The Perils Of An Incomplete Classical Education.

Andrew Mitchell born in Hampstead the son of another Tory MP, Sir David Mitchell, was educated at Rugby school, studied history at Jesus College Cambridge and was an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment. A typical Tory then, born into a privileged world, the beneficiary of an expensive education, arrogant, rude and prone to approaching every problem with an open mouth. A pity then that he doesn't seem to have learned very much during his stellar career. It's never a good idea to badmouth a copper, as any working class kid could have told him, but its even a worse idea to take a newspaper into court on a flimsy charge of libel. He should have known better. That he didn't probably explains his use of the term "pleb" as an insult. His classical education should surely have informed him that in ancient Rome such an insult would have made no sense. During the early phase of its history Roman society was indeed divided between a privileged and wealthy patrician class and an underprivileged and much poorer plebeian class. However, over time many in the patrician class lost much of their wealth and their privileged position while many in the plebeian class gained both wealth and positions of great influence. During the Republic the Tribune of the Plebs, who by law had to be a member of the plebeian class, was the only politician who could enact legislation and could veto any law proposed by a Senate that could only only suggest new laws and not enact them. Marcus Antonius (Mark Anthony) was a plebeian as was Gaius Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great). In fact the policemen that Andrew Mitchell called "f*****g plebs" are in very good company - except, perhaps, when dealing with an ill-educated lout like Andrew Mitchell.

Are You "Stock" Or Simply A Pleb?

To Andrew Mitchell, despite his denials and inability to tell us what he actually said, we are "plebs". The term harks back to archaic Rome where society was divided between patricians and plebeians - the rich and the poor. By classical times the distinction between patrician and plebeian had largely disappeared except in terms of political offices such as Tribune of the Plebs. By the time of Augustus the only distinctions of any real importance was that between ancient families - patrician or plebeian - and "new men" such as Cicero. In fact it only has meaning nowadays because of the so-called "classical education" of our wealthy elite who use the term, quite incorrectly, as a term of abuse about the vast majority of us who are not venal, greedy and selfish enough to amass huge amounts of money. Enter Iain Duncan Smith whose own brand of arrogance is based solely upon his ability to scrounge huge amounts of money from the taxpaying public and relatives of his wife. For him the unemployed and benefit claimants are "stock". Now this is a far more up-to-date term which has it origins in Medieval France. Originally referring to herds of cattle which were known as "stock" it was transferred to business in reference to the residual assets of a business. So the question is, was IDS referring to benefit claimants as cattle or as assets of his DWP business? Certainly he is paid to be a Minister and might regard the DWP as his personal business with benefit claimants as some sort of capital asset that might be turned into profit or at least liquidated for cash. In those terms welfare claimants might well be seen as cattle by a man who likes to regard himself as some sort of country squire. And, as everyone knows, cattle are brainless creatures who need to be herded together until the time comes for them to go to the slaughter house.

Class: The Dead Hand Holding Back The Country.

In the offhand manner common amongst those who see themselves as upper class, Andrew Mitchell's use of the word "pleb" has taken the lid off what is fundamentally wrong with Britain. Class in this country is used to hide a multitude of institutionalised abuses of what the British like to pretend is a meritocratic democracy. Chief amongst those who worship the unthinking class divisions in our society are politicians. They take it as read that they should travel first class, especially when the mode of transport is generally of a poor standard, because travelling with the rest of us would undermine their dignity. They pretend this is not so, citing such concerns as security or the need to work without being distracted by the rowdy hoi pollei. But even when they are insulated from the common people in private transport they insist on getting only the best. Thus Ed Milliband sees nothing incongruous about turning up to a TUC-led demonstration in a Rolls Royce. Nor does he see anything incongruous in regarding public spending cuts as something that should be shouldered only by the poorer members of society. Class is the very foundation of austerity, falling unequally on those with less, while prosperity is the sole prserve of the already wealthy. A grandson of Sir Winston Churchill Rupert Soames, talking on the BBC news channel today, summed up Britain's class distinctions when he said, in all seriousness, that going to Eton and an Oxbridge university bequeaths no advantage if you have no real ability. His own chosen area of business in engineering he freely admits was considered to be "eccentric" by his peers who mainly entered the banking industry - and we all know how well the banking industry has been run. Rupert Soames runs a very successful business building and renting out generators but he didn't get where he is through taking an apprenticeship and working his way up from the shop floor. He is where he is because of his privileged background not despite it. In a fairer world in which people are judged by their actual abillity rather than the imagined ability that a privileged background bestows, would someone like George Osborne be Chancellor of the Exchequer or David Cameron be Prime Minister? Of course it hasn't always been like this. After the end of World War II Britain did enter a brief period when merit trumped privilege. But it didn't last long and now a new generation of privileged nonentities have managed to use their wealth and social contacts to hijack the state once again and, using the world financial crisis that they created as cover, are determined to turn back the clock.

Tebbitt Savages Cameron.

