Former life assurance salesman turned Tory A-lister Ivan Massow on the Tory Taliban (© Alan Duncan):
“Those same shire people didn’t agree that a man and a man should live together. They are always one step behind the curve unfortunately. But there aren’t many more reforms for them to tolerate. There’s just nothing left after this. When we can get this last thing through the gate I can’t see anything else, any other slights on their lifestyle or their beliefs that they have to tolerate.”
Also in today's Telegraph :
"The idea that mothers rather than fathers should take charge of raising children needs to be "shattered", a minister said today."
It'll end in tears before bedtime, mark my words. But it all makes a kind of sense from one perspective. It all depends on whether you think that being a Master Of The Universe, high above a shattered, atomised and poverty-stricken mass of competing and variegated cultures, is better than being a more-than-comfortable member of a civil, ordered, prosperous and relatively homogenous society. You and I may go for the latter option. But that's not necessarily what an elite will want*.
(In other news, "a widow has died after being left to starve for nine days as her care agency was closed and the council forgot about her.")
* Laban - "It's true that in a rational economic world, a high-earning working class might be considered a good thing for a nation - and that therefore it's not in our rulers' interest to take us back a hundred years - but that would also have applied for the several hundred years prior to, say, 1860-1960. The post-1945 settlement is not the natural order of things. Before that it was the plebs and the rest - and the will to power, even constrained by Christianity, was strong. Unconstrained, what limits are there?"
