I did not hear the radio interview with our Chancellor of the Exchequer where he defended his claim that the recent conviction of Mick Philpott, who was drawing over £50,00 in state benefits for his seventeen children, for the manslaughter of six of them in a house fire of itself demonstrated the necessity of restructuring the welfare benefits regime.
Mr Osborne, however, is quoted as having said "I don't set out to be divisive – actually far from it, ... I think a lot of the things that I've been saying … are in tune with what the great majority of the country think and experience in their everyday lives."
I have to wonder how in touch Mr Osborne - or any member of the government - actually is "with what the great majority of the country think and experience in their everyday lives", although no doubt he is surrounded by advisers whose professional task is to tell him their version of it.
One doesn't have to wonder about (rather than wonder at) how in touch the majority of the country is with the facts of the welfare system. Surveys have shown that public opinion majorly overestimates the cost of welfare, its generosity to claimants, the extent of abuse, the proportion of the total cost that goes to the unemployed (as opposed to, for example, pensions), and the amount that this country spends compared with other European states.
Yet it is that confident phrase "I don't set out to be divisive" that strikes me most. I can imagine it being proclaimed equally sincerely by any aspiring populist dictator - including, I cannot help but reflect, Hitler, one of whose most often repeated phrases was "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer". Here and now in Britian we have a Coalition, though not one nation.
The people united come first. Then may come the horrors. Not, of course, that Mr Osborne is indulging in anything like Hitler's strident rhetoric, but, when appeals to the popular will gain political precedence over reasoned appeals to the public benefit, we are entering dangerous territory.
It is noticeable how often, at other times, Mr Osborne and his conservative goverment colleagues couch their appeal to a public described in a particular way, as "strivers" or "those who want to get on" or "hard-working families" (vintage New Labour), implying clearly that those whose views or opinions matter are those who already agree with the government's vision of society and the direction changes to its structure should take - fellow travellers on the road to political reform and the big, if not comprehensive, society. It echoes the late Mrs Thatcher's underlying question, "Is he one of us?" Yet she was a populist of a different stamp. For all her genuine belief that she was battling in the interests of her country and countrymen and women, Mrs Thatcher never shrank from identifying an 'enemy within'. Her politcal heir and successor, Tony Blair, with his fixation on the middleground was also aware that his social vision was not entirely comprehensive, and it is a rarity indeed to find a politician who is genuinely concerned to unite the country across real existing divisions, or, who, when the going gets tough, is not prepared to take political advantage from majority disdain for other elements in society.
One people. The phrase with great historic currency in the United States is rather different: "One nation under god" although it was only in 1954 that Congress, with President Eisenhower's encouragement, put god in there. The daughter of the original author, in 1892, of the pledge of allegience, socialist minister Francis Bellamy, actually objected to the change. In another small irony, illustrating the difficulty of keeping these national tokens unsullied by any fortuitous association with rival, abhorrent regimes, the salute to the flag devised by Bellamy at the same time had to be changed during the second world war because it appeared too similar to the arm extended Nazi salute.
"One nation" also has British political currency, as "one nation conservatism" and the tradition introduced to our social debate by Benjamin Disraeli, but the idea now has more campaigning appeal to the Labour than to the Conservative party, the latter famously mocked now for another once seemingly appealing slogan that "We are all in this together."
As yet the "condition of England question" has still to be explicitly revived by any politician.
