David Cameron And The Common People

My favorite music video from last year's election wasn't (sadly) even about an American candidate. The clip is the one directly above; please take a look. It's based on Pulp's 1996 smash hit single, their biggest ever, "Common People," from the Different Class CD. (Will Shatner and Ben Folds did a cover version on the album Has Been as well-- and you can watch that at the bottom. But no one knows who did the song and video above, only that it wound up on Channel Four satirical show Bremner, Bird and Fortune and has over 800,000 views on YouTube. It's the most used video in the history of DWT, not so much because of an English election that went terribly wrong, but because it is a perfect depiction of the nature of the cynicism that is modern political conservatism. Yesterday it was an elegant tweet by my friend Digby that brought it to mind:


I haven't discussed it with Digby but I'm assuming she was moved to tweet about the contents or shape of Cameron's head because of his submersion-- appropriately, I suppose, in Munich, Hitler's old headquarters-- into racism the other day, something that hasn't been as acceptable in the U.K. (or, of late, in Germany), at least until now, as it has been in America's red states. He blamed multiculturalism-- and a supposed lack of a coherent U.K. identity-- for the rise of local extremism. And Digby wasn't the only one who found his cheap scapegoating repulsive. Madeleine Bunting, an editor of The Guardian suggested yesterday that Cameron should blame consumer capitalism rather than multiculturalism for people feeling so alienated that they turn to extremism.

It wouldn't make any sense for someone like David Cameron, or his circle of cronies, to have any empathy at all for England's masses, regardless of ethnic background. He's a multimillionaire who is also the anachronistic queen's 5th cousin and went to Eton and Oxford (where he was a member of the elitist, notorious Bullingdon Club). Their world is very, very different from the one described by Bunting.

It's been quite a week for the Bullingdon Club. As Oxford University's most exclusive all-male dining society, the Bullingdon has long been a magnet for titled youths with an urge to slip into a footman's outfit and wobble about the county raising genteel hell. With the election of Boris Johnson as London mayor, however, the Bullingdon seems to have taken another step towards becoming a varsity recruitment arm for the front rank of the Conservative party. Johnson's triumph at the polls completes a key triangulation of biscuit-waistcoated power, alongside fellow ex-Bullingdon members David Cameron and George Osborne. Soon three of the most powerful positions in the country could be occupied by men whose wardrobes contain, somewhere near the back, a crumpled royal blue tailcoat with a faint aroma of vomit.

But nobody seems to have much idea about what the Bullingdon actually is or does. Its shadowy nature was underlined when permission to show the original photograph of Cameron and Johnson at a Bullingdon dinner was withdrawn by the Oxford photographers Gillman & Soame, presumably because it was afraid of losing future business. Without information, the general response has been to assume the worst. Never mind the evidence of drunken, vaguely twittish figures with bowl haircuts: bring on the anarchic toffs bent on wresting power on behalf of a secretive aristocratic elite.

I came across the Bullingdon a few times as a student at Oxford. To an outsider they seemed a vaguely slapstick crew, pear-shaped and amiable, decked out in terrible stag-do-style get-up. Many already looked like Tory MPs, or baby-faced QCs out on a spree. When news of Osborne's involvement with the club emerged, a spokesman for the shadow chancellor insisted: "George was a prizewinning scholar who worked hard and was involved in many serious activities." This sounds about right: the Bullingdon were largely solid high-achievers who saw this kind of thing as a social networking experience, up there with making a splash at Oxford's debating society, the Union. The public perception is of a cartel of elite obnoxiousness. In practice, you really couldn't hope to meet a more confident and charming bunch of arrogant upper-class drunken fops. As one recent Bullingdon member told me: "It would be much more interesting if it was massively secret and dangerous like the Skull and Bones at Yale. The truth is, it's all rather courteous and cordial in an old-fashioned kind of way."

Which all sounds great. So where do I sign up? This is a difficult one. Even among exclusive all-male drinking clubs, the Bullingdon is a notably exclusive all-male drinking club. A quick survey of known recent members reveals that around 60% are Old Etonians; the rest simply went to really posh public schools. Osborne is said to have been ragged by fellow Bullers over having attended St Paul's, the top London day school, which is, apparently, not posh enough. A good school, then, but this in itself isn't sufficient. You've got to have a certain standing. An impressive lineage helps. As does a degree of jaunty charisma, either as a titled clown with a good line in drunken buffoonery, or as-- someone with whom it might be handy to have an "in" when it's all over.