Lord Tebbitt, the embalmed corpse of the old Thatcherite Tory party, has savaged David Cameron in the "Guardian" today and told him to get a grip. This attack was apparently prompted by the resignation of Andrew Mitchell, but not because Tebbitt was disgusted by what Mitchell did and said. No, his beef is that Cameron has failed to hide the basic partisanship of the Tory party and has failed to obscure their selfish objectives. He proudly listed the "toffs" that have always dominated the Tory party and roundly criticised Cameron for failing to disguise what that means for the rest of us - the plebs. However, what Norman Tebbitt seems to misunderstand is the present context. While it is true that "toffs" have always dominated the Tory party and have always worked for their own selfish and greedy ends, what has changed is the revelation, in the wake of the financial crisis, that the Tory party is far more interested in defending the privileges of the wealthy than they are in protecting the interests of the country as a whole. They always were, of course, but they can no longer hide it from the electorate. Cameron is being criticised not because he's incompetent but because he's failed to hide the truth from the public and fluffed his primary task of creating believable spin. Tebbitt has always been the consumate snake oil salesman and is simply aghast that the present leader is not as good at this as he and Margaret Thatcher once were.

Yet Another Tory Parades His Ignorance.

As the Tory party reels from the shock disclosure by Andrew Mitchell as to how they regard the rest of us, they also seem compelled to line up in order to underline the message. George Osborne, for instance, seems completely unconcerned that he is willing to spend £180 of taxpayers money to avoid sitting with the plebs on a train. The latest suicidally stupid Tory to get in on the act is Mark Hoban, the Employment Minister, who is urging the uenemployed to “roll up their sleeves” and get a job. The fact that the Tory party has done its absolute level best to make sure that there are no jobs to get doesn't bother him at all. Nor does the fact that taking money from the unemployed, as he will begin to do from tomorrow, will not create a single job but, instead, will simply add to the sum total of human misery that the Tories are inflicting on the country so they and their rich pals don't have to pay tax. The reason that Mr.Hoban can be both so stupid and so lacking in empathy is easy to understand. He has spent his entire working life in the finance industry where ineptitude is par for the course and is positively encouraged while fraud is considered to be the pinacle of achievement. In 2011 he was happy to secretly meet with banking lobbyists intent on watering down the controls that the Vickers Report was urging to stop banks from taking insane risks with our money. He neither understands what it is like to be unemployed nor does he care. He is only concerned with making sure that bankers can continue to defraud the rest of us, while the problems of the plebs remains eternally beyond the scope of his limited imagination. For him it is axiomatic that the rich have to be rewarded to make them productive while the plebs have to be punished because that self-serving philosophy is the foundation of all Tory philosophy.

How To Lie Like A Tory.

Andrew Mitchell looked his leader in the eye today and vowed that he did not use the word "plebs" when he decided to insult a policeman guarding Downing Street. Now David Cameron certainly knows a liar when he sees one - after all he has to do is look at any member of his cabinet - and he's no slouch himself when it comes to telling porkies. Remember "The NHS is safe in our hands"? Well this week has certainly underlined to extent to which the PM and his Tory henchmen are willing to perpetrate massive confidence tricks in order to steal national assets to flog to their rich pals at bargain basement prices. Since the general election the Tories, with the LibDems standing by and doing nothing about it, have managed to reduce the number of nurses working in our hospitals by 6,000. At the same time they've also managed to appoint over 50 new "managers" earning above £150,000 a year to oversee the wholesale privatisation of the NHS. The pattern of hospital closures, which the Tories defend as a "rationalisation" of healthcare, clearly indicates how privatisation will proceed, while those that cannot be closed under cover of this lie are being driven into bankruptcy. And all this is going on at a time when the NHS is actually carrying a "surplus" of £1.6 billion. This is money that is deliberately not being spent on patient care and is, effectively, blood money. The question arises as to who will benefit from these "surpluses"? The answer is those private companies circling the dying NHS like sharks - the private companies who will use the money to fund their takeover of publicly owned assets and pay themselves juicy bonuses for what is no better than grand larcency. Not only are they stealing the NHS, they will use taxpayers money to do so. That is how safe the NHS is in Tory hands.

Tories: Fouled Mouthed And Incompetent Bullies?

Here in Britain we've become used to the Tories being incompetent so the fact that government borrowing in August was the highest since 1993 comes as no surprise. Nor does the fact that the Tories have managed to increase the deficit by 22% while the tax yield from corporations has actually shrunk by 10%. By any reckoning Britain is heading for economic disaster but the Tories, convinced that their idiotic theories must be right despite all the evidence that they are not, are becoming ever more arrogant and seem to feel that they have earned the right to abuse ordinary people as much as they like. Thus Lord Fink, the Conservative party treasurer, feels the time is right to insult our intelligence by telling us that the British economy would not survive if corporations couldn't avoid paying tax by using offshore tax havens. What we should be doing, he dares to tell us, is to turn Britain itself into a tax haven in order to attract to our shores the world's billionaires who don't want to pay tax to anyone anywhere. Meanwhile Andrew Mitchell, the new Tory Chief Whip, showed his real attitude towards ordinary people when he called a policeman a "f**king pleb" merely for doing his job. Verbal abuse is bad enough but, on the same day that Mr Mitchell was abusing a policeman, Tory Councillor Brian Coleman seemed to believe it was quite all right to physically attack a woman who objected to him parking his car in a restricted zone. Stupid we expect, arrogant we expect, greedy we expect - but now we are also supposed to put up with loutish behaviour apparently. These people are not fit to govern - indeed they don't seem even fit enough to walk our streets.