BACK TO THE FUTURE

THE BRITAIN IN WHICH I WAS YOUNG was an easy place to understand. Conservatives were rich toffs, the Labour Party was full of useless no-hopers, the Liberals were a joke and there was a bubbling-under threat of violence and extremism. The early seventies was also a time when travel to the continent was an unearthly expense, most people had to think hard about the cost of driving a car and the England football team was an international joke.

ALTHOUGH SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE, as in the England football team, from the eighties on two remarkable politicians managed to alter this comfortable state of things. The accrued efforts of Messrs Thatcher and Blair and the support of a shaven and coiffured, well-dressed middle class managed to turn Britain into a dynamic, vibrant powerhouse of economic development and financial strength, putting the UK on a footing with the USA on all fronts in the early nineties – compared with 1973, when Britain had to borrow money from Holland to stay afloat. This disappointing state of things was also made possible by the fact that the “upper” class, under both leaders, was forced to cough up a fair whack of its income, and benefits to the unwashed were cut, making people who had a natural bent for the sofa (at both ends of the scale) get up, turn off the TV (or put the Port bottle away) and get out and work.

FORTUNATELY, THERE IS ALWAYS BLIGHT at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long it is, and thus came Brown and then Cameron, beaming in their joy at sending us back to the seventies. Brown’s part in all this was to ruin the value of the economy by talking about joining the Euro and to reduce the value of work by increasing benefits for unemployment to a state where it was almost foolish to want employment if you had two children. Brown was unable to complete the job, however, and so it has been left to Cameron to reduce taxation at the top end so much that it is once again possible for rich people to remain as idle and drunk as they were in the XVII century, watching their incomes spiral off the balance sheet from the bar of the House of Commons or Lords, according to which one they have persuaded the boy Cameron to let them enter.

ALL OF THIS WAS TO BE EXPECTED when we are governed by people who have never worked and have no idea of the “real” value of money in the “real” world (both Brown and Cameron), but what was lacking until yesterday was the final touch, that little je ne sais quoi that tells you that we have finally returned to the good old days of solid English Conservatism. Cameron’s “major speech” yesterday involved all the old clichés that Conservatives love. Immigrants and foreigners “cause havoc”, “discomfort and disjointedness”; they ruin our national character and “way of life”; and finally, the pièce de résistance, “many of them cannot speak English” and “don’t fit in”.

MUCH OF THIS IS NOT FAR FROM the British National Party (known as the National Front in the seventies) and its “we like foreigners but we think they should live in Foreignland” policy or its view that one can tell who really belong in this country “just by looking at them”. And, more importantly, it is much more of a vote-winner in the upcoming local elections than Cameron’s last major message in his keynote speech last month about hard times.

VOTERS, PARTICULARY LIBERALS and the middle classes, are fed up of being told to “cut back”, to reduce their spending and, as Ken Clarke stated, tighten their belts and go on a diet. Going on a diet involves tough choices about what to eat and drink or not. Perhaps we should follow the footsteps of the last Liberal leader. He decided to give up food altogether and do an alcohol only diet. He managed to lose about two days a week.

(My picture shows Mr Cameron, not behind bars, but with his wife on their recent midweek break in Foreignland)