The Nasty Party returns

In 2002 Theresa May told a packed Tory Conference ‘You know what some people call us? The Nasty Party.’ The statement was made to the horror of her own party, who could not believe that one of their own would dare to point out the home truths that had been staring them in the face for years, and to the horror of Labour and Lim Dem supporters, who were happy that the Tories hadn’t realised the obvious, because it was taking them ever more into the margins and away from a return to power. Theresa May had unleashed the truth that could turn her party round, and to achieve this, they didn’t even have to be nice, they just needed to make the public think they were.

Not that the lesson was immediately learned. After ditching Iain Duncan Smith, the party did not set out to find a leader that could represent their nice side, instead they took a lurch even further towards the dark side with Michael Howard, the sort of grotesque villain who, if he cropped up in a Bond film, would lead people to say that the franchise had finally taken it too far. But eventually, after a third election defeat they started to get their house in order. The Nice Party was unveiled under David Cameron, and, to prove their credentials, he even hugged a hoodie, a species the Tory old guard wanted the public to see as more life threatening and dangerous than the BSE burger John Selwyn Gummer once fed to his daughter.

 With the aid of Labour Party moving into a self-destructive mode where on one hand it could no longer rely on selling itself as ‘actually quite right wing’, and on the other couldn’t agree whether it should go further right or return to some of the principles it was meant to stand for, the Tory makeover seemed to work. It wasn’t Changing Rooms but it was Ten Years Younger, with all signs of decay from age and physical and mental self-abuse hidden under a peeled-back, surgically-uplifted face. It fooled so many people that they came close to winning an election, but not close enough to prevent the murmurings of a deluded faction who thought they would have achieved an outright win if the Nasty Party had never gone.

And now they’re back. They probably never really went away, and they’ve certainly been seeping through the cracks in the polished veneer of niceness for months if not years, but this week in Manchester they’ve made a full throated return, rising forth onto a stage, spitting and spewing out bile, and setting out their agenda with an ill-disguised glee. They’re back and they’re proud. So proud, and indeed so bold and unashamed, that their former leader is standing on the podium announcing nasty policies. Of course, he’s not their leader anymore. The puppet master turned controller is a far more evil character who in true super villain style, has somehow managed to conceal his real identity from the Nice Party even when it’s clear to the rest of us that George Osborne is the new king of the Nasty Party.

When Osborne says we’re going to have to suffer the pains of austerity for another five years, in spite of claiming it’s working so well that continuing with it seems like malice, you get the feeling that he is smiling inside and wants people to suffer just for the fun of it. But that’s only half of the story of the Nasty Party. The other half is a concerted attempt to demonise the unemployed and stir up public anger to such an extent that they can claim to have a mandate for policies that could only be justified if everyone without a job really was a workshy idle layabout, with nothing better to do than watch Jeremy Kyle with the curtains closed all day.  

And not only do they use the rhetoric to support policies like making them do unpaid community work rather than paying the minimum wage for the same work, they also use it as a way to focus anger on someone other than themselves for the current economic situation.

You can almost imagine Osborne at a Nasty Party meeting saying ‘What reason can we give for why working people should continue to suffer, other than because we haven’t done quite as well as we said we would. Who can we blame?’ Someone would have immediately given the answer ‘let’s blame it on a section of society we can demonise and present as an amorphous mass of vagabonds, vagrants and cheats.’ At which point someone would have said ‘do you mean immigrants?’ someone else would have said ‘no, sadly our go home or get thrown out vans didn’t go down to well’ and another would have said ‘how about the Lib Dems?’ before being told ‘we can’t, we need their support for another two years, and besides, we need to blame them for the last five years when we get elected in 2015’. After anyone who offered the correction of ‘if we get elected in 2015’ has been laughed at and asked to leave, Smith would have revealed that it was a rhetorical question, and he and Osborne already knew the answer, it was the unemployed.

 The facts don’t bear out the rhetoric behind their claims. They will have ignored the fact that there are a lot of people who are unemployed through no fault of their own, that many people out of work are victims of the Government’s austerity programme, while others would probably have had a happy and fulfilling working life if only we hadn’t sacrificed the manufacturing industry their non-academic skills were suited for in order to remodel Britain as the centre of IT and Finance. And as for unemployed graduates with years of debt-funded knowledge, they would be dismissed as people who should lower the expectations the Government’s previous drive to get more people into higher education had fuelled, and stack shelves instead.

