Tories

Call Me Dave – Mad Dave 4

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Call Me Dave

Mad Dave 4, or Why We Should Scrap the UK Honours System and Ban the Tories From Ever Holding Office Again

Part four of my serialisation of Mad Dave Cameron’s biography, ‘Call Me Dave’

I better get this off my chest upfront. I’ve always thought the peerages, OBEs and other titles showered upon the celebrity glitterati every New Year to be not only a little bit arbitrary, but at worst a squalid example of how corrupt our political leaders have become. My reasons for thinking this are threefold.

1. Honours sometimes get given to complete monsters

The first reason for doing away with the honours is that they are often awarded to people who with hindsight turn out to be hideous human beings – deeply flawed individuals who pretend to be something different in public to what they are in real life. Take Jimmy Savile, or the female CEO of a famous-brand UK challenger bank, as being two that spring to mind. Pinning medals on closet paedophiles, corporate bullies and psychopaths is hardly the best advertisement for an ‘honours’ system.

2. Honours are often undeserved

Secondly, honours should ONLY go to people who do things WAY above the call of duty. Those selfless individuals who dedicate their lives to noble causes. Fund raisers, charity workers, the thousands of anonymous souls who toil selflessly for their local communities. What honours should NOT be about is doling out sweeties to pet celebrities and civil servants for ‘services to’ their chosen career, i.e. getting out of bed and going to work.

As far as I can tell, most of the more salubrious recipients – whose various gongs and peerages adorn the front pages of our newspapers every New Year’s Eve – appear to have been awarded them for no better reason than simply doing their job well. That is to say, turning up for work and making a decent fist of their occupation, day in, day out, just like the rest of us. For which most of them have already been handsomely remunerated.

What’s more, for every care worker, miner, policeman, engineer, road-sweeper or nurse who gets a mention in despatches, there seems to be a whole army of these famous A-listers queuing up to become Knights and Dames. As though being famous is considered an achievement worthy of honours in itself. Which would suggest it’s more about the vanity of those handing out the honours, than anything to do with the recipients’ worthiness.

3. Honours are invariably politically motivated

For most of history bestowing honours has been the preserve of kings and queens. Monarchs typically bestowed them on members of the aristocracy in exchange for loyalty, military service and keeping the peasants in place. Only since the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the power of royalty began to wane and parliament became supreme, has the method of selecting individuals for honours gradually changed. Kings and queens have continued to confer them, but on the advice of their ministers rather than on a royal whim. Recipients began being drawn from all walks of life, not just the blue bloods.

However, of late there seems to have developed a somewhat regressive trend among the political class to regard the honours system as an opportunity to do a bit of a personal back-slapping with their chums. That’s to say, a chance to reward those who have done them personal favours, endorsed them, bunged them money, that kind of thing.

David Cameron’s bestowing of a knighthood on Lynton Crosby in January 2016 for ‘services to politics’ was a particularly flagrant example. For those not in the know, Crosby was the anonymous spin doctor who masterminded the Tory election victory in May 2015. His knighthood is that grubby. And while it’s true that no party has been above such squalid practices in recent times, when a political snake like Crosby gets one for services to a party who are piece by piece dismantling everything that is good and decent about our country, then the whole idea of honours becomes discredited. Crosby’s elevation would seem to indicate that the system has sunk to a new nadir, and provides proof perhaps that the Tories now think they can get away with anything.

No leader of a self-respecting democratic nation should be allowed to brazenly elevate their cronies to the peerage in this way, or stuff the House of Lords with their political mates. That brings the whole system into disrepute. Simply replacing one all-powerful potentate (e.g. a king who showers awards and honours on his favourites, elevating them to positions of influence) with another all-powerful potentate (e.g. a Prime Minister, who does exactly the same) doesn’t seem much like progress to me, whether the demagogue is called Bad Prince John or Mad Dave Cameron.

If anyone thinks comparing the current Tory Government to a despotic feudal regime is a bit extreme, I’d suggest you have a quick glance at ‘Angels Coffins’, Chapter 3 of Mad Dave’s biography, ‘Call Me Dave’. Pay particular attention to the third paragraph down, which covers the early years Mad Dave spent at boarding school.

