I was idly thinking about Cameron and Osborne, what they were doing now their great adventure was over. Without really being conscious of it, I imagined them going back into the toy box. There was (apart from the psychotically evil levels of damage they inflicted on the social and economic fabric of the country) always something so infantile about them. They just had that look of school boys, expensive schoolboys. Dilettantes.
I went to a somewhat duff comprehensive school in a large village. Results were poor to average, some kid came to school on a tractor. I used to get sent home for ‘being a punk’ but no one ever told my family so I just let my self in to the house and lazed happily around while everyone else was at work, feeling punker than ever, on a quasi-official doss. Every term or so, the lads in my school would decide they were going to have a fight with the boys at the next door private school. No fight was ever had, but a crowd of comprehensive kids in DMs and football scarves would charge over then loiter around in the woods at the edge of the posh school grounds, and holler a bit at any stragglers, who usually made it hot-foot into the hallowed (I presume – they usually are when you pay) halls.
The point is, the private school boys always had the same sort of look, well fed and pinkish, it is exactly how I see Cameron and Osborne, posh, but still boys. (Our boys were more feral looking. I’m not making a judgement, both types of lad had skillz. Just that in the expensive school, the wealth was written somehow into their flesh, they kind of glowed with good food, health and breezy access to opportunity)
Cameron even did his carefree tum-te-tum , caught on camera as he ambled back into number 10, to start packing away his scalextric before handing over to Theresa May – who, in styling herself as ‘The Grown-up’ must share this view. I hope that is the only time we end up agreeing, I truly do. As an aside, if he is so f***ing casual about the whole job, did he really need to trash a mainstay of European peace and co-operation, a core strut of recent economic stability to boot, in an excessively poorly judged attempt to prevent the other guy from having a turn?
Meanwhile the other guy is raising an army – an army of people who were already there. So in fact, he’s not raising an army, he’s just waking the same old rag-tag crew up a bit so they can be as poorly served as they have been for the last I-don’t-know-how-many elections. Because in spite of hearing all these lovely vague socialist promises, not one of the people who is ‘doing it for Jeremy’ didn’t think these things already. Not one of them has had a blinding epiphany that lead them to eschew their former UKIP or Tory ways and come on over to the good side. They were all left-thinking people who probably voted Labour and who all got the willies (perfectly reasonably) about Tony Blair and the depressing Red Tory era. They haven’t appeared, like mystic avenging spirit-knights, long buried until time of need to sweep aside the shitty, low-rent, contemptible vision of selfish, fearful delusion offered by the right. They’ve just turned up the volume and are shouting about what they already (what I already) believed. It’s like the good old day, all that shouting ‘Scab!’ at the drop of a hat.
Maybe that IS a revolution, or the start of one. But to my currently jaded mind it feels more like going round the playground yelling “Who Wants To Play War?” and everyone joins arms and feels invincible for a while and you all hoon over to the posh school across the field, shaking a rustic stick or a bit of building site debris, and then nothing changes. The posh boys wag their lacrosse sticks from the other side of the rugby pitch and nick through the gargoyled norman arch doorway for some buttered crumpets before prep. And then we all go home.
Lou Allison
