I will make this brief, as the guff quotient is woefully similar to yesterday’s noting of Osborne’s fear factory. But David Cameron’s press conference in South London with Brooke Kinsella (step up from Ken Barlow, step down from Gary Barlow. Hang on! The Tory Barlows! Are they related?) was astonishing in its contradictory guff. First, Cambo was back on his previously abandoned “big society” theme: you know, social responsibility, local accountability, POWER TO THE PEOPLE (not, he maintains “a slogan”.)
But then he waded backwards even further to our “broken society”. Remember that? All the guns and misery. At least we got the relationship between the big and the broken cleared up. Apparently we need to “mend” the broken society in order to “build a big society in its place”. So much to do! First, the mending. The oppressively depressing lists rattled off by Cambo emphasise the dreadful state we’re in – poverty, despair, crime. And the language… hold on tight. He talks about a “stew” of issues. And how the government has “drained the lifeblood out of society”. Then there are the “victims” of state failure. It’s like Reservoir Dogs out there, with the government as the pistol-weilding maniacs.
Cambo, by contrast, will provide “the most family-friendly government you have ever seen”. Ah, the PG Disney Pixar Spielberg version. How lovely. Cambo’s government will actually be a musical, with a karaoke option so that we can all sing along with his cuddly policies. At the end, you will be given a souvenir toy and a McDonalds Happy Meal and told to celebrate the innocent beauty of a free-market economy. At one point, Cameron, his heart veritably bleeding, decried our broken times “when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community”. (Who is doing this active discouraging by the way? Are there bruisers wandering the streets knocking on volunteers’ doors in the middle of the night, threatening the kindly folk: “Oi. You. Kind person. Do good again and you’re slammed.”).
At the end, Cambo rounded up with a final question from the audience and greeted it with a smile. “The power of positive politics – it’s what today’s all about!” Is it? Is it really? When you refer to us all as a “stew”? I sense guff.
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