What Living Standards?

Yesterday David Cameron displayed his lack of political nous by demanding that all Tory MPs should vote against a motion calling for a popular Referendum on the future of Britain's role in Britain; and some eighty of them ignored the request. If he had allowed a free vote, there would have been a fun day with no significant aftermath: instead he was perceived to have suffered serious reputational damage. After the votes were counted the Leader of the House of Commons expressed the view that there had to be one outburst in favour of the public mood during this five-year Parliament; and that everybody should now knuckle-down and accept whatever was demanded of the UK by the European Union. Some hope!
The Daily Telegraph, for generations the authentic voice of Conservatism, suggested that the incident had demonstrated serious inadequacies in David Cameron's leadership; and it was widely suggested that this diminution in his authority [albeit self-inflicted] will be damaging in the future.

The Government has to hope to carry a consensus in the country through a series of years of dramatically falling living standards. Prices are going up much faster than earned incomes or benefits will increase, and individuals' chance of borrowing money to maintain.a high standard of living will diminish for almost everybody. Only public-sector jobs are strongly unionised; and if the civil service and Fire Brigades and Teachers' unions go on strike to preserve their pay, pensions and benefits they will increase the sense of depression and betrayal among the unionionised majority who will suffer from closed schools, unpaid benefits, accident damage - including human body-parts - left at the scene of the incident, and greater risks from fire and terrorism. The majority of the population support the Firefighters, are cynical about the pay of tube drivers, are increasingly open to the view that schools fail because of bad teaching and discipline, and hostile to the idea of petty bureaucrats being compensated to meet inflation that is crushing ordinary folk. As the public mood sours with the ongoing slide in living standards, some mitigation could possibly be achieved by Churchillian or Roosevelt-like leadership: instead there is a clique of career politicians with exiguous experience of 'real life' and who lack any hint of charisma.

This is why Cameron's failure is so serious. The absence of credible alternatives to Cameron and Clegg within the conventional political system is equally alarming. The government's policy will not lead to recovery: at best it seeks to mitigate the downward spiral in living standards by fostering 'growth' largely in 'manufacturing'. They have had eighteen months to implement policies that should be producing evidence of success, at least on a small scale. It is not visible. There is no reason to believe that mass living standards can be protected in the foreseeable future; and that is likely to spawn more profound political radicalism that has been seen in Britain since 1848.

Silly Speaking

So: David Cameron made a last-minute deletion from his Great Speech, toning down his pre-announced  admonition to the British people to pay off their debts. What a cock-up!
Tens of millions of those people are net debtors: their mortgages plus unsecured debts greatly exceed their assets. Many people do not even have one month's income in reserve. Meanwhile the overwhelming majority of the population have declining real incomes;  their wage or benefit increases - if they have any - do not meet the rise in prices and taxes that they must pay. If they are able to pay anything off their debts [and some people are being required to do so] this is a small sum each week, and it causes them to reduce their standard of living commensurately
Until today The Prime Minister's silliest utterance was his repetition of the meaningless 'Big Society' tag, which has never had any meaning for either the media or the public.
Now he has just avoided plunging headlong into a display of profound incomprehension and insensitivity. He and his team clearly have no understanding of everyday life under his own regime. Unlike the greatest Tory Prime Minster, the Marquis of Salisbury, David Cameron does not have daily conversations with the grooms, keepers and tenants whose lives were entwined within the routine of a great estate and who were used to speaking with complete frankness to the great man. Unlike Disraeli, Cameron clearly does not have the common sense that enabled the founder of modern Conservatism to say - and to mean - 'Trust the people'. Harold Macmillan was much criticised in the establishment for the 'vulgarity' of his adopting the phrase 'You've never had it so good': but it resonated with the mass of the population and ensured an election victory. Stanley Baldwin had managed a steelworks before he went into politics and he kept the lessons in mind. Winston Churchill was brutally blunt with aides whose recommendations showed an absence of common sense or a failure to appreciate the public mood.
David Cameron's intended admonition to people who simply can't do it to 'pay off their debts' shows a profundity of ignorance that is comparable with Marie Antoinette's 'Let them eat cake'. It is comprehensible [though it proved to be inexcusable] for an eighteenth-century Habsburg to have lived in ignorance of the condition of the people.  It is inexcusable in a twenty-first century Prime Minister to allow a similarly silly assertion to get into the text of a major speech. It may be comprehensible, given Cameron's origins and the fact that he has spent almost all his adult life in the political bubble; but it will not be forgotten as he and his chosen Chancellor stick to their increasingly isolated programme.