“Founded in 1908, Heatherdown catered for fewer than 100 boys at any one time, but what it lacked in size, it more than made up for in social exclusivity. According to one account of Cameron’s time there, among the parents of his contemporaries were ‘eight honourables, four sirs, two captains, two doctors, two majors, two princesses, two marchionesses, one viscount, one brigadier, one commodore, one earl, one lord, and one Queen (the Queen)’. Cameron’s classmates included the grandson of oil billionaire John Paul Getty, thanks to whom he would later enjoy an extraordinary holiday in America; and Prince Edward, whose older brother Andrew was also educated there.”

If this list of ennobled individuals with whom the young dictator rubbed shoulders from an early age proves anything, it does perhaps give some inkling as to why Mad Dave turned into such a sly, double-dealing apologist for rampant inequality and social exclusivity in Britain. And as one picks over the carnage of George Osborne’s latest budget, incredulous at the almost medieval savagery with which this Government is attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in society while showering gold and tax breaks on the richest and most powerful, one can only conclude that Mad Dave and his Tory mob are determined to turn Britain back 500 years to a kind of feudal society where a landed aristocracy of rich robber barons considered it their divine right to bleed the populace dry, and keep the masses in a state of servile vassalage.

Hold on to that thought, when you next vote in a General Election, or the EU referendum. Cameron is your enemy, not your friend. He is in it for himself, not for you. He is a congenital liar, a dissembler, a conman whose word you should never trust on anything.

How the Tories ensure the richest 1% of society control the poorest 99%, is by perpetuating the lie that ‘we’re all in it together’, when they are patently only in it for themselves. How they keep us in place, continually enslaving and impoverishing us, is by lying, cheating and stealing from us all on an institutionalised basis. It is the British people who built our railway network, our steel industry, our energy industry, our postal service, our great NHS, and we did it with the sweat of our brows and the brilliance of our intellect. And now these modern-day Tory robber barons are selling it off to their rich chums in the city, as if it were theirs to sell.

If there is any blame attached to the British people it is only this: that they were credulous and gullible enough to believe a word that ever came out of Tory mouths in the run up to the last election. They mistakenly believed that as public servants who were supposed to have the best interests of the people at heart, our political leaders were men and women of integrity, whose word could be trusted. But as the last 12 months have proven, since they broke free of the Liberal Democrat influence which had proved a handbrake on the worst Tory excesses during the coalition government, this current Tory administration are among the least trustworthy, the greediest, most cynical, hypocritical and socially unjust administrations in living memory. We will only have ourselves to blame if we EVER trust them on a single promise again.

Mad Dave Cameron is the 21st Century’s Machiavelli. A modern day cut-purse who dresses in a gentleman’s clothes to dissemble and deceive society about his true motives. Don’t fall for it. Not again. To borrow from Oscar Wilde, to be fooled once could be considered a misfortune, but to be fooled twice would begin to look like carelessness. Reject Mad Dave and his party of greedy capitalist thugs. Reject every nasty little policy they stand for.

Oh, and if you ever find yourself within a hundred yards of any of these closet fascists in Tory clothing, with a sniper rifle and a dozen rounds of 50 cal, in open line of sight, you know what to do.

Posterity will thank you.

 

 

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Mad Dave 3 – the best bits of David Cameron’s biography, Call Me Dave. Chapter 2: Two Silver Spoons

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Mad Dave Cameron

This week’s excerpts from Mad Dave – David Cameron’s unofficial biography ‘Call Me Dave’ – are from Chapter 2: Two Silver Spoons.

On reading the chapter I must confess I had a bit of a Eureka moment. Hitherto I’d only been vaguely aware of Mad Dave’s background. I knew he was a bit of a toff who went to Eton and Oxford, but I didn’t really know the full extent of his wealth and privilege. Nor had I fully understood the relationship between his upbringing and the heartless politics of his Government, probably the most right-wing we’ve seen since Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

After you’ve read the excerpts below, ask yourself this simple question: is this is a man you’d trust to run our beloved NHS and other vital public services? Or a man you’d trust to preside over a fairer, more compassionate society?

Chapter 2: Two Silver Spoons

“By his own admission, David Cameron had an extremely comfortable start in life. In a sign of the privilege to which he would become accustomed, he made his entrance on 9 October 1966 not in an NHS hospital – though there were plenty nearby – but in the London Clinic, off Harley Street, a private hospital favoured by the royal family.”

“A Cabinet colleague who once teased that Cameron was born with a silver spoon in his mouth was amused when he responded: ‘No, I was born with two.’”

