Flight of the posh

By Ivan Briscoe
For the Herald

Saved by a war and some green shoots in a moribund economy, Margaret Thatcher managed to ride out the tide of rebellions that swelled up in her first few years in government. The survivalist logic devised by the grand dame of British politics in the early 1980s seems to have left its imprint on Prime Minister David Cameron recently.

Cameron’s past two weeks have brought a fever of announcements, hotspots and the plan to build a new, very fast train. Look for a war; hope for a recovery.

But that is too superficial an interpretation of the Tory leader’s strategy. Mixed in with his descent on Tripoli’s Martyr Square and panic stations during the Algerian hostage crisis, has been a considered mauling of the European Union, and a seemingly sincere call for an end to world poverty. For those who might wish to see these various geopolitical strikes as rice paper atop a soggy macaroon of economic stagnation, Cameron has riposted with the train, and could well push for more expansionist spending in the coming months.

“Red meat” was the curious phrase of choice handed around by the prime minister’s coterie when asked to describe the content of his speech on the EU delivered a fortnight ago. The beef in question — a demand to repatriate powers from Brussels, and stage an in/out referendum on Britain’s new European deal in 2017 — was intended to stuff the vampirish mouths of backbench Tory parliamentarians demanding a show of right-wing strength. For a time, they seemed placated. But the nature of the carnal comparison, summoning up the thought of a lion tamer inserting an evening meal through the slots of a cage, does not exactly reflect well on Cameron’s relations with his own party.

Crucially, it is ever more apparent that the distrust is mutual. Within the Conservative Party, which is possibly the most Marxist right-wing force in the world if judged in terms of inner schisms, ideological protuberances and general simmering revolt, Cameron is not widely liked. One Member of Parliament, quoted in the British press, put it thus: “Colleagues are fed up with the posh boys. They do not look like the country. I would love it if a working class guy of mixed race became our leader.”

The aspiration in question alluded to a plot, abruptly denied by all sides, to unseat the Tory leader in favour of a self-made millionaire called Adam Afriyie, whose skin colour resembles that of President Obama even if his beliefs owe somewhat more to Goldman Sachs and the Austrian School.

But never mind: impressions are what matter. And so long as the economy bumps along the drainage pipe, leaking GDP as it enters its third recession in five years, Conservatives will continue to conspire around a means to inject popular support via the nearest available syringe. Another possible alternative to Cameron, London Mayor Boris Johnson, also appeals to certain populist quarters through his mix of verbal dexterity and louche panache. As he put it recently, the talk of fiscal austerity, of “hair-shirt and drinking our own urine and God knows what,” should be ditched in favour of glowing investments in steel and concrete.

However, ditching Cameron is about as foolish as it gets for a party without a majority in the Commons. Though he has certainly emerged from the bowels of privilege, he polls consistently higher than his own party. He is terribly polite, excepting some bulldog references to the Malvinas dispute, and has managed to resurrect a political brand soiled by hardline free-market demagoguery. Had he been governing an economy that, as under Tony Blair, grew without any particular command or control from ministers, then it is likely he would be heading for clear electoral victory in two years’ time. That would be his idyll: there is nothing that might suit Cameron better that a warm, patrician glow as he takes credit for economic achievements he has had nothing to do with.

But that was Harold Macmillan’s pleasure in the late 1950s. Cameron is being snubbed by the stubborn flat-line on the GDP graph. It is true that a large part of this must be attributed to his own error in allowing his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to snap the belt tight from 2010 out of fear of a Greek debacle. But it’s also true that the British economy is displaying a number of eccentricities in its current state that owe much to the path taken over the past 30 years. Wealth and income are as imbalanced as a tottering giant: the average house in London, at 350,000 pounds, costs six times the price of the same in the northern town of Hull. Unemployment has not grown much in recent years, but productivity, the surest sign of what people’s labour is really worth, has fallen. A recent article in The Economist wrung its hands over the possible causes of this oddity. Raw common sense, on the other hand, would say that this is what you get when 77 percent of the economy is composed of services, and where the most employable skill set seems to be frothing milk or conducting a survey.

Cameron is not entirely to blame for his birth, his voice or his government’s economic inheritance. Yet, as if in a morality tale of Sartrean existentialism, he is answering the immovable facts of history and the implacable hate of his colleagues by seeking a place to be free — out of Parliament and outside Britain, beyond Europe, on a world stage that the new Obama presidency seems for now to shun. Perhaps he will not find a great cause, but by jove he will have a good time trying.