Aspirations ?

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the US. The commemoration of someone who articulated the hopes and dreams of so many seems like an apt time to reflect on the lack of inspiration from our current leaders.

Labour firmly nailed its electoral colours to the mast the other day when it apparently staked out (again) the middle classes and middle England as its natural constituency. After dabbling in past weeks with some class politics, in the 'Cameron-is-a-toff-shocker,' and then the 'maybe-class-is-now-more-important-than-race-revelation'; they have decided to fight the election on an 'aspirational' platform.

I hate their mis-appropriation of the word 'aspirational'.

Martin Luther King telling us that he had a dream is aspirational - wanting a bigger car, a bigger house, a plasma tv and a flashy holiday is not - it's just materialistically and socially ambitious.  Of course there's nothing wrong with that -  and the working class are just as entitled to want any of  these things as the middle class - but it does not constitute a political vision.

Or if it does, then it is a euphemism for a  mean-spirited individualist vision where inevitably 'better'  means not better than you have now, but better than the family next door. It's tempting to call  it post-Thatcherism but it is much older than that - Guizot's 'enrichez-vous' rallying call to the wannabe middle class pre-dates the 'Essex man' phenomenon by a century. Then as now it  wasn't about getting 'on', but getting 'above'.

There's no problem with being aspirational but how about aspiring to something a bit more worthy as the grandiose vision of a political party ?  A decent education for all, the very best free health care from cradle to grave,  proper and affordable housing, real jobs and careers for young people, and dignity and care for the elderly. Just for starters.

Ambitions that are a  bit less like  Guizot (and Thatcher, and Blair) and a bit more like  Scottish Socialist John Maclean;  'rising with our class not above it'.

We're all in it together

Except some of us are clearly more in 'it' than others. Certainly everyone I know is considerably more in 'it' than David Cameron who along with his wife is apparently worth £30 million or George Osborne worth a mere £4.3 million but who stands to inherit much more from the family business along with a baronetcy.

It's the mirror image of when that other 'great' patrician MacMillan told the working class in the 60's boom that they'd never had it so good' - when in fact some had 'it' considerably better than others. It's one thing for the vast majority of us to have to endure the cyclical effects of a capitalism system we have no control over ... and another to have our noses rubbed in it by the tiny elite minority who manage to come up smelling of roses no matter how deep the shit the rest of us are in.

So it was fantastic timing that in the same week as we had to listen to those pampered baby-faced toffs at Tory Party Conference lecture us on tightening our belts, we also saw 'When Boris Met David', the TV drama capturing their formative years at Oxford. Funnily enough at the same time in the 80's that David, George, Boris and the rest were up to their hi-jinks at the Bullingdon club, I was at Cambridge and had a chance to witness at first hand their equivalents there. We had a name then for those kind of people at the time - arrogant, obnoxious, over-privileged cunts.

I have a long memory and bear a grudge - so I hope does anyone else who can remember the Tories last time round.

Property & the masses

I had hoped that one of the few silver linings to the recession is that we might have seen the demise of the 'reality' property tv genre. But Tory aristo-totty (can't see it myself) Kirstie Allsop was on the radio promoting her latest series.

Apparently this will reflect the present climate by focusing on home improvements rather than on buying and selling property. Kirstie sees this as a kind of public service but was at pains to point out that she still very much 'believes' in the property market.

'Believes' ? - acknowledges its potential for making a fast unearnt buck - well ok - but 'believes' ?

But then, post-Thatcher, the property owning democracy has become a belief.

Once entrepreneurs built engines, railways and cities, the conditions of their workers might have appaling, but they could claim to be progressing the fabric of society: Today's equivalents feel that by re-painting their window frames and sanding the floors, they have made similar a contribution.

It's a lie. Buying a house doesn't make you a captain of industry. (If that's what you want to be). You need a roof over your head and whether you buy or sell at the right or wrong time is pretty much a lottery. And the particular Thatcherite lie (which still has a tight hold) is that this represents some form of popular capitalism where everyone can be an entrepreneur.

That's a bit fucking rich coming from the Honourable Kirstie Allsop, daughter of a baronet and former chairman of Christie's auctioners...

Double standards

The level of class deference in this country never ceases to amaze me.

When a nutter starts shooting at his neighbours through their windows and is subsequently killed in a drunken gun battle with the police just off the Kings Road in Chelsea, it is reported as a tragic end to a glittering career.

As of course it is when any 32 year old suffering from substance-abuse and other emotional problems flips and ends up dead.

But Mark Saunders wasn't just anybody: He was a barrister tipped to become a QC. A graduate of Corpus Christi College Oxford and a part-time soldier in the poshest regiment in the territorial army, the Honourable Artillery Company. He lived in one of London's most fashionable and exclusive areas. And apparently he also had a drink problem and kept a shotgun at home.

Now imagine just for a moment that the shooting had happened in Brixton or Tottenham. And that Marks Saunders was a black man on crack cocaine, and a graduate of North London Polytechnic who worked in IT.

The papers would be talking about how gun crime and drugs were a blight on a community with a growing culture of violence. No doubt social services, political correctness and rap music would be held responsible.

Maybe the Metropolitan Police will now be setting up a special squad to tackle 'toff-on-toff' crime as a counterpart to Operation Trident. But I doubt it.