Dust To Dust

David Cameron thinks that lots of people actually want to go back to the Eighties, and is clear that he is among their number.

Cameron wants to go back to the days of massively increased benefit dependency and of general moral chaos, including the rise of Political Correctness, and the destruction of paternal authority within working-class families and communities through the destruction of that authority’s economic basis in the stockades of working-class male employment.

Cameron wants to go back to the days of the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, and the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs.

Cameron wants to go back to the days when Thatcher transformed the middle classes from people like her father into people like her son, and told us that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation.

Cameron wants to go back to the days of liberty mis-defined as the “freedom” to behave in absolutely any way that one saw fit, and when national assets were sold off at obscenely undervalued prices while the rest of the public sector, fully forty per cent of the economy, was subjected to an unprecedented level of central government dirigisme.

And Cameron wants to go back to the days of an open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the (starved) Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day.

All in all, Cameron wants to go back to the days of Britain turning herself into the country that Marxists had always said that she was, even though, before then, she never actually had been.