Trivial Nonsense

The Mirror (yes, that trashy rag) and other bloggers over-exaggerating David Cameron drinking champagne with Fraser Nelson is, quite frankly, annoying. Channel 4 documenting “Boris and Dave” and their Bullingdon Club days, in a cheap attempt to undermine the Conservative agenda, is also rather trivial. This was furthered with Paxman questioning Boris Johnson (and what hypocrisy too as he attended a prestigious college, Cambridge University and is now paid in the region of £1m from the BBC) over David Cameron’s background.

Does anybody care to ask Harriet Harman about her background? No. And yet the Conservative party leader cannot have a drink of champagne without righteous indignation and hysterics over being “removed from the issues of the people”.

Anybody would think that the UK’s deficit wasn’t such a problem, that cutting public spending wasn’t an issue, that schools weren’t failing, that we don’t have tough foreign policy choices to make — it’s these issues that the Conservatives are addressing this week that really matter, not bitterness over Cameron’s privileged background and attempts to continually portray the Tories as being “out of touch”.

“Old Etonians”

But in the coming election that figure is set to fall, on present estimates, to 52 per cent, because candidates selected – both in the 116 target seats the party needs to win for a Commons majority, and in the safe seats being vacated by retiring MPs – well under half the new candidates are from private schools. In the case of the target seats, the figure falls to 42 per cent. The trend is clearly towards the point at which, for the first time in the party’s history, the state-educated will achieve parity with traditional public school products.

Moreover, most of the private-school educated MPs will have come from relatively ordinary schools, and certainly not the great boarding schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester – three schools which on present figures will provide between them only six of the expected new intake of some 150 Conservative MPs.

David Cameron may be an Old Etonian, but he will be one of only 16 in a 326-strong party, a mere five per cent of the total.

From Total Politics.

Well, let’s put an end to the “the Tories are only for Toffs” and “David Cameron and his Eton cronies” then.

Taking Issue With Darling

Alistair Darling has another article today in the Guardian (there’s a surprise), perhaps to seize some kind of initiative on the economy. There is one part I take true issue with, in light of recent news:

“I am determined the recovery will be sustainable and lasting, that no one should be consigned to the scrapheap, like so many were in the recessions of the 80s and 90s.“

Alistair Darling — meet the so-called “lost generation”: the number of under 25s out of work increased by 50,000 (6%) to 928,000; 722,000 of these are aged 18 to 24 and 206,000 are 16 to 17. But this is probably the truly important part: the jobless rate among the 18-24 age group, at about one in six, is closing in on the all-time high of 17.8 per cent set in March 1993, after the 1990s recession. We are seemingly nowhere near out of the recession — despite what the BBC and others will claim — and unemployment figures aren’t stalling. It appears likely that the unemployment rate in this generation will reach the figures of the 1990s. How is that the Labour government not “leaving anybody on the scrapheap”?

All of this is without even considering last week’s “5 million have never worked under Labour“. And when you consider Brown’s plans for helping youth unemployment (announced way back in June) apply to youths who have been out of work for over a year then Labour’s proposals to combat this seem ridiculous. (Where are these apprenticeships going to come from? Where will the funding come from? Labour seemingly believes that there doesn’t have to be a limit to their irresponsible borrowing.)

What planet does Darling live on then?