Though Cowards Flinch

During the 2001 election, which Tony Blair went on to win securing a second term, pollsters from ICM came up with the phrase “Pebbledash people” as the group the Tories had to woo in order for them to have a fighting chance of winning. They were married couples aged 35 to 50, white-collar workers and professionals, who lived in semi-detached, often pebble dashed, homes in the suburb.

The group is just one example of cohorts, conveniently congealed together, that political parties feel they need to fight for in order to win an election. With Thatcher, the “Basildon Man” or “Essex Man” explained her electoral success, while with Tony Blair he fondly remembers “Mondeo Man” who went on to be the face of New Labour’s new constituency.

With the Tories, who they designate as must-grab voters is always very interesting. The very wealthy are usually sold come what (M)ay, whereas the working class Tory vote may be harder to pin down – particularly in times when they are feeling the pinch as much as anyone.

In a recent YouGov poll, their volunteers decided which political parties their favourite soap stars would vote for. Surprisingly (or stupidly) the majority of those who took part in the survey decided Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses would vote Labour, despite clearly being a typical working class Conservative. We know this because he tries, by all means, to be someone who he is not i.e. one who throws French words, erroneously, into casual speech, pretense he lives the life of the rich and famed, appeals to a millionaire’s lifestyle, fancy cocktails in working men’s clubs, and the constant, failing, hope for aspiration “this time next year we’ll be millionaires”.

Seemingly, Del Boy is the perfect “Basildon Man” – despite not being from Basildon. But “Basildon Man” is not only about appeals to false aspiration. The advertising magazine Campaign tried to describe them via reference to a current politician at the time, a fellow Basildonian, on 26 January 1990: “Representative [David Amess, a] new Essex man, working-class, father electrician, right-wing, keen hanger, noisily rambunctious, no subtlety”. If it sounds like someone you know, I wonder if they’re thinking of changing their vote this coming election?

Tim Montgomerie’s column in today’s Times (£) reveals a rumour that two Conservative MPs are “seriously considering” defecting to UKIP. They would not be the first – there is Alexandra Swann, Bob Spink and Roger Helmer, too. The type of voter being lost here looks and sounds a lot like how Campaign describe David Amess. UKIP are stealing “Basildon Man” from the Tories.

The question is can Cameron’s Tories afford to lose him? They could not get a majority last time, and since the departure of Steve Hilton, the chirpy chirpy compassionate conservative narrative has been silent. But it has not been replaced with a politics that can usefully take on UKIP for the Tory right vote. Has it got the bottle to fight for the political centre, or will it give in to the right closer to the election? Cameron has a pig of a job in the next few months!

I’ve just had the misfortune of reading one of those dreadful articles which makes you hate yourself on a Saturday morning, even more than your headache does already. The author? Zoe Williams (well, who else?).

In it, she testifies to waiting with baited breathe for a renaissance of left wing comedy, now that David Cameron and his Tories are in public office (for how long now, 18 months – has she just realised).

It will go for the jugular of David Cameron’s big society, and while I see a lot to mock about how ridiculously optimistic BS is, let’s not forget that it is basically the equivalent of pulling money out of a service and saying “right, see how that works for you now you have no guaranteed funding”.

The joke she quotes in her defense seems odd. It is by Stewart Lee, who if only for his gall, I am a very big fan of. The joke goes as follows:

the Libyans … when they didn’t like their leader, they dragged him out of a sewer pipe, shot him in the face, and put him in a meat fridge. Nobody told them to, they just went ahead and did it. That’s the big society in action, David Cameron.

It’s funny because it is exaggerating. The words he uses are unpleasant and blunt (“meat fridge” and “shot him in the face”); but does something that Cameron will inevitably score political points on (i.e. the successful campaign, helped by Nato, against a tyrant with severe intentions) threaten to knock him off his high stool?

Later in the article Williams calls Frankie Boyle anti-political (as opposed to somebody like Stewart Lee). Funny (!) that elsewhere in the Guardian, Boyle levels the same criticism towards Lee.

