"Aspiration nation"

"The global race is not just about GDP. It's about saying to the mum who's worried about her children's future, 'We are building a country where there is a future, so your kids won't have to get on a plane to get on in life, they can make it right here in Britain.' It's what this party's always been about – aspiration." David Cameron

Under Margaret Thatcher, the unemployed were urged, indirectly, by Norman Tebbit to get on their bikes (not a plane), as his father had done. Nevertheless, Tebbit knew about planes as well as bikes, and unemployment: ex RAF, ex British Overseas Airways Coproration pilot, and ex official of that aggressively self-interested trade union for the well paid, the British Airline Pilots' Association, he became, as a politician in Margaret Thatcher's government, the scourge of the trade unions.

Former Prime Minster Harold Macmillan, who came out of a different drawer, remarked, of Tebbit, "Heard a chap on the radio this morning talking with a cockney accent. They tell me he is one of Her Majesty's ministers". What he would have thought of today's lot is a puzzling question but one not beyond all conjecture.

It is reported that David Cameron intends in a forthcoming speech to hail three "great Conservatives" – Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher – for putting in place ladders that help people improve their lives. Macmillan's ladder was to build homes; Thatcher's, not as one might think to sell them (the council houses) off at a large discount and prohibit councils from building new ones, but to "fire up enterprise so people could start their own businesses". Depends which way you look at it I suppose. I'm with the sunflower, or Sir Thomas Browne.