Bunting started her Guardian column yesterday with a description of a Saturday morning shopping spree in east London: "The air is full of the smell of Turkish bread and African salted fish, the stalls are heaped with yams and chilis. The street traders' banter is littered with the Cockney endearments of love and darling. No one is dewy-eyed about this kind of London-– there is too much poverty for that-- but for all its many shortcomings, there is something extraordinary about how Britain has accommodated this hyper-diversity, the legacy of its economic boom of the last decade. And a sense that the process of how people become British, what it is to be British, is being subtly negotiated in a myriad of interactions on the street, in schools and hospitals."

What was so infuriating about Cameron's speech at the weekend is that this organic street-level process of Britishness was held up to ridicule as "passive tolerance," derided as a product of "failed policies of the past." In a speech that excoriated "muddled thinking" it then offered plenty of its own; worst of all, it dangerously confused the distinct agendas of counter-terrorism and community cohesion. This was precisely what the all-party committee on communities and local government warned against in a report a year ago. Cameron then went on to offer a straw man version of multiculturalism as promoting segregation. Despite all the spin ahead of the speech-- "bold," "brave"-- there was nothing new in his speech. We heard plenty of its kind under the last government. All that was distinctive about this usual formula of "signing up to British values" was the speech's timing and the venue-- which I'll come back to.

But the thought that dogged my Saturday shopping was the irrelevance of this kind of political rhetoric. It is political posturing at its most pointless. The language is macho and energetic with phrases like "muscular liberalism"-- this is the politics of body building: largely cosmetic but with an implicit capability to bully. It has almost no impact on policy-- apart from snubbing a few community leaders-- and the hard graft of maintaining good community relations, raising educational standards or improving health in poor communities grinds on, reaching out to the organisations in ethnic communities who can help achieve these goals. As Professor Tariq Modood recently pointed out, despite the continuing hostile political rhetoric the irony is that multiculturalism has continued to expand in government policy. It's partly a matter of pragmatism-- how do you reach Asian mothers to teach them English?-- and partly due to explicit government promotion such as new faith schools and the "big society" agenda of encouraging community groups. Politicians' speeches have floated free of policy development.

...The problem is that how politicians choose to frame these issues seeps into the culture, establishing new assumptions and prejudices. How Britain and Europe accommodate Muslim minorities has become neuralgic-- a source of deep anxiety that politicians are using to build up their constituencies. Nations are a product of the imagination and the stories we choose to tell ourselves of our past and present: that is the much quoted insight of the historian Benedict Anderson. If a generation of political leaders keep telling us that the hyper-diversity of London, Rotterdam and Hamburg is a failure, then that is how it will be understood; it robs millions of some measure of dignity in their efforts to adapt and accommodate difference. It deprives European urban multiculturalism of hope, as Modood points out, and makes it instead something to fear.

Ultimately this kind of political narrative is selling us all short with both a flawed analysis and diagnosis. Behind Cameron's speech-- and those of Blair and Brown-- is a nostalgia for a strong national collective identity, and a sense of shared values. But after a generation of individualism and globalisation, all kinds of collective identities have been weakened or abandoned. Many of the institutions that expressed and inculcated a sense of nationhood are in decline, whether political parties, trade unions or Christian churches. The fabric of institutional life in which we expressed values has been discarded in favour of individual freedom. The "vision of society" that Cameron urges as necessary is in fact already in evidence-- in a million versions of consumer capitalism 24/7, and it promotes acquisitiveness.

Pinning these long-term trends to questions of Muslim integration has been a cruel and deceitful sleight of hand of politicians on both sides of the spectrum. It has ensured two things: first the key questions of racism and inequality-- which drive segregation-- are ignored. Second, it dodges the political rationale for extremist violence as a critique of UK foreign policy. Attention is driven to relatively trivial cultural symbols such as hijabs and minarets; and the language becomes vague and emotive with rallying cries about "our way of life." That ensures a debate in which there is plenty of heat, but little light.

Skeptics think all Cameron was really trying to do in Germany was distract voters from his failed policies and his failure to keep his campaign pledge about cutting taxes and handing back power to local governments (his Big Society charade). Americans should follow this stuff closely; our conservative leaders-- from both political parties-- are headed down the same garden path.