David Cameron

[poliphilo]

A poll published yesterday in the Sunday Times showed the Tory lead cut to a tiny 2%. In the circumstances I thought it might be interesting to watch David Cameron give his conference speech at Brighton.

He has a strangely smooth and unmarked face. It's as if his skin has been stretched tight or covered in plastic film. What sort of genes and passions give a man a face like that?  He's hard to read. Is he as sweetly nice and reasonable as he tries to look? Obviously not. No-one gets to lead a political party by being sweetly nice and reasonable.

The speech was unimpassioned. Only when he spoke about the National Health Service did something like personal conviction seem to break through. Otherwise it was all generalities and platitudes and things no sweetly reasonable person could possibly disagree with. He slid over foreign policy- and the war we're fighting out East only got a mention so he could call our troops  "the best of British".  There will still be tax measures to help the family- even though specific Tory policies about tax breaks for the married were torn into bloody strips a few weeks ago. As soon as the speech was over it began to slide from memory. It had been a thing of faint sunlight and tinted mists. You got no real sense from it of the depth of the trouble we're in, nor of the rugged, unpopular measures that will have to be taken to begin to set things right.

I'm never going to vote Tory. It's a tribal thing. However much they polish up the knocker on the big front door this is still the party of those people in the nation I don't want to be aligned with- the toffs and the bankers and the cads. So I wasn't looking to be won over. I suppose I was watching in the hope of finding out what might be on offer if this man were to win the election. And, well, I still don't know. 

Gorden Brown is horrible, but he's a man who looks like he knows what he's doing. Also a man who looks like he may still harbour- deep down- some of the core beliefs that brought him into politics in the first place. Labour- as someone once said- it may even have been Tony Blair- is nothing if not a crusade. Labour people- no matter how corrupted by office, no matter how blundering and gross- are the people who dream of Jerusalem. And what do Tories dream of?  Hmmmmmm.....

Comments

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Tories dream of power.

"I kept the faith and I kept voting,
not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
and mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory,
mine is the greenfield and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
and mine is the peace we knew between the wars"

Billy Bragg, Between the Wars.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like that a lot.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

If you've not listened to much Billy Bragg, I think you'd enjoy him. He mixes the personal and the political with marvellous imagery, and he's an engaging and passionate speaker.

He's also fond of quoting Kipling; his song 'The Few' is based around the line "What do they know of England, who only England know?" and 'The Pict Song' is almost entirely Kipling's lyrics.

[jenny_evergreen]

Thanks for the mention, I'm checking him out now. :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of him. I've got the two albums- Mermaid Avenue I & II- in which he and Wilco provide the music for lyrics from the Woody Guthrie archive- but I've never properly explored his work. I realise I should.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Ditto for me; one of those artists I think I'd like but have never got round to. And I'm frightened by the vastness of his back catalogue, and how much his fans adore him. It's always scaring dipping a toe into something like that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. There's so much music out there I've never heard....

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

P.S. It's interesting how Kipling- for all that he was a man of the right- has this appeal for contemporary left-wingers.

[sovay]

and 'The Pict Song' is almost entirely Kipling's lyrics.

I need to find a copy of that.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

There's a version of it on this page:

http://www.tsrocks.com/b/billy_bragg_texts/a_pict_song.html

It plays as soon as you load the page.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

My grandfather was a railwayman - I sing that song sometimes and think of him. He was delighted when the rail system was nationalised into British Rail - and totally disillusioned with the way it went afterwards.