It’s quite difficult, you probably wouldn’t understand
Yesterday was a big day for empty rhetoric. Before New Labour’s mutton-headed election broadcast we had the oily launch of the Tory Manifesto.
Michael Howard described the manifesto as reflecting “the simple longings of the British people”.
Simple longings? My simple longings are wishing I could get a decent pork pie in a supermarket and that if only 2000AD was still as good as when I read it when I was a kid.
The so-called simple longings of “more police”, “cleaner hospitals”, “lower taxes”, “school discipline”, “controlled immigration” and “accoutability” aren’t simple at all. All of these are actually complex issues that Howard has boiled down to an almost meaningless sludge that he can throw at the wall in the hope some of it sticks.
Take the “how hard can it be to keep a hospital clean” schtick for instance. Howard probably watches his cleaner doing the bathroom now and again and thinks: “There you go, a bit of Domestos wipes up my pee-pee drips a treat. Why can’t they do that in hospitals?” But it is actually slightly more complicated than that.
And that’s how meaningful debate and respect for politics goes tits up. I don’t believe for a second he thinks people other than journalists are actually going to read his manifesto - they’re going to rely on the edited highlights from him. The easily-swayed and unimaginitive, Sun and Mail reading, sections of society, will go:
“Too right! It’s a piece of piss cleaning a hospital/recruiting policemen/increasing public spending while simultaneously lowering taxes/letting fewer scroungers into Britain/holding our leaders to account. Bloody politicians.”
And then they turn over to whichever witless soap is on, their simplistic prejudices entrenched even further.
Howard, like Blair, hasn’t got the first clue about living in the real world. For him, humanity is an abstract concept - a warm, fuzzy, non-specific entity. As we’ve seen during the Iraq war, depersonalising humanity and marketing complex issues to the public at a macro level can have rather unpleasant consequences.
UPDATE: How hard can it be to keep a hospital clean? Very.
Posted on April 12th, 2005 at 8:39 am
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Filed under 2005 General Election, Tories, UK politics |
I saw one of those “How hard can it be to keep a hospital clean?” posters near me and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Anyone who thinks about this for a while must realise that it’s got to be extremely difficult. Massive buildings, thousands of people going in and out every day, medical procedures that involve various bodily fluids, hundreds of nooks and crannies in every ward… it’s no wonder the privatised cleaning services in the hospitals get fed up.
It’s probably one of the most difficult things to keep clean. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with these baseless claims, and I’m glad your post has considered and dismissed a whole range of them.
A more apposite question would be “How expensive can it be to keep a hospital clean?”
Well, if you read Matthew Turner, you’ll learn that good pork pies still exist. Good to know, eh?
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