Liking Cameron More

I really respect politicians who will talk like real people, not like media-friendly quote-generating machines. In last year’s US election I was hoping Fred Thompson could gain the candidacy, and it is one reason Daniel Hannan and Boris Johnson are so impressive (I see no need to talk like real, uneducated people).

That is of course one thing that annoys me about David Cameron. I can see why he is timid with the media. They have misrepresented the Conservative Party for so long, and spread so much socialist propaganda that it is very hard to persuade people that racists are not necessarily right-wing for example. Cameron does have to be careful what he says, as do all his senior people, as the Guardian and the BBC will wilfully distort his words, and the new media do not yet have the reach to correct them.

However I think he has generally been too careful. Most critically this means he has failed at times to argue the case for capitalism and small government. On top of this it has made him seem far more bland than I think he really is.

I think that is why Guido Fawkes's quote of the day pleased me, and made me think better of Cameron.

“…in the restaurants on the parliamentary estate you can treat yourself to a ‘lean salad of lemon and lime-marinated roasted tofu with baby spinach and rocket, home-roasted plum tomatoes and grilled ficelle crouton’ for just £1.70. That’s all thanks to you: taxpayers’ cash subsidising a politician’s food and drink. Well I suppose LibDems have to have something to eat…”

Now that is the sort of thing real people say about rivals.

A relevant point is made with banter, apt and witty without being nasty. Suddenly Cameron the toff seems more human and more ‘of the people’ than any Labour postman or ship’s steward.

Independent Prattle

It is the silly season, and the Independent on Sunday is taking the opportunity to dig well into the Conservatives. Of course the story is quite without news value, as Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home explains. After all what possible relevance does the value of accrued wealth of those benefactors have? It is hardly as if a member working in an Essex car plant is going to donate a flight to Mr Cameron.

The most ironic comment in the article in the article is that this destroys Mr Cameron’s environmental claims. The Independent’s view that ‘global warming’ (or ‘climate change’ since there have been no sunspots for 36 days, so obviously CO2 no longer traps heat as we contemplate lighting the fire in August) is the most important environmental issue. Perhaps they might have bothered to investigate a little further. Maybe looked at the website of the company run by the Henry Lawson who gave Mr Cameron more flights than any other donor. It is Henfield Lodge Aviation, a ‘carbon-neutral’ aviation company.

I actually saw Cameron being walked out to one of the flights marked on the Indie’s silly little map. He waved at me. He was walking to a Beech 200 Kingair. This is a small turboprop, a very modest aircraft. I knew where he was going (any other transport would have been impractical), and as an aviation professional I can say not only that it was exactly the right aircraft for the job but also that most customers would have demanded a jet.

Oh, and fire your subeditors, Independent on Sunday. “Where David Cameron Has Been Flown For Free” is not only a horribly-written headline that sounds childish, it is grammatically incorrect.

Politics of Envy

A good piece by Janet Daley in the Telegraph blogs today had me thinking about the politics of envy, what it means and why it is generally applied to the left, when envy is pretty much universal in humans (and even many animals).

The piece points out that in Labour before New Labour, and in society before Margaret Thatcher, “… self-determination and individual aspiration had to be seen as the exclusive province of the petit bourgeois middle classes”. Libertarianism was, in effect, incompatible with British society before Mrs Thatcher. Since she was voted in on my sixth birthday it is hard for me to have a clear impression, but from what I know I can quite believe it.

So now consider envy. It is, as I have said, a human emotion, not specific to any class or political group. However I can think of three rational responses to envy.

• Work hard to achieve more of what inspires envy
• Demand that you deserve what inspires envy, and it should be given to you
• Prevent the people who are envied from having their enviable benefits

The first is of course one of the driving forces of capitalism. In his book The Armchair Economist (a fascinating book, by the way) Stephen Landsburg suggests quite convincingly that the reason top executives are well paid is not to make them work hard, but to make the rest of the management work hard. Envy of his salary makes people want to achieve his position.

The second and third are both embraced by socialism.

If you are a driver on an underground train your work is not terribly specialised; most people could be trained to do it. Therefore the natural salary is not high. A driver who envies others’ high salaries could work lots of overtime, or work to improve his qualifications and find another job. The socialist worker goes on strike for higher pay. The socialist government takes the benefits from the envied and gives them to the envious.

Finally we come to the connection with my quote from Mrs Daley. If “self-determination and individual aspiration [are] seen as the exclusive province of the petit bourgeois middle classes” then the only way to cope with envy is to prevent self determination, and thwart aspiration. Hence the left-wing attacks on education, the very engine of aspiration, and hence the strong connection between socialism and authoritarianism.

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, to give him what little he is due, understood that individual aspiration is not exclusive, and Thatcher at least understood that self-determination not class underlies aspiration.

In that way Tony Blair could justify to a limited degree his silly claim to be the heir to Thatcherism. It is in delivery that they part, she largely succeeding, he seeming to mistrust self determination and being prevented by his out-of-date party (as even he acknowledged; the “forces of conservatism'” did not have a capital ‘C’) from actually making anything of this revelation.

That is why the Thatcher years were remarkable for social mobility, and New Labour years for the return of social stagnation. It is in the response to the politics of envy.

Just Grow Up!

The Spectator Coffee House has a brief piece discussing a post on Paul Waugh's Evening Standard blog, about Conservative unwillingness to say that health and education budgets will be cut despite the incredible inefficiency in those areas, because political opponents will equate such cuts with reduction in nurses and hospitals. My first thought was "please, people, just grow up!".

Initially that thought was aimed at the politicians, especially Labour and Liberal Democrats who would certainly make those dishonest accusations. Conservatives also need to have courage, and realise that people now listen to them and believe Labour less under Brown than they did under Blair.

However my view quickly developed to wish that editors and journalists would grow up. Yes politicians will twist the words and policies of opponents. They always have and always will, and in a democracy they cannot and should not be restrained. However the role of the media in a healthy democracy is not simply to report but to think as well. It is to present what politicians say in such a way that their readers, listeners and viewers can see both sides, and such distortions become obvious.

More honesty in politics will come when politicians have an incentive, when they realise that the media report more than rewritten press briefings, so their dishonesty becomes a liability. This is a critical matter not of personality but policy. Good policy comes from effective debate, not from a debate won by the best dissembler.

As an aside the Conservatives and Spectator must take back ground from socialists in the terms used in debate. The Coffee House piece said “… no major politician is prepared to risk the inevitable charge of wanting to shut down hospitals, sack nurses etc”. This shows how the focus is entirely wrong, and has been captured by the union movement. The issue is not nurses and teachers or buildings. The issue is patients and children. The government’s aim should be to provide services, not to provide employment.