Yet To Speak

So now we are to be ruled by a firm of undertakers, Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, men of little genuine compassion, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, whose windy empty rhetoric speaks only of a sour prejudice, the disdain of those who do not need the state, for the state. A government without a mandate.

I listened yesterday to Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political correspondent as he smugly dismissed the prospect of widespread unrest as a consequence of the government’s draconian spending cuts. At the same time a senior policeman was warning that cutting police numbers could threaten their ability to handle the consequent unrest resulting from the government’s spending cuts, (incidentally how disgusting is this latter statement at so many levels.).

Cameron, Mr nice guy, all teeth, oozing good looks and sincerity, the face of this Condemn trick, represents all that is most unpleasant in contemporary politics, the victory of PR over anything resembling substance, the face of the clever Tory. George Orwell once said that the day the Tories became clever it was time to check your watch and feel for your small change. Well they are not yet that clever and they need to bear in mind that there is another English tradition, (the Scots and Welsh have their own noble and significant traditions). This is the tradition of revolt and protest running through The Chartists, Peterloo, The Suffragettes, the General Strike, CND and the Poll Tax Riot. Perhaps Nick Robinson is correct but I am not so sure.

"But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us by. But never forget.”[1]


[1] GK Chesterton

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