I had a friend for a while who lived in a moderately nice house across the road. He is still there, but I would not call what he does in the house living. He mainly sits in his kitchen drinking alone. He is a Tory.
It is very sad. He has a quietly cute geek thing going on. His family was once prominent in Scotland, and so they reached the social class that avoid interaction even with the filthy working middles and who apparently lack the education or wit to think about doing anything else.
I knew him for years. He first dismissed me as a scruffy worker, even as I single-handedly put together our community council in response to the architectural gems in the area being bought and bulldozed to build sub-standard flats, encouraged people to list their properties, and formed a committee which still exists to protect the heritage that is still here despite the efforts of developers, who apparently lack eyes. His neighbour, an English git who moved up here from Manchester to socially climb in our unpleasantly socialist city, then took this organisation, since I am obviously too scruffy to do anything but actually do the work, and she still runs it to this day whilst I am blessed with avoiding miserable people and their boring ideas about how to avoid doing anything remotely productive with it.
It was a most interesting process. I encouraged people who were particularly fond of themselves to form sub-groups, because I knew that this way the whole entity would stay stronger. I then opted out of actually participating in any of them, because it was apparent that I was dealing with children. I see evidence of this in politics as well. Where you see authority, I see a bunch of small selfish toddlers fighting over plastic toys, in the form of nuclear weapons, starving disabled people, other people’s property, and destroying the planet on the off-chance of having an extra fifty pence.
Anyway, as our relationship progressed – I knew the dude was lonely – so I made some efforts to get to know him. I became aware that this rather senior figure in our community did not actually know very much about the world. When the referendum on Scottish independence rolled around, he expressed great shock that I would be anything other than a Tory. I informed him that our area was one of the highest votes for the SNP. He was visibly offended.
“It’s OK.” I said “The even bigger houses down the hill still voted conservative, but we on the hill outvoted them because we are younger and more progressive.”
He slumped with relief. There was still sanity left. People with big houses voted for selfish morons and all was well with the world.
Between this and his views that renewable energy upset his view across the golf course, but fracking is OK because it is somewhere else and the Tory party said so, he declined massively in my estimation right up until it also became apparent that he had no intention of fulfilling his financial duties. I coped despite this, and it was only when his selfishness and lack of ability to think for himself directly affected us that I kicked his ass.
It is unfortunate that politics, in most people’s heads, is a matter of personal identity rather than actual thought.
“I have earned the right to be a Conservative.” is a quote from Billy Connolly, after he had become famous for espousing Glaswegian socialist views. He was so hard-up for company on one visit to Glasgow that he impaled me to the side of a bar talking at me until I finally managed to indicate my displeasure and remove myself.
Being a Tory seems to mean that you
a) Got lucky and have a stable income.
b) Fear people who have not stabbed others in the back to gain similar benefits as being irrational and stupid.
c) Fear change of any kind.
d) Have a childish pre-dementia distaste for compassion and find inappropriate things funny.
e) Think that it is OK to make other people suffer and actively block hearing about it as being their responsibility. Basically they vote for other people to be shitty and then don’t want to hear about it.
f) Believe that it is OK to think only of themselves, and that anyone who does otherwise is stupid.
g) Believe that enhancing life for others somehow affects their own, because their status might be marginally reduced if other people are encouraged to do better. Status is all that matters, after all.
Fortunately, not all posh people think like this, and not all conservatives are at all posh. I would say the opposite. If you lack compassion for others, you demean yourself as far as I am concerned. I have had more than one wealthy employer attack me for being perfectly happy to retain my relatively lowly status so that I remain free to use my perfectly serviceable brain for something other than benefitting them.
My ancestors lost their freedom and in some cases income making sure that scummy little people, who then use that to make assumptions about our voting habits and class status, had the right to vote. We have this in common with many other ‘posh twats’ who have had no interest in voting Tory for the above reasons. My take on this would be that the Tory party have a serious image problem.
When Boris is permitted to talk about Conservative philosophy, which is not often because it is the only bit that he is really good at, he amplifies the sensible bits of conservatism. He does this because he, like me, has listened to hours of parents arguing over day-to-day points. The principles, if you could call them principles, of conservatism are nothing to do with being posh.
They believe in opportunity at the expense of what they would call ‘mollycoddling.’ This translates as you having the opportunity to earn at the cost of taking care of your own kids or parents. This is the part they have been misunderstanding of late. They currently believe that this means killing or otherwise making the lives of disabled and poor people unpleasant and somehow ‘encouraging business’ by making the rich even richer.
Where Boris has recently differed from the party, and why he is currently being put in a Russian shitstorm of mammoth proportions, is that he did not anticipate the sell-off of public services to America. This has massive implications for the daily life of the public, and he, like me, is well aware of this. Quite apart from ultimately losing your right to healthcare, you are likely to see the introduction of capital labour, privately administered policing, and an increase in crime and incarceration. Social care, which is already Labour infested and corrupt, will get even more so and your loved ones WILL BE AT RISK.
To avoid his accidentally talking about his, which will cost the investors money, he is now trapped in a pro-American plot to rifle Putin’s money, which involves bullshit from a mysteriously unequivocal figure at Portadown. This means that Boris can be dropped from the Tory team at any time. I can only assume that as usual, our civil service has made sure that he is unable to simply walk away from this unscathed.
Don’t get me wrong, the Labour Party are no better. The corruption just takes a different form. If you are, like my neighbour, a stupid old man, the corruption means that you are told what to do whilst your money is taken. It is so much easier to simply blame someone else for your problems, that people then sit and argue over, than take any action over anything.
Despite Boris’s childishness and insistence on redirecting any questions, he is the only one who actually cares what you think, so the future is entirely up to you. Either you vote for the equally corrupt Labour party, who will simply fuck things up a different way, or you make moves for significant change towards a more sensible, open conservatism that doesn’t actually kill people.
I would suggest that our best approach to avoid losing our public services, our right to free thought, our expectation of human rights is to participate in politics. Rather than blame someone else for mis-managing, people need to understand that they are just as capable, probably more so, than individuals such as Theresa May to run the country. It isn’t someone else’s fault that you didn’t speak up. It isn’t up to someone else whether your country is raped and your money taken. That is what democracy is for.
I made significant efforts to befriend the Tory across the road. I tried to help him, because I know how much work these houses are, and I know what it is like to be lonely. He rejected this on the basis that he believed that I wanted something from him, to the point that he failed to help when he could have done even though it was his legal duty.
He is sitting on his own with a bottle of whisky wondering why he has no friends now. Soon he will be removed from his beautiful house, his belongings will go to auction and he will be murdered in a Tory care facility by Labour-voting nurses who believe that they are doing a good thing by carrying out Conservative social engineering policy, just as they did to my Tory mother. Conservatism is great, isn’t it?