You’re an RAF pilot shot down over wartime France. Miraculously, you survive, only to be immediately arrested by German soldiers, who deliver you into the hands of the Gestapo. They give you a hard time for a bit before losing interest and announcing, “For you Englander, ze war is over”.
You get taken to a camp full of other allied servicemen. Tired of vaulting over that bloody wooden horse in the exercise yard, you dig a tunnel and manage to escape.
Beret-clad, garlic-reeking resistance fighters find you and make arrangements to get you back to Blighty so you can return to the fray. Only, it turns out half of them are Nazi agents, so after shouting “You’re flies are undone!” at exactly the right moment, you manage to escape again. You stumble upon a German airfield, knock out all the guards, and, with a cry of “I’ll be back, Fritz!”, you hijack a Messerschmitt, fly across the Channel, and, running out of fuel over the White Cliffs of Dover, manage to land unharmed in a nearby field. You eventually end up being ushered into Winston Churchill’s presence in the Cabinet War Room. He smiles at you, asks the others to leave the room, and, when you’re alone, pulls out a luger, snarls “For you, Englander, ze war is over!” and shoots you.
This scenario (which may very well turn out to be the plot of Quentin Tarantino’s next film) flashed unbidden into me head when I heard David Cameron railing against Oxford University for only allowing in one black student last year. There I was, supposing that truly stupid policies were the price Cameron was having to pay for needing the LidDems to get him into No. 10 after his dismal failure to win the last election – but no, he turns out to be yet another ghastly liberal fantasist willing to lie in order to win an argument (see my last post, if you can be bothered). 27 black students got into Oxford in the year to which Cameron was referring. Yes, only one of them was a black UK student of Caribbean origin – but, then, just over 400 BUKSOCOs got three A-levels, compared with 29,000 for the population as a whole, so unless we’re going to force Oxbridge colleges to accept any BUKSOCO who manages to get three A grades (and, believe me, they will eventually) I really don’t see that it’s any of the government’s business.
If you’d asked me five years ago whether I’d ever consider voting UKIP, I would have laughed scornfully in your face– I’ve never been that keen on businessmen in double-breasted blazers guzzling gin in the saloon bar and saying things like, “Know what this country needs? A military coup!”. Now, I’m not sure there’s any alternative (to voting UKIP, I mean – I’m not the military coup type). After all, when not one of the major parties is willing to offer what you want on Europe, Law and Order, Higher Education, the NHS, the Environment, Defence or Public Spending, what else is a believer in democracy to do but support a party that has sensible policies on every one of these major issues?
It won’t be a big wrench for me – I feel no strong emotional attachment to the Tory Party. For instance, I didn’t count myself a supporter after that wretched man Ted Heath became leader. I only returned to the fold because of Margaret Thatcher, Sir Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit: most of the rest of them were revolting. My support for the Tories is based almost entirely on the loathing I feel for the Labour Party rather than any enthusiasm for the anaemic placemen who seem to make up the rank and file of Conservative MPs these days.
The job of the Tories right now is to stand firm against trendy liberal “thinking”. Not only are they not doing this, they’re gleefully embracing every bit of faddish silliness that urban liberals can dream up. Wind-farms?Love ‘em! Community sentences? Gosh, how civilised! Make universities pay for the failure of the state education system? You bet! Pour yet more money into our dismally failing Health Service? Rath-er! Spend a fortune propping up a currency we don’t even belong to? Super! Keep allowing in zillions of immigrants when our infrastructure can’t cope with the ones we’ve already got? Hey – sounds terrific! Get our military embroiled in a foreign civil war without any definable goal or exit strategy? You’re talking my language!
Better go out and buy a double-breasted blazer, I suppose. Pity I can’t stand gin.
Understand the temptation of UKIP…but then I hear them speaking and know I just couldn’t bring myself to support them no matter how convincing their policies…shallow I know. Last time the Tories were this wet your great heroine Mrs. T appeared, so there’s always hope. Patience.
ReplyDeleteSunday, April 24, 2011 - 11:00 PM
Harumphrey is right, of course. The double breasted blazer/gin/pub bore factor is one thing. That's the thoughtful wing. You only have to go on the Spectator Coffee House for 5 minutes and you will come across the uncomprehending, foaming at the mouth, dotty core of the party. They are not big enough to vet their candidates and there's a fair bet you'll be voting for some one straight out of the North Minehead by-election sketch.
ReplyDelete"Darling. I've invited the Farages down for the weekend." Doesn't quite seem the ticket, does it?
Monday, April 25, 2011 - 12:34 PM
Yes, but… every political party harbours a core of hard-line loonies. You two make it sound as if every Conservative MP, peer and supporter are rational and lovable and civilised, and, of course, we know that many of them are utterly detestable. Labour’s even worse. The Lib-Dems… no, that doesn’t work, they’re all ghastly. I’d much rather have spent an amusing evening with the likes of Francis Pym or Lord Carrington than most right-wing Tories – the wets were generally well-educated and civilised people (more “rounded”) but I loathed their limp-wristed assumption that this country was headed down the crapper and we should at least try to have an amusing time while it was doing so. It’s politics – policies count: Tory policies = wet liberal internationalist wishful thinking, while UKIP policies = common sense. The old argument that the Tories at least provided a bulwark against destructive Labour policies won’t wash any longer – many of their policies are destructive Labour policies!
ReplyDeleteMonday, April 25, 2011 - 01:02 PM
Yes but....You, DM, Harumphrey and I could don blazers, head for the pub, get some gin in and within an hour we would have a wish list (or rant list) as good as Farage's, which we might call "And Another Thing". At the end of that process, if one of us said "I want you to go to your constituencies and prepare for Government" the other three would fall off their chairs.
ReplyDeleteThat's really my point. No one has yet made the observation that the collapse of the Lib Dem vote is partly due to the fact that many of their life-long supporters are only realising once they've seen them trying to govern, how completely off the point most of them are.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - 11:52 AM