Lord Young: the favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better
Posted on Friday 19 November, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party
THE last time an aphorism from Baron Young of Graffham made the headlines came a week before polling day in 1987, when he grabbed Norman Tebbit by the lapels and shouted ‘Norman, listen to me, we are about to lose this fucking election’.
He need not have worried. The Conservatives proceeded to win that fucking election, and Lord Young was reappointed to the cabinet, enabling him to mastermind the privatisation of what few nationalised industries by this stage remained.
He thereafter returned to his business career. He is now – according to the Sunday Times Rich List last year – worth £30m. So it may well indeed be that things are looking good for him. For Lord Young and his class, things always look good.
But to extrapolate from obvious personal prosperity to the idea that the ‘vast majority’of people ‘have never had it so good’ in ‘this so-called recession’ is truly a senior moment on the part of our 77-year-old enterprise czar.
Likewise, he maintains nonchalant composure when it comes to the 100,000 public sector posts that will be lost over the next year. There are thirty million jobs in the UK economy, he helpfully points out, just as there are thirty million quid in Lord Young’s bank account. So a six-figure addition to the dole queue can airily be dismissed as ‘a rounding error’.
This outburst – coming from a man who is as rightwing as he is rich, and who has held jobs in three Conservative administrations without having to undergo such tiresome niceties as getting elected to anything – will not be quickly forgotten, even if Lord Young has this afternoon had the decency to resign.
As a spotlight on the mentality of the Conservative Party, it is as revealing as the time another Tory called Young – in this case Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet – described the homeless as ‘the sort of people you step over on the way out of the opera’.
Lord Young, of course, is old enough to remember Harold Macmillan’s 1957 ‘you’ve never had it so good’ speech the first time round. But presumably he will not have been a fan of 1980s leftwing rock band the Redskins, who famously rejoindered that Supermac’s bon mot was ‘the favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better’.
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16 Responses to “Lord Young: the favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better”
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I am sure some lefties will wish decapitation on me but the Lord is right. The minority poorer in society will suffer with the cuts to services. The majority will will not notice. That is why the Lib/Cons were elected. Sometimes the truth conveniently evades people.
Anyone who can quote from the Redskins goes up in my estimation!
What a great lyric.
Though the pro imperialists have attempted to appropriate the song “Kick over the statues”, much to their dismay!!
Dave. Did Harold MacMillan actually say,’you have never had it so good’? I think the honorable press may have twisted his actual words. Unlike them of course.
He said something very like it, Jimmy, I did check.
I am not rich, I am not a businessman, I am not a Lord, but I agree with Lord Young on this one: I am tired of hearing the whining of people who have a house and a car and a pension. This is a welfare state, and nobody ever had to starve or die out of need. And the alleged spending cuts are no cuts really: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/uk-budget-what-cuts/
I have travelled many places, and one thing I have learned is that we Europeans moan and whine at a very high level. While others, who are truly in need, are forgotten by us.
A civil servant who loses his job and has to look for one on the free market with his experience, connections and references is not in a terrible situation. A farmer in Bangladesh is after a flood. Or a refugee in Kigali who doesn’t know where his family is.
Think about this, next time you warm up with a coffee at Pret-a-Manger after a protest in London.
Dave @ Dean. I am sure I read years ago that he said something different. However Lord Young has probably said what I have been saying for a long time. The rich and better off have loadsamoney. Therefore no need for cuts. Tax them. We should be focused on the tax dodgers and not the red herring of benefit scrounging. Greece, Ireland, Britain and probably all of the EU countries on the gravy train are doing F all and allowing tax dodging.
James Glasgow, how come you can talk sense and bollocks at more or less the same time?
You sound like a Labour supporter who refuses to be embarrassed by the party’s recent history.
You’re trying to put me off re-joining, aren’t you?
Lobby. Are you not prepared to admit to talking bollocks on occasion. You should join unless you have a viable! alternative that people will vote for. Your choice Lobby. To many lefties are out in the wilderness talking to themselves and that is a shame. You cannot do anything for the punters talking shite on the internet. You have to be elected. That is the system. So get elected and change it.
Lobby. My mrs is a pedantic socialist and has told me that to many should be too many. She is a typical socialist more concerned about grammar than the workers. She said the clever people will laugh at me. I just love the university mob. Fuck them. I had to correct grammer.
James Glasgow:
“Lobby. Are you not prepared to admit to talking bollocks on occasion.”
James, I talk bollocks all the time, but I’m still usually right.
Lobby. Just like me. I will send you a bevvy over the net. Hic.
Oh my, it turns out we now have ‘Camerons Butler’ and ‘his’ valet here. Jimmy and Andreas.
Look guys, if you want to stay living and working ‘beneath the stairs’ in ‘Downton Abbey’ it may be quaint for you. Just do not expect those of us who find being privelaged in wealth or title fucking obscene to join you. As the bastards upstairs rob us of jobs, welfare and pension.
It is about power you dickheads, (Oh the language you taught me Jimmy). The ‘have it all’ robbing the ‘have nothing’ to invest even further in a casino in which most of us here are only counters. No power.
If I see one more word here about how worse off ‘Sub Saharan’ Africans are to me I will fucking vomit. The right have used that argument for decades. The result. They are worse off and so are we. Their very intention when they teach you to parrot it. Not least on this day of ‘Children In Need’.
Parroting that shit is lazy and unthinking. It intentionally ignores that the people causing the relatively obscene circumstances are one and the same. We could not have Luxury cruise ships touring round the coast of Haiti. A few miles from a hell few of us could imagine. Without increased inequality here.
Get it
Being a public sector accountant, I can assure comrades that the cuts are very much real. These are cuts to jobs and services.
I am not sure what planet Andreas is living on frankly.
Well let be honest, it is planet conform isn’t it.
Been on a local Demo today. Brilliant stuff. A small but significant beginning to opposition to the criminal cuts. Even as they are beginning to bite. Every age from a push chair to a wheelchair. Just wait till next spring. If we can. When the sharks really start to bite.
30 years on the left and I for one have seen nothing quite like today. Repeat that in every town and city over the next few months and the coalition are history.
An alliance of students, workers and pensioners is Murdoch’s ‘Red Sea’. Ask him if he thinks he can walk it.
Please.
Hello Martin. Did you canvass how many on the demo voted against Labour and voted for the Con/Libs that are about to fuck them.
Jimmy, no need to canvass old chum. I am very confident the vast majority of us on the demo, like me, did not vote. We are too politically aware to think that farce changes anything anymore.
Agreeing with Tony Benn when he resigned his seat to become ‘involved in politics’. Even if your other cosy right wing chums in Labour PLC got in, the cuts would still be happening. We would have still been marching.
Maybe you should try it some time. Invigorating and nourishes the soul. The exercise alone is far healthier for me than any ‘Front Government’ Conservative, Lib Dem or Labour can erect for Murdoch’s whimsy.
The Winter Palace next. Did they have fire extinguishers when last they stormed it?