“His parents’ wealth was both inherited and self-made. Though the Camerons are not blue bloods, there are titles and big houses in the background… Members of Samantha Cameron’s much grander family wince when they hear the Camerons described as ‘upper class’, but they are hardly bourgeois: the Prime Minister is a fifth cousin (twice removed) of the Queen.”

“There was ‘old’ money on both the paternal and maternal sides of the family, as well as his father’s considerable income as a stockbroker.”

“Sir Ewen Cameron, David’s paternal great-great-grandfather, was London Head of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and helped the Rothschilds sell war bonds during the Russo-Japanese war. David’s paternal great-grandfather, Ewen Allan Cameron, was a senior partner in the stockbrokers Panmure Gordon. His grandfather Donald, also a Panmure Gordon partner, left the equivalent of nearly £1 million. Donald had married into the Levita family, one of whom – another of David Cameron’s great-great-grandfathers – was Emile, a German-born Jewish financier who was the director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which became Standard Chartered Bank. He sent his sons to Eton, starting a family tradition.”  

“Ironically, given the political sensitivities surrounding tax-avoidance today, Ian’s [Cameron’s father] expertise was offshore investment funds. He set up business in 1979, shortly after it became legal to take large sums of money out of the UK to avoid tax. He proved very skilled at it, so much so that he rose to the top of a string of asset management firms, including a Jersey-based company and a firm registered in Panama. He also had shares in a firm based in Geneva. In 2007, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated his worth at £10 million.”

“He [Mad Dave] is a real, proper Englishman, who would love to defend what he sees as the real England, but his real England is different to almost everyone else’s, says a childhood friend.”

So, what do you think?

Here’s what I think.

I think Chapter 2 of Mad Dave’s autobiography gives us several insights into his moral degeneracy – particularly where the NHS is concerned, but also on tax-avoidance, and on the preservation of the ‘them and us’ class system that keeps the rich in power and poor people at the bottom of the pile. It perhaps also sheds light on why Mad Dave’s party seem so set on forcing doctors to work longer hours for less pay, indeed why they appear determined to force doctors and nurses to leave the NHS altogether, and why the Tories seem so wedded to the idea of selling off the NHS to private companies, against the wishes of almost the entire population. Because rich families like the Camerons can afford private hospital treatment. It’s that simple. They don’t need the NHS. And they can’t make any money out of it, as in, personal gain. Which is why they’re in the process of happily selling it off on the cheap like some knocked-off family silver. Screw poor people, if we get sick it’s our lookout.

Chapter 2 also explains the rationale behind some current Conservative policies that are frankly inexplicable to most decent, fair-minded people. For instance the proposal to cut child tax credits from some of the poorest working families in Britain, while increasing the inheritance tax allowance so the richest are better off. Then there’s the bleeding dry of public services and small businesses, while reducing the corporation tax burden on big business, and turning a blind eye to the tax-avoidance of huge multi-national organisations altogether. For instance Facebook, who, despite being worth £169 billion, and paying their 362 UK staff £35 million in bonuses last year (equivalent to £96,000 per person), claimed to be hard up, so only paid the UK Exchequer the grand sum of £4,237 in tax. I kid you not. Way less than you or I or any other single working person pay in tax in a single year. Fair? It’s what Mad Dave calls ‘compassionate Conservatism’, which is rapidly turning into the biggest oxymoron in the dictionary.

So when Mad Dave talks about ‘a fairer society’, and the Conservatives being ‘the party of working people’, and the ‘NHS being safe in their hands’, you can give those utterances the same credence as, say, a pronouncement by Adolph Hitler that he intended setting up a charity for homeless Jewish children.

Basically, the Conservatives lie out of their back teeth, at every opportunity. To get elected they’ll tell you anything they think you want to hear, even though they have no intention of keeping any of the promises they make. Once elected they invariably do the opposite of what they promised, and find some weasel way of explaining it away. That’s the Tory way. Lies, deceit, and the preservation of the status quo that keeps rich people like them at the top of society and the rest of us at the bottom. They’re the rich 1% enjoying a self-perpetuating gravy train of excess while the 99% of us continue to work our nuts off for a pittance, get sick then die. Ever it was so. And ever will it be, as long as we’re gullible enough to keep swallowing their lies.

The big lesson for us all is this. Just because words come out of a politician’s mouth, you shouldn’t necessarily believe them. In fact, where Tory politicians are concerned, it’s almost axiomatic that it will be the exact opposite of the truth. Your life may well depend on that useful bit of information. And when promises come out of Mad Dave’s mouth, oh boy, run for your life. Mad Dave tells the biggest whoppers of all, possibly in the known world outside of North Korea. Big, in-your-face lies like “we’re not going to cut child tax credits after the general election”. He was specifically asked this question several times in the Leaders’ Debates before the election, and each time gave the unequivocal answer, “no cuts to child tax credits”.