Boyle rants:

It seems to me [Stewart Lee is] irrelevant and flabby. OK, you don’t like Russell Howard; that’s fine. But don’t put on your posters “a new kind of political comedy”. Yeah, without any politics.

Is this absence of politics not because, like it or loathe it, we are not at a stage where Cameron is as divisive as, say, Thatcher?

Williams notes the playwright Tim Fountain, who admitted:

We’re not at that point, yet, where you can just say ‘I hate David Cameron’ and get a huge laugh. But we will be soon.

Is it because he hasn’t done enough yet? The left wing comedians of the 80s hardly ever touched upon the ill-fortunes of those led under a fiscal conservative government. They rallied against the absurd pomp and arrogance of the figures like Cecil and Nigel Lawson. Today, the only way to attack Cameron is to call him a try hard, or a man tied up in his own guilt.

On the social, Cameron is as left wing as anyone. Hear the tirades by the right of his party:

he became focused on subjects of interest to, well, Guardian readers. His obsessions became your obsessions. Climate change. More women candidates. Civil liberties. Gay rights. Some of these changes were necessary, but many actually worsened the Tories’ fundamental brand problem. Support for renewable subsidies means Cameron has added to struggling families’ energy bills. Civil libertarianism meant Tories got on the wrong side of public support for CCTV. Rather than achieving a deep diversity of candidates, Cameron replaced some male barristers with female barristers and white bankers with black bankers.

Only today Cameron said this: ”I don’t believe private provision is always better”. He did go on to say “There are brilliant examples of state provision, voluntary provision and private provision” just to cover his back, but he is, as Tim Montgomerie said, trying to make his obsessions the obsessions of Guardian readers.

My advice to left wing comics is as follows: it’s not the same as the 80s, the government is not avowedly right wing anymore, they are a weird postmodern left of centre fiscal conservative government. If you can find a joke in that, give it a shot.

An Ipsos MORI poll in January 2011 had it that 11% of the public liked Ed Miliband but disliked the Labour party, while 20% did not like Ed but did like the Labour party.

In this period Miliband’s total “likeability”, according to the pollsters, was the same as Michael Howard’s in April 2008.

Over the period between October 2010 and February 2011 the proportion of the public who were dissatisfied with Ed almost doubled from 22% to 43%.

Furthermore, the polls picked up a lower “don’t know” percentage than is typical of an opposition leader. This means that many more people have an opinion on the leader of the opposition, today, and according to polls it has been negatively placed.

YouGov, for the Sunday Times, have today revealed another uncomfortable figure that shows Ed Miliband’s “well figure” of 26% equaling the lowest he’s seen.

The percentages for David Cameron have increased by 2% while Ed has dropped 4%. And yet, this month’s ComRes online poll for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror shows Labour to be leading the Tories by 4% – signalling no change for Labour, but a drop of 2% for the Tories.

The perception of Ed Miliband has changed very little over the year. While the Labour party tops polls, particularly now the cuts are starting to bite (despite the majority of the public, according to other polls, saying they agree with the Coalition’s economic policy – though whether they agree with this being frontloaded onto the frontline remains to be seen), Ed Miliband himself is not being trusted by the public.

More disagree today that Ed Miliband would be better protecting jobs than they did in April and January this year, and less agree today than they did in January and April.

On other points of note, most people agree that there is a class system today, while fewer see themselves as working class. Ipsos MORI made a damning statement looking at the Labour party vote in the last election saying a “working class” party, given the percentage of people who identify as such, and the percentage of those people who vote, is not feasible anymore. So perhaps the squeezed middle strategy was right, and so too the appeal against predatory capitalism?

Whatever your thoughts, it is not working for Ed, the figurehead of these moves.

Nothing other than concern can be said for these results. We cannot believe everything we read in polls, but they are the best indicator we have, and they are often very close to correct. We are where Gordon Brown was coming up to the election of 2010 a year later, even with a new leader, and a government doing unimaginable things without mandate. This is greatly worrying.

