Life is so easy when everyone else is wrong!
Date Published: 02-May-2013
Dear Mum,
I know it's a while ago now, but I’m sorry that I argued with you. I felt terrible as soon as I put the phone down, and even though we speak nearly every day, the fact that I've not yet apologised properly has been on my mind for weeks.
Maybe I just felt so comfortable with our chitty-chatting that I thought I’d get away with saying how George Osborne had managed to enrage me. I know that no matter how much I tried to explain my outrage, you would respond with classic Daily Mail stances.
I’m not suggesting that you are unable to form your own opinions. I remember well the dark and fearsome atmosphere in the family home decades ago when life was tough for the Adleys, and it looked like you might vote for the SDP, rather than the Conservatives.
Dad didn't know what to make of it, but I was impressed. It was a huge opinion shift for a woman who had spent all her adult life campaigning and fundraising for the Tories.
As you know, I lost my interest in party politics when New Labour arrived on the scene. Even though it was great that their victory broke the sequence of four successive Conservative governments, Blair's rebranding made my old socialist party sound like a jazzed-up washing powder.
Trouble was mum, you and I were coming at our conversation from completely separate perspectives. You sent me to Public School, so I know well the Camerons, Osbornes and Blairs of this world. I know them for the self-serving ignorant little twits they are, so when Osborne asked why the English should have to support a Dole culture like that enjoyed by child-killer Mick Philpott, I just lost it a little in the noodle.
However much I insisted that there is no Dole culture being enjoyed by people like Mick Philpott, because Mick Philpott is a crazy evil man, and that by making such a comparison Osborne was not only trying to scrape some political kudos from the bottom of a stinking barrel, but also, in the process, demonising all other families on the Dole, you kept referring to the way Philpott had exploited all his women to increase his Welfare payments.
I’m sorry that I lost it, but that sounded so Daily Mail, and I can only take so much of George Osborne’s knee-jerk bigotry. You see, despite the way the English middle classes depict themselves as quintessentially conservative with a small ‘c’, there are few people I’ve ever met more conservative than the Irish.
When they’re not comfortable with their own status quo, they borrow someone else’s and stick to that like a mouse in a glue trap. To satisfy this appetite for conservatism, Ireland actually has two Daily Mails: one of them is called the Irish Independent.
So no, I didn’t mean to offend you, and yes, you’re right, Philpott was just doing it for the money and the power, but isn’t that central to Conservative policy?
For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.