps to their betters.
i know i know it is hard to believe that such a time ever existed, but it did.
i know it did because david cameron has told me so. this golden age occurred under the conservative government of margaret thatcher.

moving on from his ‘broken britain’ idea cameron now talks about ‘social recession’ where all the ills of british society are laid at the feet of gordon brown.
the solution to this new version of ‘broken britain’ seems to be as simple as the cause: tax breaks for married couples. a neat packaging of several key favourite themes of the tories: tax cutting, traditional family life, crime and morality. (so much for the new conservatives.)

now i may be cynical but the ‘social recession’ catch phrase (not as good as ‘i love it when a plan comes together’) saw the light of day at the same time the sentences were being passed on the two boys involved in the edlington torture case. cameron was quick to use this case for political gain and to blame the labour government for the decline of social order.
while lip service was paid to the extreme rarity of such cases the implication was clear: under labour the country is going to hell in a handcart. to save the country we need the fresh, morally correct conservative party (led by david (i may or may not have been involved with drugs at college) cameron) to lead us to the faintly remembered time when the only person who came into your house unannounced was the tooth fairy.

in some ways cameron’s morality attack is an echo of gordon brown’s ‘toffs’ strategy. the difference being that when cameron is attacking binge drinking or divorce we all know he doesn’t mean us – he means those poor people over there. when the right wing press go on about how the young are easily influenced by images of sex and violence they don’t mean the children of their readers – they mean those poor people over there.
after all when prince harry and his set get pissed it is all a jolly jape. while the antics of amy winehouse or peaches geldof may cause some newspapers to complain about their conduct they also know that they sell their papers, and of course there is no chance that their responsible reporting of these people will influence anyone.

the idea of broken britain that is in a social recession is a strong one, but it is not an honest one. it is just a crude way for cameron to tell his core support that he really is one of them and that when he gets into power it will be conservative business as normal.