Paul said it better than I ever could earlier:

It’s a pity … Sean Woodward doesn’t read Though Cowards Flinch regularly. We’d be a lot further forward if he did.

The reason being is Though Cowards Flinch blog was wise to the fact the Tories were pushing rightwards yonks ago.

Here I’ll point out why we knew that.

In 2009 a study was carried out by Political Quarterly around the time of Cameron’s successful leadership election. It showed that in 2005, of the 198 sitting Tory MPs 91% were Eurosceptics, 81% were economically “dry” and 73% were “conservative” on social, sexual and moral issues. According to Edward Turner (doc), it seems uncertain that the Tory party has shifted its Thatcherism, despite having tried to re-paint the image of the party in light of Thatcherism’s toxicity.

But Cameron did not create compassionate conservatism – big society and broken Britain were two attempts in the mold of the Etonian’s predecessors.

William Hague told the Tory party conference in 1997 that “compassion is not an bolt-on extra to conservatism but is at its very core”. This was when Hague was floating the idea of equalising the age of consent for homosexuals. Only 16 Tory MPs voted for this and Hague was forced to retain section 28 (needless to say there were those recent smears – undoubtedly residual pro-inequality seeping through).

When Hague was forced to take his party back to the Right, Ivan Massow complained of the “tabloidification” of the Conservatives and that regarding certain activists “theirs is the politics of the taxi driver” (pdf).

And so it remains.

Cameron is an image spinner, PR savvy, too. He had a lot of authorship over the 2005 manifesto which focused on immigration and asylum (are you thinking what we’re thinking?) but also led a party that tried to remove its brand of Thatcherism to the public – despite its politics still being prevalent with party activists.

Cameron’s game is to hide what remains – he has recognised that his party’s politics are out of kilter with the public mood, and has tried to pull the wool over our eyes – and I worry that this may have worked on the Labour Party. But no more – we can see the inner Thatcher, and it’s disgusting.

Update: Here’s a thing: Ivan Massow left the Conservative Party at the same time as Shaun Woodward did, both defecting to Labour.

Sir/Madame, tell me you can look at the cabinet without wincing emphatically and I’ll show you a liar.

Sir/Madame, must we not send these shreaking swines back to the decade from whence they came?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Lansley. Using the parlance of the modern day this wretched would prefer the day working men and their wives sought donations from the club house to afford operations, or where one was sick you kept your trap shut if you were to eat for the next month.

Sir/Madame, look at this other. Gove. Does he aspire to return all schools to the ethic of the three B’s, common knowledge of all public schoolboys of a certain age: bullying, beating, and buggery. The headteacher is less a patient confidant, and more an authoritarian dictator. But times have changed dear Gove. If everything is above board then what you call bureaucracy is little more than an audit towards reaping success. Keep up Gove.

Sir/Madame, are you aware of who the British Generals would denigrate as ‘gippos’ first? It was the Eyptians, during the Suez Crisis in the fifties. Do you suspect Generals today curse the Libby’s, or the Gaddy’s? Gaddy’s boys, the Gaddy Arabs? Sir/Madame, look at this one. Hague. Do you think he ever sniffs Anthony Eden’s draw box? Or do you think he ever wanted to delineate Anthony Nutting?

Sir/Madame, look at these two. Clegg and Cameron. Are you surprised? Do you wince? Do you think their compassion consists in wanting to share, nay impose, the worst of the lifestyle of the ruling class upon us grounded, not landed, folk?

Sir/Madame, are these conservative men ripping down our institutions from inside? Did they not realise we must desist from change if its success rests upon luck?

Sir/Madame, did they not realise that it was private interest and interference that slowed down and frustrated the national health service during the terms of the last cabinet. Are they aware this service, free at the point of entry, is an inscription of welfare as a right of citizenry, there to stop anyone from falling through the net, commissioned only through donations of that grandest of traditions the state?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Duncan-Smith. Does he not acknowledge welfare as a right of citizenry?

