The current political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic has reached a level where human language seems altogether too sophisticated a medium in which to couch it. After all, what is the point of language when it no longer has any meaning? When, for example, “progressive” clearly means “regressive”, “fair” means “revoltingly unjust” and “pledge” means whatever the word or phrase is that means its exact opposite. I don’t know, like “total and complete cynical betrayal” or something.
Still, although it’s now more or less redundant, it seems to me a bit of a shame to jettison language in quite such a cavalier manner. It’s not just rather short-sighted to trash something we’ve been working on, as a species, for more than 120,000 years. It also means, once we’re reduced to grunts and howls, that several questions will remain unanswered forever, except with the kind of yelping and whinnying that, just possibly, they deserve. But before it is too late, here are just a few of those questions still waiting for an answer.
First, has David Cameron gone mad in office quicker than any previous Prime Minister? This earnest inquiry follows on from David Owen’s recent study of the hubristical syndrome that inevitably drives all Prime Ministers bonkers: they either get consumed with a deranged sense of self-righteousness, like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, or sink into gibbering paranoia, like Gordon Brown and John Major.
Although the sort of self-assurance they teach at Eton probably predisposes Cameron to the particular strain of delusional narcissism that starts with personal photographers and often ends with statues, flamboyant uniforms and renaming the moon after your mother, two points are worth making here. First, this condition is usually restricted to the cheesier kind of military dictator – or at least a leader strong enough to maintain a praetorian guard prepared to murder anyone who starts sniggering. It is, therefore, extremely rare in democracies with minority governments propped up precariously by unreliable coalition partners. And the second thing, of course, is that it almost always takes longer than six months to kick in.
This leads me to my second unanswered question. Are David Cameron and George Osborne really and truly sinister Thatcherite boys from Brazil, carefully nurtured over the decades to finish the job, or are they actually what they appear to be? That is, a couple of rather bumptious posh boys who think, thanks to generations of comfortable living, that things will turn out the way they want them to just because they say so?
I genuinely don’t know the answer to this and the consequences are going to be pretty grim for many people either way. But, rather comfortingly, I suspect that those in the Thatcherite illuminati who’ve been grooming them so assiduously haven’t quite sussed the boys’ real nature either. There’s hope nestling somewhere in there that the whole enterprise will collapse rather faster than anyone might now imagine.
And that, in its turn, begs another question. If they’re as politically nifty as they think they are, why don’t Cameron and Osborne show how we’re all in this together by simply renouncing their inherited wealth and giving the lot to the Exchequer? Stanley Baldwin did it after the First World War, and while there’s no guarantee that either of them would ever be able to get a proper job in the outside world (Osborne’s last real job outside the Conservative Party was at Selfridges), in tactical terms such a move would wrong-foot their opponents for at least a decade.
I think we probably all know the answer to that question, which is just another mark against Cameron, for being so drearily predictable in his class-consciousness. Funny, isn’t it, how across the political spectrum it always seems to be the left which has to “think the unthinkable” and abandon its aspirations when faced with the “real world”, while the right – and the rich – never have to compromise a thing in order to get along fine in a reality mostly of their own construction?
So I’m tempted not even to ask another question that’s been nagging me for years, the one about why so many apparently smart little chaps genuinely seem to believe that another social construct – that series of human exchanges they call “the market” – is as uncontrollable as the weather and why therefore it’s also their sacred duty to brick up the entrances to all the hurricane shelters.
Here’s one last question, which struck me when I was reading about the recent death of the former Argentine president Nestor Kirchner, who memorably ignored the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund, revived his bankrupt country’s fortunes by appealing to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and thus protected his fellow Argentines from unimaginable hardships, in the way governments are meant to protect their citizens.
According to the article, “markets rallied” on the news of his death, as it could lead to greater investment opportunities for multinational corporations. So my last question is this: if you consider humanity as a whole to be a single, individual human being, is free-market capitalism most like a virus? Or cancer? Or a tapeworm? Answers on a postcard, please.
