You thought that George W. Bush was an ultra-rich kid with a sense of entitlement to rule and a mission to take care of fellow millionaires?
Meet Britain's new Prime Minister: The Right Honorable David William Donald Cameron.
At left: Britain's Brand-New "21st Century" Prime Minister -- David Cameron. Snapped in 1987 in his "Born To Rule" outfit -- worn by all members of The Bullingdon Club -- the UK equivalent of the elite Skull & Bones Society.
Born 1966. Raised in a fabulously wealthy family as heir to a massive family fortune. His Conservative Party is committed to passing a tax cut that will only benefit the 3,000 richest families in the UK -- including his own of course.
He was schooled at England's most expensive and most exclusive private school -- Eton -- and then attended Oxford University where he was a prominent member of the notorious Bullingdon Club.
The club -- a UK equivalent of Yale's exclusive Skull & Bones Society -- is an ultra-exclusive clique that admits only the nation's richest and brattiest trust-fund kids. Its openly declared primary activities are outlandish drinking, boisterous behavior and damaging property.
A well-documented typical evening while Cameron was a member in the late 1980s consisted of the members taking over one of Oxford's fanciest restaurants for the night, eating the priciest food on the menu, ordering and quaffing copious quantities of the most expensive wines and champagnes -- and then totally trashing and destroying the entire restaurant, furniture and fittings. The coup de grace at the end of each such excursion was to go up to the traumatized, distraught restaurant owner and, in a gesture that dates back to the aristocrat-peasant relationship of centuries passed, contemptuously throw wads of banknotes at the hapless owner as recompense for the massive damage caused.
That is the background of Britain's new Prime Minister -- whose only employment other than climbing the greasy pole of Conservative Party politics to become party leader was a stint as corporate flack and spin-master for a down-market TV network.
He now has the opportunity to follow in the tradition of the political hero he idolized in his youth, Margaret Thatcher, and do unto Britain's public health-care system, education system and poorest citizens exactly what he and his Champagne Charlie, Hooray Henry, Upper-Class Twit cronies did to Oxford's restaurants twenty years ago. Trash and wreck them. With the added bonus for him that, unlike his days in the Bullingdon Club when he and his fellow trust-fund brats at least paid for the damage they caused, now they can do this all for free.
The nation's money is already spoken for. Massive tax giveaways for the richest 1% and special business favors (for services rendered) to Rupert Murdoch.
As we've all seen, it's a recipe for economic success that worked so well for his fellow "compassionate" conservative, George W. Bush.
However, though he came from a sheltered background of white, monied privilege, Cameron has had major success in his oft-pronounced claim that he would modernize and broaden the Conservative Party's public face. Prior to Cameron's leadership, the party's Members of Parliament were primarily white, male and avowedly "straight". Now, after just five years of Cameron's diversification program, only 97% of the Conservative Party's MPs are white, only 77% are male and a whopping 3% are openly gay.
(While 97% claim to be heterosexual, the party -- like the US Republican Party and the right-wing clergy -- contains a considerable number of closeted, self-hating homosexuals who lash out at gays at the drop of a beret. One leading spokesman got in hot water during the recent election campaign for forgetting the party's new public veneer of tolerance towards the LGBT community and announcing that he favored hoteliers being able to discriminate against gays. A few years ago another prominent Conservative was found dead in his mansion with a noose round his neck, a plastic garbage bag over his head, wearing a very fetching French maid stockings and garters set and a large navel orange stuffed in his mouth. His private lifestyle, apparently, was in contradiction with his Conservative public face. Not to mention his taste for frilly underwear and citrus fruits.)
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In this coalition I think it could be good as the Lib Dems will be able to curb some of the right wing policies of the Tories and bring them more to the centre. Not all of them but some, after all Cameron needs Clegg and needs him (slightly more) than Clegg needs Cameron (to be seen working in Government, give him credibility in the next election?).
As for 'protecting the rich,' I wish! The Tories have already had to scrap the pledge to raise the Inheritance Tax threshold... what's next? By the way, IHT in UK begins at £350,000 - compare, please, to US, where it's what.... $2 m?
Greetings from one former resident of Ashtead to another.
Unfortunately, I find your efforts to denigrate Cameron with tales of his youthful misdemeanours deeply hypocritical. I quote from your own website:
(Martin Lewis) "His formal education ended at the age of 14, when he was expelled from one of Britain's most exclusive private schools for inserting the - very premature - death notice of his Latin tutor in the world’s most famous newspaper The Times (of London) "
Reminds my of that old saying about glass houses ....
This is payback against the Labour Party for getting the Brits into an unethical, unnecessary war that contributed greatly to the crash of their economy and the worldwide recession that followed.
These two parties are like oil & water. The coalition won't hold for long, and in the meantime, well.... let's get on a with some austerity for the masses, shall we??, Oh, and tax cuts for the top 1% income bracket, - that's much needed, and by Jove, we need more petrol tax, more whisky tax, and by golly, lets raise public transportation costs for the masses and cut their subsidies. Oh, and the inheritance tax? My god, I shudder at the mere mention of it, its unfair and prevents the establishment of dynasties, which is, of course, the right, the essence, the very raison D'etre de la corps, don't you know?
And the poor Lib-Dems! They'll be dragged along for the ride, and they deserve every bump! The rank & file will desert Clegg en masse, if he doesn't jump ship first. I'd give this non-sensical abomination about 9 months to live.
And then???? Oh, ... AND THEN! ....Along comes Mr Millibank, or the unfortunately named, Mr. Balls to the rescue and we'll see a labour government within 1 year. Gordon Brown took one for the team He did it with style and some well-disguised nastiness, as is his wont.
Gordon Brown's early exit paves the way for a stronger Labour challenge, comes the autumn.
Clegg, having made his bed with the Tories, will now have to work hard at making it work;, otherwise that's the end of the Lib-Dems, whose numbers were vastly swollen by Labour voters unhappy with their party's turn to the right. Cameron will probably try and make it work at the beginning, too, because he knows he's the one who lost this election miserably - after Iraq, the economy, MPs' expense scandals and several other issues, winning it should have been a doddle. But it wasn't. If anything, and unlike what the Daily Mail, Faux News and Co. want to make us believe, it proves that Britain does not want a return to the Thatcher's years.
So, I guess, after exchanging niceties and platitudes for a few weeks, we'll see the Social Democrat wing of the Lib-Dems clashing with the Thatcherite/Tebbitte wing of the Tories (Prime-minister included). The economy won't have improved by then, PR and Europe will be causing their nerves to fray, and the fall-out will be to big for them to ignore.
I give it some 5 months until the next elections and Labour, if they convince the general public that they've ditched Blair's toxic legacy, might be in with a chance.
Unlike W, he's not a complete idiot, and it's not clear that he's surrounded by evildoers either (Murdoch excepted, but that's a necessary ring to kiss in exchange for electability when the UK media's largely owned by him and other unpleasant oligarchs).
It's also possible that Clegg might have insisted that he rein in his personally-enriching tax breaks.
The point is pointed in the right direction.