Then guess what? After the working poor voted the Tories in, their ‘reward’ was to learn they were going to get clobbered with cuts to child tax credits. Over 3.3 million working poor families, to be precise, who were about to lose on average £1,300 a year, until the House of Lords revolted and national outrage forced Mad Dave’s heartless pickpockets to do a reluctant u-turn. But don’t worry, that was just the opening shot in this Conservative Government’s war on the poor, their savaging of the sick and needy, which is going to get a lot worse before we’ve seen the back of them. Under Mad Dave’s merry band of muggers, while the rich and big business continue to get more and more tax breaks, the poor will get financially raped.

The Tories aren’t in it for public service. Never were, never will be. They don’t give a shit about you or I, our families or the working class. They don’t give a shit about anyone except themselves. They care only about money, and big business. Their money, their businesses. And making sure they take more money out of your pockets, and put it into theirs. More food out of your children’s mouths, so they can stuff theirs.

It’s genius, Mad Dave keeps lying through his back teeth, telling barefaced whoppers to our faces. And when we’re gullible enough to believe and elect him, we get our faces rubbed in the dirt. The next election that comes round will be just the same. More lies, more claims that they’re the only party you can trust with the economy, the NHS, our public services. Then soon as polling day’s over, they’ll dismantle them before your very eyes, and you won’t be able to do a damn thing about it for the next five years.

And mark my words, Mad Dave’s successor as the next Tory leader will use exactly the same tactics in the 2020 election – spin, propaganda, lies and deceit. Anything to get elected. If you fall for it again, you’ll only have yourself to blame.

If you don’t believe me, vote for them again in 2020, and see what you get.

I’ll leave the last word to cartoonist Steve Bell.

Steve Bell Cartoon - Cameron destroying poverty

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Mad Dave – the best bits of David Cameron’s biography: Call Me Dave

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Mad Dave Cameron

Just the other day I took delivery of Mad Dave Cameron’s unauthorised biography, Call Me Dave, by Michael Ashcroft & Isabel Oakeshott.

For anyone who’s been living in a cave for the last few months, the book is widely acknowledged to be Lord Ashcroft’s revenge for being dumped by Cameron after bankrolling the Tory party for a number of years to the tune of £8 million.

Ashcroft expected to be rewarded with a cushty post in Mad Dave’s cabinet. But as the world now knows, Dave reneged on him. He did the dirty. Scared off by Ashcroft’s allegedly dodgy non-dom tax status (which Dave had apparently known about for donkeys, but kept schtum, in a kind of, semi-legal kind of way).

Anyhow, when Mad Dave needed Ashcroft’s money to get elected, he practically car-washed Ashcroft’s bell-end with his tongue, metaphorically speaking, for years. Then when he became Prime Minister and didn’t need Ashcroft’s dough any more, he dumped him like an old boyfriend he’d grown out of.

Hey, who needs enemies with friends like Mad Dave.

Well, here’s a thing. Apparently it seems Mad Dave thought that that would be the end of it. Ashcroft would be done and dusted. And that basically he would shut up, crawl under a rock and die. But Ashcroft didn’t read that script. He wrote his own instead. Payback time.

At 600 pages I’m sure it’s going to be a ripping yarn that keeps me entertained right up to Christmas. I thought it would also be a service to mankind, especially to those too poor to afford their own copy (whose number has grown to millions under Mad Dave’s government) to serialise my own unauthorised excerpts from the book over the coming months. To pass on the real juicy bits that show Mad Dave at his maddest, without all the air-brushed spin and PR. Without the lies. Without the deceit, the media bias. Just Dave. Mad Dave. Mad Dave Cameron.

In one of those little gifts from the Gods that you sometimes get, the arrival of Mad Dave’s biography has coincided with the week of the Tory Conference in Manchester. During which, as it happens, Dave has made a number of statements aimed at convincing the British Public what a stand-up guy he really is. Stuff like, Mad Dave the anti-poverty campaigner. Mad Dave the champion of multi-culturalism. Mad Dave the bouncer looking after our national security. And above all, Mad Dave the trembling, emotional, bulgy-eyed raving hypocrite.

