All of a sudden it feels like the mid-1980s again. Huge bonuses in the city for the yuppy money men, private equity companies buying up major retailers and service providers, rampant house price rises and gentrification, public sector wages kept down and a crisis in affordable housing for those not lucky enough to be creaming it in the city.After 10 years of Tony Blair it feels like he has created the Thatcher ‘loads of money’ era again – only this time without any working class opposition.
There is a significant difference however. In the days of Thatcher and Kinnock, the Tory and Labour parties were led by people who had got there by their own hard work, without the benefit of aristocratic privilege or the old school tie. Indeed it seemed as though the meritocracy beloved of Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch had finally triumphed. When Douglas Hurd was defeated by John Major for the leadership of the Tory party in 1992 he put his defeat down to his old Etonian background… “The days when an old Etonian could lead the party or the country are over” he mused.
How wrong he was. Fast forward 15 years and both parties are led by old Etonians. Admittedly Blair’s Eton was Fettes public school in Scotland – ‘the Eton of the North’ – but David Cameron’s is the real thing. The fact both of them share the same head of school – Cameron’sheadmaster at Eton was Blair’s headmaster at Fettes – is very cosy!
Our public life is dominated by the privileged, privately educated, public school Oxbridge brigade more than ever. Cameron far from being an ordinary ‘bloke on a bike’ is from a long-standing well-connected blueblood aristocratic family related both to our own dear Queen and Charles II via an array of dukes and baronets. Sarah Cameron, his wife, is marketed as ‘a girl from Scunthorpe’. Well actually the stately Normanby Hall nearby, owned by daddy who allows David to go stag shooting on his 35,000 acre estate in Scotland so he can retain his Countryside Alliance membership.
The elaborate ‘ordinary bloke’ marketing of Dave the Toff is completely phoney but reveals deep worries about details of his posh class background leaking out. So much so that the infamous photo (above) of Cameron and his toffee nose inbred chums in The Bullingdon Club at Oxford has been ruthlessly eliminated from publication as if it never existed.
When the photo first came to light the Tories pressured the copyright holders, Gilman’s of Oxford, to refuse permission for future publication. All past publication on the internet, even via national newspaper sites, were hunted down and the pictures removed from the sites in an operation similar to Stalin’s removal of Trotsky from the photo of him at Lenin’s side.
Why so sensitive? The other difference between Thatcher’s time and Blair’s is that Blair has created space for London to be flooded by superrich billionaires with conspicuous consumption way beyond anything in Thatcher’s era. The gulf between the billionaires and the city millionaires and nurses restricted to a 1% pay rise and unable to find anywhere to live might not go down too well with the voters.
Hence the creation of ordinary bloke Dave – but Dave is not at all ordinary. We have already had 19 prime ministers from the same school, ETON, and Cameron will be the 20th. He’s a real toff along with the rest of the Notting Hill Set – George Osborne, Zac Goldsmith Tom Parker Bowles. The superrich aristocrats are still running the fucking country.
It’s time for us again to take up our cudgels in the Class War…
BASH THE RICH – TOFFS OUT!
Notting Hill 2pm Saturday October 27
March on David Cameron’s house and marvel at the mansions of the Notting Hill Set. Come dressed as ‘Bullingdon Toff’ or ‘Ordinary Bloke’. Gather hidden in the gastro pubs of Holland Park, the Bohemian boozers of Portobello Road, the chic coffee houses of Westbourne Grove, the swanky restaurants of Notting Hill……..
THEN LET US DESCEND LIKE A CLOUD OF LOCUSTS ON THE FAT OF THE LAND!
2 Comments
March 20, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Cameron wants a Bullingdon Club in every borough
Community leaders have given a cautious welcome to David Cameron’s proposal for a Bullingdon Club to be set up in every deprived borough.
more:
http://ollysonions.blogspot.com/2007/02/cameron-wants-bullingdon-club-in-every.html
June 19, 2007 at 7:02 pm
[...] see ‘Ordinary’ Dave Cameron rolled into Bristol on Friday – with toff about town Michael Heseltine trailing in his wake – to [...]