The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Pride in Our Tory Island

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, will be having a bit of a blather this evening about how broken Britain has miraculously healed itself on his watch. Daveybloke will concede that Britain has lost respect, but not because of any lunatic wars which the Conservatives may unwittingly have supported or any lunatic fringes which the Conservatives may unwittingly have joined. Oh dear me, no. Britain has lost respect because of the state of the national finances: Johnny Foreigner is laughing at us, dash him, because we don't kick our poor people hard enough.

Daveybloke will deny that Britain is "shuffling apologetically off the world stage"; which is accurate enough. Britain would have been dragged kicking and screaming off the world stage decades ago, had it not had the foresight to crawl into America's pocket and stay there for sixty years; but it is unlikely that Daveybloke appreciates this, fresh as he is from laying down the law to the Heathen Chinee from his best missionary position. Daveybloke will note, again quite accurately, that Britain has a massively bloated military budget and is the second biggest contributor of forces in Afghanistan; from which he will then draw the peculiar conclusion that, "In terms of our role in the world, the truth is that many other countries would envy the cards we hold". That must be why they're all racing to have a go in Helmand.

Daveybloke will provide his doubtless nearly wakeful audience with a "unique inventory" of British assets, including the English language (a uniquely British asset in that it is spoken in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Belize etc.); the BBC (soon to be destroyed in order to pacify an Australian with an American passport); "world-class" universities (soon to be closed, or else turned into upper-class universities); a "vibrant and tolerant society" of dawn raids and forced labour; and, perhaps most bizarrely, the "buccaneering spirit" of expatriate communities. I have no idea what Daveybloke's speechwriters intend him to mean by this, unless it be some sort of simpering compliment to the Caribbean pirate who owns the Conservative Party.

Daveybloke will hail Britain's "deep and close relationship with America", which has earned us so much of the respect we would have had if only we gave our bankers bigger bonuses; and our "strong and active" membership of the right-wing flat-earth society in the European Union. Daveybloke will end on a note of "hard-headed internationalism", promising to be more commercial in his strategy and more strategic in his commerciality and to uphold moral values and to defend Britain's moral authority "even in the most difficult of circumstances", including, presumably, those all too frequent circumstances when it hasn't got any.

In short, Daveybloke will be demonstrating, for the benefit of anyone who hadn't realised it already, that his grasp of Britain's place in the world is approximately what one would expect of a bloke unfortunate enough to be lumbered with Willem den Haag as Foreign Secretary and Liam Fox as Minister for Blowing Up Wogs.

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