Here’s an interesting passage from Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli, Michael Foot’s favourite Tory: “The real cause of [the Dutch] invasion [of 1688] was financial. The Prince of Orange had found the resources of Holland were…inadequate to sustain in his rivalry with the great sovereign of France… The prince came, and used our constitution for his purpose: he introduced into England the system of Dutch finance. The principle of that system was to mortgage industry in order to protect property: abstractedly, nothing can be conceived more unjust; its practice in England has been equally injurious… [and] pursued more or less for nearly a century and a half, has ended in the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude. Nor have the demoralising consequences of the funding system on the more favoured classes been less decided. It has made debt a national habit; it has made credit the ruling power… it has introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard, and dishonest spirit in the conduct of both public and private life; a spirit dazzling yet dastardly; reckless of consequences and yet shrinking from responsibility. And in the end… the moral condition of the people has been entirely lost sight of.”
Forgive me for quoting that at such length, but over a century and half after the founder of the modern Conservative Party wrote it, it’s worth savouring. It is, after all, an indictment of banking and “financial services” every bit as telling as Marx’s more general critique of capitalism, written a decade or so later. Moreover, it’s part of a specifically Tory analysis, which Disraeli himself sought to use to inform his unsuccessful attempt to forge an alliance between the landowning gentry and the workers, in order to thwart the capitalists after the repeal of the corn laws.
As such, you’d think it might appeal to Disraeli’s Tory heirs, born of the class he spent a lifetime aspiring to join. Considering that David Cameron is descended in a direct line from William IV and that George Osborne will one day inherit an Irish baronetcy, both of them, along with a lot of the rest of the Cabinet, and with only minor costume changes, could have walked straight out of an Anthony Trollope novel.
But to think that would be to make the same serial error as Disraeli himself. He may have led the Conservative Party, but he never quite understood it, while it never entirely trusted him. True, most Tory leaders find themselves in the same position, Cameron more than many. But Cameron nonetheless has that dominant Tory gene which defines the DNA of conservatism. Instinctively, in common with lackeys everywhere, Tony Blair and beta-level baboons, he worships power.
As I’ve written in this column before, the Tories originally emerged as a loose parliamentary block in support of the later Stuarts and their attenuated concept of the divine right of kings. Through the centuries, the party mutated into the party of Anglicanism, monarchy, aristocracy, landowners, capitalists, businessmen, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, Britain and bankers, while many of these groups should, in theory, be mutually hostile. But the quality they’ve all had, when the Tories have claimed to represent them, is power, pure and simple, and with neither need, nor room, for ideology.
It was her commitment to ideology that made Margaret Thatcher so distinctly un-Tory, and that fuelled her equally un-Tory contempt for the kind of deference the Tory grandees expected from her. Instead they got the sack. Cameron, however, is profoundly Tory in his freedom from ideology, whatever it may look like from outside the comfortable acres of rolling pasture and parkland in his mind. But viewed through their eyes, I suspect Cameron and Osborne are dismantling the state simply because they genuinely believe that the rich and powerful are better at running everything because… well, because they’re rich and powerful, obviously.
So anyone with clear vision can see that the main “enemies of enterprise” at present aren’t the civil service or regulations preventing cowboys from building schools likely to collapse on their pupils, but the banks. And yet Cameron and Osborne are unlikely to do anything to punish, stigmatise or even rein in the banks, whatever Disraeli may have said about them, because their reflex response to power is too ingrained. Nor will they do anything except go out of their way to accommodate the ever expanding, balefully banal empire of trash of Rupert Murdoch and his family, and for the same reason.
Add to that Cameron and Osborne’s breathtaking capacity for brazen lying and you have the final proof of the truth of my analysis. Words, quite simply, don’t matter. The function of humans is to fawn to and flatter the rich and powerful, and everyone knows that you don’t really mean what you say when you flatter someone. So the meaning of language becomes redundant, and it’s reduced merely to noise.
What other possible explanation can there be for Britain’s Prime Minister, having already declared war on his own civil service, telling his supporters in Cardiff last weekend that, in promoting the arms trade, he will unashamedly “hustle for Britain”? Or did he truly mean that his office now amounts to little more than a rent boy turning a trick down the Dilly? But then the horrible thought suddenly occurs that maybe he did…
