The problem isn’t Cameron’s extreme privilege – it is that he has never tried to see beyond it. He keeps accidentally revealing how warped his view of Britain is, and how little of it he understands. For example, Cameron said in an interview: “The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background”, but “she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school.” Read that sentence again. Now imagine how Britain looks from inside David Cameron’s head, where the 97 per cent of us who went to day schools are “very unconventional”. (In the Bullingdon Club, he called George Osborne “oik”, because he had gone to the £20,000-a-year St Pauls, not the £30,000-a-year Eton.) This points to a wider mindset. The group he considers “conventional” and “normal” are the only people he has ever really mixed with, and they are the people he chooses to staff his office with today – very rich people. Is it any surprise he makes policies that serve them, not us?
The problem isn’t Cameron’s extreme privilege – it is that he has never tried to see beyond it. He keeps accidentally revealing how warped his view of Britain is, and how little of it he understands. For example, Cameron said in an interview: “The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background”, but “she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school.”
Read that sentence again. Now imagine how Britain looks from inside David Cameron’s head, where the 97 per cent of us who went to day schools are “very unconventional”. (In the Bullingdon Club, he called George Osborne “oik”, because he had gone to the £20,000-a-year St Pauls, not the £30,000-a-year Eton.) This points to a wider mindset. The group he considers “conventional” and “normal” are the only people he has ever really mixed with, and they are the people he chooses to staff his office with today – very rich people. Is it any surprise he makes policies that serve them, not us?
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If you’re looking for class war, you can find it - in David Cameron’s policies, by Johann Hari.
Preaching to the choir a bit, but a good read nonetheless.