Has Cameron gone bonkers?

What ho, squires!

Good God, have you fellows seen the new Tory manifesto?  It reads like something dreamed up by the Soviet People's Council circa 1925.  Consider this helpful description over on Conservative Home:

This must be the most un-Tory manifesto ever published by the Party.  It would have astounded that bleak, frowning, gloomy-bearded Victorian statesman. It's altogether lacking in the sense of evolutionary caution, of politics as the art of the possible, of the fragility of public affairs, and of the frailty of human endeavour that, not so long ago, coloured the lifeblood of the Conservative Party.

Consider this: "Our ambition is for every adult in the country to be a member of an active neighbourhood group."  Please note: every adult.  How will voters find the time?  After all, they'll be too busy taking over schools, forming co-operatives to run hospitals, organising their own single budgets if ill long-term, sacking MPs in recall ballots, electing police commissioners, voting in local referendums, undertaking national citizenship service, and monitoring government spending on-line to do very much else at all.

I say, it sounds positively dangerous! I have visions of some horrendous totalitarian state in which workers' soviets run every shire and bumptious busybodies are given free rein to poke their noses into every nook and cranny of rural life.  Does young Cameron seriously propose to give every random oik in the realm a say on complex matters of state?  Does he imagine that Gary from the council estate has anything remotely sensible to put forth at the local governors' meeting?  It is a recipe for absolute chaos. 

I had resigned myself to voting Tory but now I am not so sure.  I grow ever more convinced that a full-scale coup is required if we are ever to be free of these infernal knaves and blackguards. 

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

Comments

[Andrew]

My Lord, you are exactly right. This volunteering claptrap will get precisely nowhere, it is the sort of wishy-washy nonsense that is dreamt up in the town halls of Hackney, not in the marbled corridors of power. How Cameron is unable to land telling blows on the loathsome Brown, Mandelson and Balls is beyond comprehension.

Oh for the days when one knew what a politician stood for. The Conservative would be for the landed nobleman, the Labourite would be for the working man and the Liberal would be for the bourgeois. Now each party wants to be for everyone, and in so doing speaks for no-one.

It must have occurred to Her Majesty that none of this lot are up to the job. Restore the absolute monarchy I say!

[Viscount Crouchback]

Precisely, old bean. Couldn't have put it better myself. I do find, however, that the closer polling day draws, the more the old atavistic Tory loyalty kicks in. I keep reminding myself that an Eton and Oxford chap like Cameron can't be all bad, and that perhaps all this wishy washy talk of a big society is mere cover for a secret programme of out-and-out oik bashing once in government. Let's hope so anyway!