Do you remember the end of the 1960 film "Spartacus?" Crassus, played by Sir Lawrence Olivier, asks the defeated slaves to give him the dead or living body of their leader in order to avoid cruxcifiction, but they thwart him by all claiming to be the gladiator. "I'm Spatacus," Antoninus, played by Tony Curtis, shouts back, quickly followed by every prisoner who would rather die than give up their hero. Fast forward over two thousand years to modern Britain. The Tories, returned to power by a constitutional quirk, wreak revenge on the hapless British voter for keeping them out of power for 13 years and launch a campaign to lay the blame for the country's economic woes at the door of the poor. It's the feckless unemployed they tell us, it's the fake disabled who are all secretly world class atheletes, it's the unmarried mother forcing us to raise a brood of rioting kids at taxpayers expense, it's foreigners who've invaded our country and demand that we house them in twelve-bedroomed mansions in fashionable Kensington. "Give us the dead or living body of the scrounger Spartacus," the Tories demand of us, the defeated, and one by one we all stand up, point at our neighbour and scream, "He's Spartacus, the scrounging bastard." Lacks a certain majesty doesn't it?
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