We’re all in the Roller together

The royal family seemed keen earlier this week to emphasise that the car in which Kate Middleton will travel to her wedding is the same Rolls Royce that was attacked in student protests.

No doubt this was intended as a heartwarming “good news” story, but something about it left me feeling uneasy, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what at the time:

Thinking about it further today, I think it’s the “Britain Can Take It!” tone of the coverage. We’re invited to think “Isn’t it great that those ghastly students haven’t succeeded in spoiling Kate’s special day?” At the very least, it’s hard not to see this as the royal family in some small way taking sides in a political issue.

(Not that I’m defending the students who attacked Charles and Camilla’s car. It was worse than a crime – it was a blunder, because it gave the media another excuse to focus on “violent students” rather than “violent police officers”.)

This particular story is only a straw in the wind, and I’ll cheerfully admit that I may be “over-reading” it. However, we do seem to be moving back towards a rhetoric of “the enemy within”: students, public sector workers (a.k.a. “enemies or enterprise”), lead-swinging benefit cheats, and so on.

In the light of that, it’ll be interesting to see how the phrase “we’re all in this together” develops over the next year or two. As coined by George Osborne, its avowed intent is to express how we are all one country, rich and poor, united against the common enemies of financial, economic and fiscal crisis, sharing its burdens fairly.

However, it won’t take much for it to become a slogan, not of a country united against external enemies, but of the middle and upper classes – “decent, respectable people” – united against internal enemies.

Which would at least have the benefit being more honest and accurate, given how this government has been acting to date.

Michael Gove, class warrior

Much is (rightly) being made of a revealing column Michael Gove wrote in his op-ed days arguing in favour of higher tuition fees. What has attracted most attention is his statement that:

anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of [a £21,000] debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place.

However, of far more importance in helping understand the mentality of those now running our country is this observation a couple of paragraphs later:

Those of us who are net contributors to the State, graduates or not, are getting a terrible deal for our money. We could guarantee far superior healthcare and schooling for our families if only the Government gave us back the money which it confiscates from us in taxes and then spends on the schools and hospitals which it runs so badly.

This shows a far more radically right-wing mindset than the present government is prepared to own up to publicly, but which surely informs many of its actions.

First, the mentality of being the “us” who are “net contributors” to the State, versus (by implication) the “them” whom “we” are “subsidising”.

Second, the view that taxation to fund public services is “confiscation” from those “net contributors”.

Third, the clear desire for the “far superior healthcare and schooling” which “we” could guarantee for “our” families if the government gave that money back and let “us” spend it ourselves – no mention of what implications this might have for “them”. But then, if “they” are afraid of a little debt, then they don’t deserve an education anyway, do “they”?

This is naked class-war politics. So much for “we’re all in this together”.