Tuesday 7 April 2009

Don't Be Bullied

Labour is apparently squaring up for a fight in the courts to use that Bullingdon Club picture of David Cameron. They want that fight to take place during the General Election campaign. According to the Tories, however, the "toffs" accusation "didn't work at Crewe & Nantwich".

But the Tories only won Crewe & Nantwich for the same reason that the SNP won Glasgow East: Catholic revulsion at what was then still the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Nothing else. In either case. It takes human-animal hybridity, spare parts babies and the abolition of fatherhood for the Catholics of the North-West to vote Tory, or for the Catholics of Scotland to vote SNP, just this once. And that is what it will turn out to have been: just this once.

Consider what would happen if a group of boys on a council estate, the same age as Oxford undergraduates, formed themselves into an organisation - complete with a name, a uniform, officers and a membership list - specifically for the purpose of becoming drunk and disorderly before committing criminal damage and even assault.

They would rightly be sent to prison.

Whereas the Bullingdon Boys go on to become, simultaneously, an aspirant Prime Minister, an aspirant Chancellor of the Exchequer, and an actual Mayor of London.

Living in rural England, as I have done most of my life and which is a very different matter from merely owning great swathes of it while living in Knightsbridge or Notting Hill, I suspect that the publicans of Oxfordshire are not without connections in the local constabulary and magistracy.

One of those publicans should simply tell the Bullingdon Club to stick the money that they offered him at the end of one of their "events", because he would be seeing them in court. How would it look for Cameron and Osborne if the Bully Boys were to be locked up for just long enough to have themselves sent down?

4 comments:

  1. Surely youve got the by-elections wrong.
    I dont think a Catholic agenda surfaced at all in Crewe. Frankly Catholics are more concerned with bread and butter issues (and knocking the Government) than any esoteric Catholic dogma.
    If we cannot get worked up about abortion rates (look at the figures) nobody is gonna get worked up about the issues you have every right to be concerned about.
    Look at "Northern Ireland" where our co-rligionists vote for terrorist murderers on a regular basis.
    In Junes Euro elections more than 150,000 (a low estimate I think)people will vote for Sinn Féin-IRA. Most are practising Catholics. Almost all will be the product of Catholic schooling at which we both served time as governors.
    Indeed my own rather unscientific poll would suggest around half of Catholic priests vote SF-IRA
    Do you think a single one of those people will be persuaded to vote otherwise because of abortion or stem cell research?

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  2. What are you waiting for, David? I'm a disillusioned Tory MP and I want my party back. Why don't you write to all Tory MPs and urge them to join your campaign? You'd get a lot. I know you would.

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  3. I know that I wouldn't! Although I'm willing to be proved wrong. Plenty of them know where I am.

    "Surely youve got the by-elections wrong"

    I know that I haven't. Glasgow East is a particularly fascinating example: working-class Catholics switching parties to vote for Baptists on the life issue is how the American Religious Right started.

    "Look at "Northern Ireland" where our co-rligionists vote for terrorist murderers on a regular basis"

    The politics of Catholicism in Great Britain no longer has anything to do with Ireland.

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  4. "The politics of Catholicism in Great Britain no longer has anything to do with Ireland".

    I daresay we are BOTH glad about that :)

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