After much thought, I have reached the conclusion that David Cameron is the biggest and most successful liar our parliamentary democracy has ever encountered. Yes, I know that’s a big claim. But the evidence is pretty clear: there surely has never been a greater gulf between what a prime minister has set out to do in office, and what he and his party said they would do during the preceding election.
What he is doing, with the tame acquiescence of Nick Clegg and his office-hungry Liberal Democrats, is nothing short of a massive right-wing counter-revolution against the post-war political consensus, mounted on a scale that even the Tea Party movement in the United States might fear was beyond their reach. He justifies it on the basis that clearing up the mess allegedly left behind by New Labour (itself a lie) demands nothing less. But as time has gone by since the election, it has become increasingly obvious that the real driving force is pure, naked right wing ideology.
That ideology is sometimes described as Thatcherite by Cameron’s critics. But this is a gross understatement. Margaret Thatcher would never have dared go as far as this Government, or across so wide a front. What’s more, she didn’t lie about her intentions (well, not much; it’s true there was the little matter of her 1979 pledge not to double VAT). The essential quality of the Iron Lady was that what you saw was what you got. By and large, she told you what she intended to do, and then she did it. That was why she was so widely admired, even by many of those who hated her politics.
Cameron, by contrast, tells you what he will do and then does the opposite—-and he does it with an air of self-confident affability which conveys the message that he is a decent sort of fellow who you can trust to do the right thing by the country. That is why Steve Bell, The Guardian’s award-winning cartoonist, always portrays him with a condom over his head. It is meant to tell you that he is a smooth, slippery, plasticky sort of person whom you can’t trust an inch.
But a condom, even one with a teat on the top, is hardly an adequate image to convey the full extent of Cameron’s dishonesty. In the light of what he is doing to local government services, to welfare benefits, to the NHS, and to the Navy, to name just a few of his targets, a death’s head would be a more suitable mask. For the reality is that he has set out to turn this country upside down before the next election, and in such a way that no incoming Labour government will be able to turn it back again. And he is doing it without the smallest trace of a mandate from the British people.
Even Cameron admits that he didn’t win the election. But even if he had won a
majority, he still wouldn’t have had a mandate for his current programme, because next to none of it was in his manifesto. So he is forced to claim that he didn’t realise the scale of the country’s deficit until he saw the books, a discovery which has required him to inflict far more drastic cuts than he had originally intended. But that is pure cobblers; the size of the deficit was well known at the time of the election, and the reason for its size was the huge cost of the bail-out operation which rescued our profligate banks and saved the country from financial collapse.
But in any case, Andrew Lansley’s insane plan to throw the NHS open to private contractors has nothing to do with cuts – indeed, it will very likely cost more than a publicly run service. His scheme is entirely driven by an ideological belief in the free market as a better service provider than the state. So what I want to know about this
plan is, first, did Lansley draw it up before the election and tell Cameron about it then? Or did he jot it down after the polls closed, and spring it on his boss after he got the health job?
The answers are important, because if Cameron knew before the election then he lied deliberately to the voters when he told us that there would be no top-down
re-organisation of the health service. But if the plan was dreamed up after the election then he is allowing Lansley, in defiance of his election promise, to engage in a wild, untested gamble with a national institution which is probably more widely loved than the Monarchy.
And the Royal Navy? Does anyone imagine that even Tory voters would have supported a party which promised to leave the senior service with an aircraft carrier that carries no aircraft; that can’t afford to keep a guardship in the Carribbean; and which wouldn’t have been able to send HMS Cumberland to Benghazi if the Libyan revolution had happened a few months later, because the ship would have been scrapped? This isn’t a Tory government; it’s a government of crazed zealots. I just wish our lot had half their aggression. Then we’d have a proper fight.
