Voting to harm, with fingers crossed

At the time he sacked himself over Europe, John Major famously said he could trust the Parliamentary Conservative Party to re-elect him (notwithstanding that he'd labelled a number of the 'bastards', of course) because they were perhaps 'the most sophisticated electorate in the world' For those not around in 1994, he got back in, but the effects were so catastrophic that his party were turfed out of office in 1997 and it took them until last Thursday to win another election in their own name - even then, they only ended up with three more MPs than Major's final majority of nine when he lost office. If - and the evidence is slight - Tory MPs of 1994 vintage were sophisticated, a sizeable chunk of the 24% who voted them back into office last week are anything but. For example, who would vote for a party that told the electorate they were going to make swingeing cuts, but then refused - either in the manifesto or in debate - to reveal how much or where the reductions would be made: that's not a leap of faith, it's blind stupidity, placing trust in an arrogant group of politicians whose social class and family backgrounds are far removed from many who voted for them, or the people who will suffer most from the cuts. On justice, we now face a similar issue. For the second time, Cameron has appointed a non-lawyer to hold the Ministry of Justice/Lord Chancellor portfolio. But this time, the former-journo, Michael Gove, has been charged with fast-tracking the abolition of the Human Rights Act. In 100 days, we are told, the Daily Mail/Sun/Express-led charge against the European Convention on Human Rights (drafted by a Tory Home Secretary at the behest of Churchill no less), will be replaced by a British Bill of Rights, that will - in a reconditioned phrase stolen from 'new' Labour without a sense of irony 'bring rights home'. Except it won't. Before the 1998 Act, we had common law civil liberties, which were enforceable largely at the whim/pleasure of the judiciary, without a stable basis on statutory law. Voting for Cameron on Thursday looks to me, on the basis of these two examples, to be the most dangerous act of self-loathing by an ill-informed or highly partisan electorate that believes it won't ever suffer the misfortune of ill-health or job loss, that its pensions are large and secure, and that its rights can be entrusted to a Murdoch-beholden journalist turned right-wing neo-con politician. And they've inflicted this on the rest of us. Lemmings show more sense.

This is England?

So ran the legend, without question mark, tattooed onto the large man's upper left arm, underneath the tattoo artist's representation of a Union flag, unfurled in a stiff breeze. A simple affectation of patriotism – albeit it one stolen from the title of a series of TV films, written and directed by Shane Meadows. In his work, Meadows depicts the changed fortunes of a group of working-class skinheads during the 1980s and the tattooed man certainly would have shared their origins. But it was his chosen depiction of patriotism that interested me. The word itself is loaded – 'last resort of the scoundrel', according to Dr Johnson - or, perhaps increasingly, the first resort of the right-wing politician, as evidenced by David Cameron's frequent references to speaking of behalf of the British people, or praying in aid nationalism to bolster support for his policies. The reality, as exemplified by our tattooed friend, is rather different, for here we have a government dominated by a public-school and Oxbridge educated cabal that is simply light years away from the common shared experience of those they govern, yet with the apparent need to use the sentiment driven language of unity and shared past to drip feed fear of the 'other' – be it foreigners, the poor, the jobless, to keep the majority onside and supportive of policies, such as privatisation or the loss of employment rights, that are inimical to their basic needs and instincts. Seeing the tattoo made me wonder how it is that we have become a nation bound together by fear: is this the only vision our leaders are able or willing to offer those they are otherwise so clearly alienated from? Juxtoposed with the tattoo, I have another image – this time on the T-shirt worn by a man (strange how both image bearers are male – mirroring the John Bull or Tommy Atkins of old, so beloved by those on the right...). This slogan was slightly longer and far more threatening:

'Welcome to Great Britain; fit in or f*** off'

Fear of being overwhelmed by the 'others', by 'them' – a lowest common denominator rendition of the common refrain of IDS, Cameron, Farage, and those despicable advertising vans trundling around parts of London. We are better, more generous, more accepting, more open than this: we need to demand better of our leaders, or they will squander the real legacy bequeathed to us by those past generations who welcomed the 'other' and the different to these shores and whose leaders did not seek to create division and hatred merely so that they could claim narrow electoral advantage.