I was planning to write something else. But I’ve parked that so I can have a rant.
Occasionally, I like a good rant. I don’t often have them, but when I do, I do them in writing because I’m not very good at getting angry in person. People don’t take me seriously if I ever lose my temper and hurl insults.
My rant today is about a man called Dave.
David William Donald Cameron.
There are several reasons why you or I might be angry with our former prime minister of six years. If given enough time, I could develop an acrostic poem like those you did in school, where you put letters of the alphabet down the side of your page and had to write a sentence that correlates to them. Except this poem could have every letter of the alphabet, and each letter could have a corresponding point to something that this man either did poorly, made worse or turned into a bin fire to make a quick buck for him and his smarmy inbred Etonian pig shagging chums.
I only need to look at the first two letters of the alphabet to know why most people hate him, though; if the first one missed you with a flying knee to the head, the subsequent roundhouse kick from the second would have had you on the canvas.
A is for austerity. A policy of “fiscal responsibility” with the economy. “In economic policy, austerity is a set of political-economic policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both”. A path that Cameron chose to adopt after the financial crisis of 2008. This was compared with the Labour government under Gordon Brown, which had wrecked the economy, a party that was shown to be untrustworthy financially. It's a decent tactic and sounds like common sense to many in the country. After all, people had sat and watched the banks collapse. Most people don’t understand global economics, but it looks clearer when you put a country in the context of a household needing to make savings, despite the whole concept of needing to save money as a nation, like a household being a lie. Most houses don’t have central banks or money printers in the basement.
The devil, though, was in the detail. When Cameron said fiscal responsibility and careful management of the economy, what he actually meant was the cutting of public service to the bone, the plunging of millions of children and lower-income families into poverty with the implementation of the two-child benefit cap (an estimated two million would be lifted out of power overnight if the cap was scrapped) and has indirectly led to approximately 122,000 excess deaths due to healthcare and welfare cuts because either people couldn’t get the treatment they needed or they simply froze or starved to death once the winter came.
“I’ll tell you what, that takes balls from David Cameron! Going after single parents and disabled people when he could have been going after Starbucks, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Gary Barlow.” - Kevin Bridges
So, if the manslaughter of hundreds of thousands of people didn’t get you wound up, Try the letter B for Brexit. Regardless of which side of the referendum vote you were on, both sides are pretty unanimous that the whole subsequent negotiation process has been a complete and utter joke. Many people resent him on this for two reasons; the first is for calling the referendum in the first place to appease the UKIP vote, and the second is that once he’d created the mess, he decided at the first possible opportunity he was off, and getting as far away from accountability as possible. All while collecting the allowance for being an ex-prime minister. And when I say off, I mean off to go and make millions doing anything and everything possible from anyone who paid him the highest price.
There are, of course, a metric tonne of other things we could point to as to why 99.9% of the world should hate Dave. To allude to some of them: He swept the idea of a fairer electoral system under the carpet in an AV referendum in 2011 that was won using lies similar to the EU referendum, taking most talk of proportional representation off the table for a generation. He destroyed half of North Africa with involvement in Libya due to his outdated belief that Britain was still the world power that it was in the 1920s, where we could muscle into any country and sort out a situation by planting a flag and killing some locals. He nearly destroyed the United Kingdom with the Scottish independence referendum that he wasn’t prepared for despite supposedly being part of the Conservative and UNIONIST party. He’s also why Britain isn’t much further ahead in the world with the development of green technology and renewable energy, as he doesn’t believe in half of it. Once telling us all to “cut the green crap”.
“What’s happened to that twat David Cameron who called it on? He’s in Nice with his trotters up! He should be held accountable for it. He should be held accountable! Twat!" - Danny Dyer
Like many people, I thought that was the last we’d ever see of him in political life. He’d be collecting hundreds of millions around the globe, but at least we didn’t have to see him globe-trotting. An emphasis on the trotting. But on Monday, we all had that small privilege taken away when Home Secretary Suella Braverman was sacked, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was moved to the home office and our mate Dave was swiftly appointed to the House of Lords and moved in to take his seat, once again as one of the most influential people in Britain.
No regular member of the public could have seen that coming. I don’t care how many people claimed they knew all along. Getting rid of Suella Braverman from any place of direct power is always good, but bringing in David Cameron is like swapping a spider infestation in your house for a slug infestation. You can tell where the slugs have been, making you more disgusted.
So why should we care about this? This sort of stuff happens all of the time. People born into privilege take seats in high offices and play God with the regular minions of the world. Typically, yes, I’d agree with you. But this move is different.
This appointment shows there isn't just a difference between the rich and poor. There aren’t two wealth classes. There are three. The poor, the rich and then the tiny group above the rich. People who are so wealthy and entitled that they’re not playing the game. They’re writing the rules for the people who write the instruction book. Cameron had been out of public life and politics for seven years, and a few days ago will have got a phone call and, just like that, was able to waltz back into one of the highest offices in the country without even being an elected MP. That’s influence for you. I’m currently sitting 196 miles away from where Dave is now, and yet I can smell the rot from here. By no means is it anything new. Instead, it serves as a reminder that, in some ways, we haven’t moved far from the class systems of a bygone era.
You should also care about Dave's return and what this will do to the country regarding the next election. Last week, we faced the prospect of an increasingly right-wing populist Conservative party being annihilated when put against Keir Starmer’s Labour (despite my critiques on where Labour are also heading over issues such as the Israel/Gaza conflict). Cameron's appointment and the subsequent reshuffle is a move more towards the centre ground. It was Dave and his chums that saved the Tories from themselves the last time there was a rise of the nutters. Rishi Sunak must have realised a move towards the hard right would get him very little in the grand scheme of electoral politics, and the balancing out of his party might be a better chance. Labour is now staring down a different beast. One more agile and able to adapt. The move might be too little too late, with the election only being a year or so away. Still, I find it reasonable that the Conservatives, one of the most successful parties in electoral history, could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
As for the Liberal Democrats, their leadership should be fearful. David Cameron's return represents the devil coming up from hell for them. They made a deal in 2010 to join the coalition government and paid a heavy price. Cameron took many of their southern seats in 2015 when he was PM, and it’s taken until now for them to swing back. The party still only has around a quarter of the MPs it once did. The move to the centre and Cameron's return to near the top of the tree will make potential Lib Dem voters think twice. After all, why have the yellow Tories who stand for next to nothing when you can have the blue ones who have a shot at power? At least, that will be the logic of some deluded poor souls.
Moments like this make people give up on the British political system. If I gave up on it, I wouldn’t have much of a hobby left. So I guess I’ll welcome back dodgy Dave. I hope someone is keeping his place in hell warm.