What a Waffle
I have just read through David Cameron’s speech. This was done without notes or a safety net. It may have been good to listen to, but to read it is absolute agony.
It simply waffles from one populist note to another without stopping to substantiate any claims or to give any sense that this is a man who has a clear set of aims, with all the necessary details. To make it worse he pulled up the sad case of the two Community Support who were too late to save a drowning boy.
And it ended with that extraordinary farce of two community support officers standing by a lake after a boy had drowned, feeling that because the rule book said they couldn’t intervene, they shouldn’t. Well, we’ve got to start tearing up the rule books and allowing people common sense, initiative, and responsibility in the jobs that they do.
Okay, let us be upfront and honest with this. The training says, when someone is obviously already dead, don;t go and risk your own lives to save a corpse. It is not nice, but it is right. And fully trained police officers (who also have no underwater rescue training) are taught the same thing. You are in the army too, and the fire brigade. But no, David Cameron has to go for the tabloid spin, and to hell with the feelings of two hard working community support officers who did all the right things in a situation where kids were playing where they had been warned it was dangerous to do so.
He also started waxing lyrical about national service.
If you ask people of my parents generation about national service, they tell you often that it was something that brought people together. It didn’t matter whether you were from the north or the south or whether you were rich or poor. It was something we all did together and it was about serving our community and serving our country and we learnt responsibility.
Strange that. Talking to relatives of mine who did national service they remember it with complete hatred. Two years of wasted life just to solve an employment problem. It even spawned an unflattering comedy sitcom, “Get Some In.” Perhaps David did not see it in his dorm. It did have some rough people in it.
All in all, though, the speech probably “sounded” rather nice, a fireside chat Nick Robinson at the BBC called it, but it read terribly. Browns read better. Notes have their uses, you know.
Related posts:
- A Most Delicate Balance
- Are MPs above the law?
- A Very Brown Speech
- Why we shouldn’t have an Election
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