Sir/Madame, I am under little doubt these thugs understand nothing of what they are doing. But quite why we should tolerate them while they do it is beyond me. Are we yet fit for revolt?

The rise in service sector machine labour is likely to shrink the numbers of employed, and is a problem that has been coming for years.

In economic recovery, while the rest of Europe races ahead of the UK, we wait for the government to admit their little plan is not working – some of us await the day they renege on their ideas completely and take a more sensible route to reducing the budget deficit while ensuring jobs and growth.

Though in fairness the need to provide better jobs is not a recent one. Thatcher dreamed of leading a country in battle; the empire was over so the battleground was in the economy. She destroyed industry without providing a plan for the skilled workforce, reducing whole towns to misery and depression – many not yet recovered.

Council tax in affluent areas was slashed, Britain was a haven for the rich, and a place in the doldrums for the poor. While budding Del Boys were fed a delusion about being Middle Class, the country was handed over to the city to make heroes of suited gamblers with the nation’s assets at stake.

But at what price for the rest of society? The once skilled workforce were told to get on their bikes or get stuffed. Those lucky enough to live in towns with an existing service sector were fodder for a new branch of labour, low-paid, un-unionised, and de-motivating.

And so it remains, only those jobs are in jeopardy now, too. The service sector doesn’t owe the country jobs, it owes its management profits. It doesn’t owe its workforce a living wage, it utilises the unceasing amount of labour (for example in London last year companies recorded 32 people applying for every job) at the lowest possible cost.

It has been reported that the food chain McDonalds ‘is about to revolutionize the way customers order meals in its restaurants by introducing touchscreen terminals and swipe cards, replacing cashiers and the use of banknotes at its 7,000 fast-food restaurants in Europe’.

With such disregard of human labour (self-service checkouts are a commonplace in many supermarkets and cinemas today) it will be impossible for a cash-strapped public sector to rely on the private sector to fill in its place.

The service industry, which has always boasted offering unskilled work where skilled labour had all but ceased to exist in some parts of the country, has no duty to providing jobs, but to investing in new ways of increasing productivity and lowering overheads.

This might be an eminently sensible business model when the motive is profit alone, but the availability of cheap machine labour is coming at the expense of human labour – at a time when jobs are few and far between in all sectors.

It’s high time the government took a real look at what its economic policies are doing, and question what effect its actions are having on jobs, and re-think those it wants to entrust when the state is shrunk to next to nothing.

He won’t tell me any details, but apparently Paul – yes, you know him, the one who writes on this blog – spoke to none other than Phillip Blond at the Labour Party conference, supposedly – and among other things – about me and my utilisation of the term “epistemic closure” to designate a good portion of the electorate who support the Conservative Party, despite being theoretically very removed from actual conservatism.

Paul has written some blog posts opposing my use of this term, so I can only imagine it was a critical conversation, but at least I got those two fogey’s talking.

Not one to blow my own, it turns out I’m not alone in thinking there is some parity in the Conservative Party and those for whom the charge “epistemically closed” had originally been levelled at by Julian Sanchez – those dreaded Tea Party folk in the US.

Four days ago, Patrick J. Buchanan of The American Conservative magazine – yes my favourite too – labelled Cameron the ‘Tea Party Tory’. (h/t Freddy Gray of the Speccie).

In fact, he goes further than I do. In my writings, I said Cameron is probably a limp-wristed leftie Tory who is able to sleep at night under the pretence he cares for the poor, but in order to be electable in his party, needs to appeal to a certain section of the party, what I call the epistemically closed section.

Buchanan, in fact, says that Cameron’s party’s cuts reflect exactly the ethos of the tea party – small government at a drastic scale.

No doubt as the money talks, Cameron’s soft social Toryism will be piss in the wind compared to the damage wielded by his cust agenda. Perhaps I didn’t go far enough in calling Cameron out for the epistemic closure inside his party.

Background articles:

The epistemic closure of the Conservative Party

Cameron will fail in reviving Conservatism

David Cameron and the Conservative identity crisis