It’s 150 years since the publication of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, and it’s often said that the mark of a true classic is its timelessness. And although it’s in the sequel, “Through the Looking Glass”, that the White Queen tells Alice that in her youth she found it quite easy to believe six impossible things before breakfast, it’s always timely to observe how many people – especially among our “leaders” – choose to view the world in a similarly topsy-turvy, back-to-front, upside-down and mad way. In fact, a lot of us are so used to viewing it like this we seem no longer to be able notice that anything’s wrong.
So no one ever says – at least out loud, in public, via respectable media – that almost everything the Conservatives say is the reverse of the empirical truth. For instance, their much vaunted “economic recovery” is, for most people, nothing of the sort, and anyway is pathetically puny compared to other recoveries both geographically and historically. All those jobs they say they’ve created they never created at all: all they’ve done is advance the neo-liberal project of making dependency on welfare so shameful many people have been driven in desperation into a modern kind of subsistence crofterism, scraping a sort of living as self-employed sole traders.
Likewise, when they speak of being a government for hardworking families and aspiration, naturally enough they mean the precise opposite: they are, in fact, a government for inherited wealth, speculators and the rentier class. Though in common with many of the characters Alice encounters, it appears they never even bother listening to what they themselves say: for the record, “hardworking families” was first used in political rhetoric in Richard Nixon’s 1968 US Presidential campaign as a coded euphemism for “not black”. Which is about as far away from the spirit of “One Nation” as it’s possible to get.
To kick quixotically against the spirit of the times and be generous for a moment, you could put a lot of this nonsensical lookingglass-speak down to pig-ignorant teenage wonks googling “Gaudy Catchphrases” and getting away with it. But even the denizens of Alice’s Wonderland might baulk at Tory claims to champion business, enterprise and aspiration.
It would be nice if they did: if they chose, like the arch-socialist Teddy Roosevelt, to break up corporations to aid competition, regulated banks to support enterprise and made room at the top to enable aspiration. Which, inevitably, would have to be via genuine, two-way social mobility, where the feather-bedded packs of complacent incompetents up at the top tumbled down to the bottom of the social heap. Fat chance of that, of course, when both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor were long ago irredeemably debauched by the private welfarism their birth afforded them, to the point where neither of them has ever had what most people would call a “proper job”. Meanwhile, “business” has become synonymous, it seems, with corporate bureaucrats paying themselves ever greater amounts of money, like toddlers helping themselves in a sweet shop, paid for from an economy based on the fines imposed on a systemically criminal banking system and selling the public realm for its scrap value.
I doubt even Lewis Carroll could have made much of this up. Not even if he sampled the magic mushrooms which Alice’s hookah-smoking caterpillar was sitting on. Although typically enough the Government now intends to make that kind of thing illegal, presumably because the psychedelic potential is far too tame for the madness at the heart of modern Conservatism.
Government by Oxymoron is neither new nor surprising. One classically brilliant way of outmanoeuvering your opponents is to stop making sense. This leaves them gawping in disbelief while you make good your escape, unless they try to outwit you by making even less sense than you do. Which might just be what the Labour Party is up to right now, though personally I suspect its upper echelons are too dim to be mad. Either way, ratchetting up the despair by peddling the lie that 2015 was the party’s greatest ever defeat (it wasn’t – except in Scotland) is pretty loopy. Simultaneously hopping backwards to re-embrace the Blairite strategy that the best way to win an argument is to agree with everything your opponent says is even loopier.
And both make about as much sense as the riddle asked by the Mad Hatter at his eponymous tea party: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The point is, that question has no answer because it’s nonsense. What you need to do is come up with sensible answers to real questions effecting real people’s real lives. And by the way, the answer to none of those questions is “Tony Blair”.
Martin Rowson 