For the alert reader there’s a bit of a clue in that last sentence, as to how Mad Dave’s new nickname – ‘Mad’ – came about.

I coined it after listening to Dave’s barking speech at the Tory Conference this week. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t in some kind of surreal alternative universe, in which ‘up’ was ‘down’, ‘black’ was ‘white’, ‘left’ was ‘right’, and the Tories were the party of fairness, social justice and equality. The only conclusion anyone with even half a brain could reach was, he’s gone totally mad. Dave’s gone mad.

For instance, during his keynote speech, Mad Dave pledged to fight poverty. Nothing wrong with that in the abstract, if it weren’t for the fact that his own savage tax and benefit changes were about to make 3 million workers worse off, plunge 200,000 more children into poverty in 2016, and raise the total number of working households in poverty to over 2 million by 2020. Completely mad.

Mad Dave also vowed to fight racism, only 24 hours after his own Home Secretary, Theresa ‘Enoch’ May, stood at the same podium declaiming in her own ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, an apocalyptic vision of the effects of immigration on our country, equivalent to the great plague of London in the 17th Century. If we let them all in, we’re doomed! Barking.

And of course, the man whose term in office has completely decimated our armed forces, leaving us with basically an under-sized squadron of Sopwith Camels, a couple of leaky canoes firing pop-guns, barely enough soldiers to quell an outbreak of disorder at the annual Gloucestershire Cheese-Rolling Contest, and a BIG FUCK OFF NUCLEAR MISSILE, talked much about our national security. Mad Dave foamed at the mouth as he warned us about the woes that would befall us if mild-mannered, humanitarian Jeremy Corbyn ever got into power. “We cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.”

As Seumas Milne said in his excellent article, Mad Dave’s Tories aren’t so much colonising the centre ground of reasonable politics, as colonising its ‘rhetoric’. They’re basically lying, to their back teeth.

“When Cameron and Osborne wax lyrical about protecting working people, it’s strictly for the cameras,” says Milne. Adding, ”A Conservative party funded by bankers and hedge funds that now claims to represent working people is preparing to drive down the incomes of supermarket workers and cleaners, deepening inequality in the process, while its multimillionaire health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, insists that losing the cash from the public purse will give them ‘dignity and self-respect’. Add to that the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will strip Labour of the majority of its trade union funding, and the authoritarian, anti-worker inspiration of the Cameron-Osborne administration can’t be seriously doubted.”

But I digress. To get to the truth, why not let the facts speak for themselves, by diving straight in with the first excerpt from Mad Dave’s thrillingly unofficial biography. The excerpt, in fact, which every foreign spy on the planet will already have tucked away in their secret dossiers of Mad Dave, as the blackmail opportunity without equal. Let’s go straight in at the deep end for my unauthorised serialisation of Call Me Dave, excerpt No1, from pp73.

“In any case, the Bullingdon was not necessarily the forum for Cameron’s worst excesses. It has emerged that he was also involved in another notorious Oxford dining society, the Piers Gaveston, whose gatherings were the scene of more shocking behaviour. During the course of our research, a distinguished contemporary of Cameron’s at Oxford claimed the future Prime Minister once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that Cameron put his penis in the animal’s mouth… a little more detail. He claimed the hog’s head was resting on the lap of a Piers Gaveston society member while Cameron performed the bizarre act.”

Nice work, Dave. Loving the homo-erotic overtones. Makes me feel a whole lot safer knowing the country, and our nuclear button, is in the hands of a man who likes to hump the living daylights out of a pig’s mouth being cradled in the lap of a fellow debauchee.

And later on p74:

“Furthermore, there are a number of accounts of pigs’ heads at debauched parties in Cameron’s day. The late Count Gottfried von Bismark, an Oxford contemporary of Cameron who became notorious after Olivia Channon, the daughter of a Tory government minister, died of a heroin overdose in his Christ Church bedroom, was an enthusiastic member of the Piers Gaveston society and reportedly threw various dinner parties featuring pigs’ heads. The Piers Gaveston, named after the lover of Edward II, specialises in bizarre rituals and sexual excess. Its gatherings, typically held amid great secrecy in country houses, were described in a 2014 article in society magazine Tatler as ‘basically a very well-organised orgy’.”

So now we know. Mad Dave’s a player. He likes to play dirty.

And the secret to gaining the keys to the highest office in the land? Be a sexual pervert. A rich sexual pervert. Now tell me something I didn’t know.

 

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