Bernard Ingham: Guide to keeping your sanity in face of a long year of hypocritical humbug

Now that the economy is growing, Ed Miliband is clearly determined to exploit whatever convenient pressure points remain such as energy bills, the cost of living and banks.

He has forced David Cameron to muck about with green levies, pave the way for a rise in the minimum wage and, so far as the banks are concerned, to stick with Plan A – i.e. long- term reform. Well, it’s worked with the economy.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg takes a remarkably superior view of his credentials and dismisses the opposition and especially his coalition partners with a certain disdain.

If you are to come through this exercise in opportunism, loftiness, hypocrisy, impracticality and sheer self-delusion, you need a survival kit. This is what this column is about. Saving your sanity.

The way to do this is to provide a benchmark for what the average Briton wants out of his politicians.

The first is an end to the humbug that Cameron (Eton and Oxford) is uniquely out of touch with ordinary folk.

It is true that as members of privileged families both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls made promising proletarian starts to their education in primary schools and Miliband even went to a comprehensive – though an elite one.

But it is not clear how they kept in touch with plebeians like me through Oxford, the LSE and Harvard and the private Nottingham High School, Oxford and Harvard respectively.

Still less clear is Clegg’s rapport with ordinary folk after independent schools, Westminster, Cambridge, Minnesota University and the College of Europe.

People couldn’t care less about whether the Prime Minister is a toff or not if he is delivering. That’s the test. So what do they want him to deliver?

The people want to feel they are electing a government that can actually govern. They know it has been progressively less able to do so since we entered the Common Market in 1973. That is why turnout at elections has fallen alarmingly.

Cameron promises a referendum on our EU membership in 2017 after an attempted renegotiation.

George Osborne rightly warns Europe that unless it reforms it will be hard to persuade us to stay.

That arch-Europhile, Clegg, won’t hear a word about leaving and Miliband seems paralysed because his party and union paymasters know that neo-socialist Brussels will deliver more to their liking more easily than Westminster.

Third, the people want a steadily-growing economy and a steadily-reducing millstone of a budget deficit. Cameron and Osborne hold all the cards after the Miliband/Balls performance as Gordon Brown’s disciples.

To his credit, Clegg knows what is needed but has ideological difficulties delivering all of it.

Fourth – and this bears on EU membership – the public know the country’s problems with housing, schools, health and welfare are at least exacerbated by immigration.

The Tories want to control it. Labour, the principal authors of the problem, are inching towards tighter regulation but, like everybody else, are not likely to get far with the EU.

Fifth, the public want living off the taxpayer ended without impeding the welfare state from performing its original purpose: looking after the unfortunate.

Sixth, they are not much concerned how health and education is provided, so long as it works at reasonable cost and raises standards of attainment.

Seventh, the criminal justice system has got to get a lot tougher with the criminal classes before anyone is convinced we have one.

You have to judge whether, on the basis of their record, the parties have any substance on these issues or are all puff and wind.

The Tories’ hearts are in the right place on welfare, the NHS, education and criminal justice, but will they deliver? Labour, partly through their union connection, and the Liberal Democrats are decidedly inhibited.

Not one of them deserves a moment’s consideration for the energy policy they have produced between them. It is an expensive, contradictory and dangerous mess and its concentration on spurious greenery clear evidence of self-delusion.

Judge them by their determination to provide real security of supply at the least cost.

As for our place in the world, 
a little modesty would not go amiss. We are not made of money so we must stop chucking it away trying to democratise religious fanatics.

I hope this helps you get through the coming year. At least it should help you be shirty in the right places.

Bernard Ingham