Listening to the BBC news and current affairs programmes, you’d think that Britain is a socialist republic. Which is odd because my entire extended family, on both my mother’s side (smallholders) and on my father’s (urban lower-middle class), is without exception monarchist conservative. From time to time there are rumours that somebody or other has cast their vote for the LibDems, or is thinking about doing so, but we laugh and put this down to an excess of sublimated sexuality rather than political conviction.
We have a short branch of the family which is staunch Hitlerite Nazi, but no party’s manifesto, certainly not the BNP’s, ever comes anywhere close to expressing their exciting vision for Britain, so presumably they don’t bother to vote. And we have one Marxist communist in the family: a former printer and political organiser who was active in all that unpleasantness all those years ago at Grunwick.
Everyone agrees that this man is the nicest and most genuine person of the lot of us, and the exception that proves the rule, therefore our pity for his Utopian beliefs is mingled with admiration for his character.
Are we, I wonder, a sort of minority enclave? Most, if not all, of our interfamily telephone conversations descend eventually into incredulous exchanges about this unexpectedly relentless assault by European socialism on our English values, or about the most recent example of political correctness gone mad. We simply can’t believe what’s happening; or why it’s happening; or why everybody, including the Conservative party, has rolled over so easily. If each of us is standing, as some believe, at the head of a long line of ancestors, carrying their hopes, ours must all be looking at each other and scratching their heads — not least of all at the hypocrisy of it all. ‘Mapinduzi inaendelea!’ is always my jocular analysis, if asked for one. It’s a Kiswahili political slogan, meaning ‘the revolution continues!’.
So imagine our complete surprise and dismay when my brother, who is a policeman, now turns round and says he’s going to vote Labour from now on. A lifelong Tory voter, my brother is so incandescent about the Winsor report, and its recommendations for police reform, and the government’s glad acceptance of these, that he is already looking forward to being first into the booth on polling day to cast his vote. Prime Minister David Cameron calling a press conference outside No. 10 and saying he’s going to vote Labour from now on would have been less surprising.
I’ve never seen my brother so angry. About anything. He blames David Cameron personally. He thinks he has a personal animus against coppers, so swingeing and insulting are the proposed reforms. Tom Winsor and Richard ‘Walt’ Disney, his ex-Addis Ababa university academic colleague, are merely Cameron’s stooges. ‘I shall never, EVER vote Conservative again,’ he shouts, working himself up into another apoplectic frenzy.
As he points out, even Gordon Brown did not descend to bullying the police, a workforce with no industrial rights. Compared with the fork-tongued traitor Cameron, the Great Numpty, peace be upon him, is now promoted, in my brother’s eyes, and with the benefit of hindsight, to the position of a sensible and statesmanlike figure.
The Winsor report is all the more unforgivable because for months his force headquarters has been receiving directives from government to prepare for civil disorder on the back of possible economic chaos. If push comes to shove, this government is going to need a police force that is more or less onside. And now Cameron goes and does this to them all. Worse still, to win over public opinion for police reform, the quaffed PR man encourages news agencies to put the suggestion in the public’s mind that as well as being corrupt, incompetent and ‘institutionally racist’, which we all well know by now, the police are also overweight. Sexist snobs, too, if their heartless treatment of those Rochdale girls was anything to go by. That old trick.
So what has David Cameron got against the police, I said? Was he roughly shoved aside by a policeman while demonstrating in his student days? Once my brother gets on to the subject of David Cameron, he ought to display a warning sticker that says something like, ‘Light touchpaper and retire.’ David Cameron was special adviser to the Home Secretary at the time of the Sheehy report, he said, levelly. Sheehy was the last Conservative attempt to privatise the police and introduce fast tracking for senior posts.
So it’s become a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder with him, police reform, I said. What matchstick model-making is for some, and onanism is for others, tinkering with police pay, numbers and entry qualifications is for the Prime Minister?
My brother breeds Border terriers. We each had one dozing on our laps. Mine, the pup kept from Roxy’s last litter, woke, lifted her head, looked anxiously about her, sniffed the air, then laid her head back down again, remaining watchful.
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