But the Nasty Party are not going to let any of this stand in their way.  Instead, they will spin every rotten stereotype, every outdated cliché, and every piece of partial ill-informed ‘evidence’ they can find to appeal to every base prejudice that might exist. I am not saying that there is no-one who is ‘on the dole’ who doesn’t want to work, but if the unemployed were a religious group the Nasty Party and their followers would probably be breaking a law by seeking to inspire hatred towards them all on the basis of the behaviour and belief of a minority.

It doesn’t matter what crumbs of reasonableness may lie in the details of the Nasty Party’s proposals, the thing that gets the attention and the thing they want to get the attention is the headline ‘we’re punishing the unemployed’ as if they are a breed of people that are responsible for all of society’s ills, along with anyone else that has ever claimed a benefit, and deserve nothing other than unmitigated contempt and public disgust at their fecklessness. Meanwhile any other proposals for dealing with the country’s economic mess, or improving the lot of the average person, are dismissed as harking back to the 70’s, as if every value held in that decade, rather than just some of them, was wrong and as if the policies that were implemented in response to them were an unmitigated success, rather than, at best, the very mixed bag they can now be seen as.

And that’s the Nasty Party. They’re coming to town, and they’re trying to take over the country. You know what you have to do if you want to stop them. It starts with a letter. The letter is X. You need to put it somewhere sensible and hope enough other people do the same thing and make the Nasty Party go away again.

Vote Europe!

If you come to an agreement with 26 people and believe that the end result is one where you give, and the others take, and you are the only one impoverished by the relationship, there are three conclusions an outside observer can come to. One is that the other 26 must really hate you, the second is that you are paranoid, seeing conspiracy and envy in every person you have contact with, and the third is that you are greedy and the reality is not that the other 26 are trying to do you over, but that you have no sense of what compromise actually is. In the case of the agreement between Great Britain, or at least the part of it known as England, and the European Union, all three of these conclusions probably apply.

The first of the three, to the extent that it exists, is probably a result of the other two. Britain’s relationship with the EU has never been easy because so much of it has been driven by suspicion, mistrust and grudging cooperation on our part. It all began with Winston Churchill’s original unwillingness to join the EUs predecessor on the grounds that ‘we are with them, but not of them’. This embodied our island nation and the days of empire – the feeling that we were somehow better than the rest of them, and could survive because we were British.

Time did not prove this right and eventually we had to join the EU. Joining when it suited us, for our own interests, and expecting others to welcome them after we’d turned them down when they wanted us in. That’s what we did. And we wonder why some of them were reluctant to let us in, and why the terms we got were not as favourable as they could have been. It shouldn’t take a genius to work it out.

It might be uncomfortable for many modern day conservatives to note, but the man who took us into the EU was not some soft-minded lefty with no concern for sovereignty and a desire to get rid of the monarchy. It was actually Ted Heath, one of their former leaders. Although, as the man Margaret Thatcher and subsequent Tory leaders sought to turn into a figure of ridicule, it probably just adds to their conviction that it was a stupid thing to do.

From then on, our relationship with Europe has often been characterised by fear that they are either taking our money, our powers, or both. This is where the paranoia really starts to creep in. Is it just us that they are taking powers from? Are they doing it deliberately to weaken us, like some James Bond villain but in a boring bureaucratic form? If they are, all I can think is that they don’t understand maths and the UKs bank balance. Why go to weaken a country that has barely enough money for itself, let alone enough to spread around 26?

The truth is that the EU benefits us in some respects, and harms us in others. It does the same for every country that’s a member of it. Only the likes of UKIP, the Conservatives pushing for the referendum, and some of the right wing press, really believe that we are the only country that get none of the benefits, and most, or all, of the misery that comes from membership.

The pressure that has led to the decision to seek to renegotiate our EU membership, and then hold a referendum on the new terms, is borne out of paranoia, and not from any desire to really have a debate on whether the benefits of membership outweigh the harm.

This has always been the way. In years gone by, our anger was directed at French farmers, various countries fisherman, and other assorted foreign people that we were paying to grow sunflowers or trawl in waters that weren’t ours, but probably had been once. The benefits in trade, customs tariffs, free markets, and whisper it quietly, some bits of funding that actually came our way, never got a look in.

The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express have always managed to turn any vague unease about anything EU related into a full-scale conspiracy, managing to achieve this even when it’s a policy that, on first glance at least, looks like it might be good for a lot of us. Maximum working week? No thanks, I’d sooner have my Government tell me I can be made to work all the hours that God sends. Minimum wage? No thanks, it’s for my Government to decide to pay me a pittance rather than Brussels to tell me I have a right to a level of pay I might possibly be able to exist on.

