I was brought up to shout “CLASS WAR!” at any opportunity—particularly if someone in a Mercedes cut my dad up on a dual carriageway—but I’ve learned it’s more . . . complicated than that.
This column was written after Ed Miliband—the now-former leader of the Labour Party, cursed with the air of a sixteen-year-old boy continually bullied for being too open about his love of maths—gave a Labour Conference speech where he basically called the Tories dim. And, as I say, it’s more complicated than that.
So, Ed Miliband’s conference speech—which, unusually, abandoned the usual accusations of Tory maliciousness in favor of a wholly new tactic: calling them divs, instead.
“Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out-of-touch, U-turning, pledge-breaking, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower?” Miliband asked, in a speech that frequently looked like it might end—like the 1980s McDonald’s advert which it appeared to ape—with the line “. . . and all wrapped up in a sesame seed buuuuuuuun,” but, alas, did not.
Labour’s new line seems to be that the Tories are not a coldhearted bunch of peasant punchers—but an intellectually busted flush, instead. That they’re stupid. That’s their problem.
However, I’m not sure the best attack is claiming stupidity. There are quite a lot of clever people in this government. I think the Tories’ real weakest spot is their . . . blitheness, instead.
Blitheness is an odd thing. Blitheness is different from optimism—which is basically a graceful digging-in, a silent vow never to give up. Optimism is a fit soul, committed to outrunning the darkness, however long it takes. Optimism has looked at the alternative—cynicism, resignation, despair—close up, in the eye, and, horrified, stiffened its resolve, and kept up a steady trot, towards the uplands.
Blitheness, on the other hand, is not hard-won. Blitheness is what you are born with—like lanugo. And, like lanugo, blitheness starts to wear off as soon as you rub up against anything abrasive.
Adults, then, who are still blithe have not rubbed up against anything abrasive. Blitheness does not have calluses on its hands; it does not stay awake at night, worrying what the next day’s post will bring. Blitheness only ever gets birthday cards in the post; and postcards; and catalogues for candles, cashmere, and pinafores. Blitheness is cushioned in the velvet surround of there being enough money to sort nearly every eventuality out.
To people who have often dreamed, in panic, of sealing up their letterbox so that bad news can never be delivered, David Cameron’s speech, a week after Miliband’s, came from deep within this swaddling.
Explaining how £10 billion of cuts to the welfare bill would be introduced, Cameron mooted the end of housing benefit to single people under twenty-five.
“If hardworking young people have to live at home while they work and save, why should it be any different for those who don’t?” Cameron asked, to wild, blithe applause.
It takes a blithe man to ask this question. Someone for whom “at home” is Mum and Dad—careworn, but still loving—wryly opening up a bottle of wine when their postgraduate children camp out in the spare room, saving for the deposit for a house.
Sure, there will be arguments outside the bathroom when the hot water runs out, and the awkwardness of having massive adult bodies in the room that once held a toddler never quite goes away. But in a world where the money has disappeared, families must stick together and help each other out. Austerity measures mean feeling cramped, not having much privacy. Canceling a holiday. Delaying your life plans for a decade.
If you are blithe, it would never occur to you that there are homes that are not a refuge at all. Rather, that “home” is actually darkness, or a trap, and Mum and Dad are not welcoming—but dangerous. It’s a blithe man who does not know how much damage can occur before the age of twenty-five behind the family doors. You can be blithe if you’ve never been in a flat so tiny the place feels like a pan coming to the boil, filled with grease, smoke, and sour anxiety. If you’d never been somewhere so small that there is nowhere to work, and save.
Optimism is saying, firmly, “Things will get better.”
Blitheness is saying, easily, “Things never get that bad in the first place.”
Churchill was, despite his depression, an optimist. Bertie Wooster, in his spats, blithe. Blitheness is telling everyone to tighten their belts—and it never occurring that some people just don’t have a belt.
But, of course, who does not love Wooster? For this is the deep irony of the appeal of the Tories—that this Boris-y, Cameron, public school blitheness is one of their biggest appeals.
In times of depression, frustration, and despair, who doesn’t find their spirits lifted by someone with the sunny, seductive belief that the solution to poverty isn’t to spend money—but to save it? Who doesn’t find their anxiety relieved by these girl-faced, almost nonchalant boys who exude an air of things being fixable simply by a stiffening of character, and everyone pulling together? These aren’t stupid beliefs. They have often been the saving of our country. But believing that these are the solutions to everyone’s problems? That’s . . . blithe.