The arguments made for withdrawal are focused solely on the harm the EU can do, and not even an accurate portrayal of what that harm is. Whether those advocating an EU exit are paranoid themselves, or whether they’re just fuelling public paranoia as a front for other more selfish reasons for wanting out, may be open to question. To do this, the arguments for withdrawal need to be countered with the current benefits we have from being in the EU, and also the consequences of withdrawal, which may be far worse than just the ending of those benefits.

Sadly and worryingly it’s unlikely that the full debate will be heard. The anti-EU lobby have already won the day in getting this far with so much that panders to the lowest common denominators of self interest and mistrust, and so little by way of a balanced argument. And, so far, they haven’t even had to remind us that our shocking performance in the Eurovision song contest is further proof that they’ve all got it in for us. Makes you proud to be British!

Great Expectations

Ed Milliband almost let me down this week. The reason for this had nothing to do with the contents of his speech, but everything to do with the fact that it seemed to come as a surprise to every journalist and political commentator wheeled out to talk about it afterwards.

Until his speech I’d been getting wound up to the point of blogging about how nothing in politics comes as a surprise any more. Every speech, be it to a conference or Parliament, is preceeded by a news story beginning with the words ‘in a speech today x is expected to say...’

If you haven’t noticed this just google the words ‘expected to say that’and over several pages you’ll find a dazzling array of examples including‘Danny Alexander is expected to say “Fair taxes in tough times means everyone playing by the same rule book,’ ‘ Yvette Cooper is expected to say: "Look at the Libor scandal that emerged this summer. It is a multibillion pound fraud,’ and ‘George Osborne is expected to say that he’s never ate a pasty in his life, but did once have a sausage roll and understands the dietary issues that face the working class.’

All of a sudden, Milliband appeared to have bucked the trend, and I lost the chance to moan, but then I came across this on the ITN website “In a highly personal keynote speech to the Labour conference, Mr Miliband will draw on his own memories of attending a comprehensive school in north London, and speak of classmates failed by the education system because they were not suited to academic exams and university.” Normal service was resumed.

Why this irritates me so much is that it’s another example of a world where people are so impatient that they can’t wait for an event itself, and everything has to be trailed in advance. For example, unlike any other person ever to sing a Bond theme, Adele cannot wait until the official announcement, she has to tweet about it to a world who also don’t want to wait four days till something that we all knew anyway is finally made public. Newspapers do the same. The Guardian a few weeks ago had at least two ‘stories’ that were little more than teasers for interviews elsewhere in the paper. One was with JK Rowling, and the other was, once again, Danny Alexander. Is there such a lack of real stories that papers have to make quotes from their own interviews into separate articles? Just take some pages out rather than repeat the same thing twice.

This trend for sneak previews began with TV, and the same nervous executives with attention deficit disorders that decided we couldn’t be trusted to tune in on two seperate weeks for a mini-series, we had to watch on consecutive nights in case we lost all interest and forgot about it. They then decided that even if a programme was on the next night, we might still not tune in if we didn’t have some idea about what was coming, and as a result they gave us the twenty-second glimpse of the next episode that is meant to give us a scene that we’ll be eagerly waiting for, but actually destroys any of the suspense by showing us the hero will still be alive, and the villain will strike again.

I can only assume that political advisers believe they have to satisfy the same level of impatience and imagined anticipation when it comes to political speeches, but political conferences are not rock gigs. Do they imagine a whole conference, or nation, full of people sitting through a 90 minute long speech waiting for the words ‘Look at the Libor scandal’ to emerge, just as they would wait for the opening bars of Mr Brightside to tell them their favourite song is on the way at a Killers gig, or for the lights to focus on the guitarist at a rock gig to tell them this is the long solo and it’s time to go to the bar?

It doesn’t happen, and, with the exception of the power and style of delivery that Milliband managed on Tuesday, it just means there are no real surprises coming from the party conferences or any other political speech. Maybe it’s ‘focus group’ politics taken to its logical end with every announcement tested in advance for consumer satisfaction, so that any unpopular ones can be quickly replaced with a sanitised family-friendly ending. I seem to remember that this was what happened with David Cameron at last year’s Tory party conference, where a controversial part of his speech was trailed and quickly altered after it was clear that it was not popular. I tried to google this to find out what the announcement was, but googling ‘David Cameron u-turn announcement’ produced more results than ‘expected to say that,’ and discovering this was where I decided to end this post.

In my next post, I’m expected to say a lot more rubbish about anything that is getting on my nerves. Bet that’s got your attention.