David Cameron loses / has lost debate on the BBC between the party leaders of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats

[Live debate commentry at the bottom of this post]
Red Toryism is a return to the smugness of noblesse oblige.

"Will the Bullingdon Club be dining with you tonight Master Cameron? If so I'll cover the floors with plastic to stop the vomit.
"Yes they will my man. Have a shilling for initiative. If only the rest of the hoi poloi took the initiative like you. Britain would be a much better place to live in for decent people like us."
"Thank you young Master you are so kind."

Do we really want to go back to this?

David Cameron, you lost.

We don't want to play those old Edwardian parlour games.

Cameron is worse, far worse than Thatcher because of his "red" Tory philosophy. In fact this philosophy is not progressive at all. It builds on Fukuyama's triumphalist idea of the "End of History". Red Toryism constitutes a serious attempt at retrenching Capitalism in Britain. Most ordinary people think something that probably goes something along these lines:

Capitalism is an evil that needs to be ameliorated by the state which is paid for by the people and should serve the people. The state redistributes the money from people who have exploited others for profit and gives some of it back, by right, to the people who need it and who have been exploited for profit.

But with this cynical Tory "red shift" strategy, we see the lurch towards smug validation of British capitalism, despite all its deep faults. The banking crisis is forgotten. The problem is now the big state sez Cameron. The big state that saved the ass of his friends in the City. Tory hypocrisy piles upon Tory hypocrisy. Cameron's philosophical Red Shift says, instead:

The best form of society is capitalist society. Generating large profits makes a company and a country powerful and "competitive". Those people who act in union to prevent this profit extraction are greedy and unreasonable and, after all, if the poor and needy (ie anyone who can't afford private education, to live for a time without a job, to retire, or to get private health care), require something in difficult times then they should rely on the "generosity" of capitalist benefactors. Noblesse oblige.

The establishment party, the Tory party, uses people like Philip Blond to produce cloaking ideologies and to misinform the general public by appropriating a seemingly "socially concerned" camouflage. That is what our ruling class, our establishment, has always done. It has tried to hide its true nature and to preserve its dominance. That's why we still have a monarchy in Britain in 2010.
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The establishment party, the Tory party, uses people like Philip Blond to produce cloaking ideologies and to misinform the general public by appropriating a seemingly "socially concerned" camouflage.
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What is this "Big Society" Cameron is jabbering on about?

Big society, unwrapped, actually means capitalist society. The most powerful people in so called Big society are Mr and Mrs Biggety Big. The Big companies dominate and rule many people's lives. And there is no democracy in a company. You do what you say or you are fired.

For Big Society read Tesco's Society, read Goldman Sachs' society. The large companies have the power. They dominate society. So what Cameron's idea amounts to is dismantling of the redistributive apparatus of the state and returning the state apparatus to its former owners in pre-war times: to the likes of anyone who cares to invest in it and make a profit out of it: to Tescos and British Aerospace and City private equity firms like Kingfisher - to all the companies foreign and domestic that hold the real economic power in Britain.What the state in Britian has done, in reality, up till now is merely to hold the arena and act as a referee. The state has been an organisation where money is extracted from everyone and in a greater proportion from the exploiters (private companies) and then it is redistributed back to the exploited in the form of pensions, in the form of free health care, education and unemployment benefit. Cameron wants to change that now.

Cameron's class has no need to call on the services of the state, except the services of the police and military to protect its dirtily accumlated wealth:

1. They use private education they don't want their tax money to be spent on state education.
2. They use private health care and they don't want their tax money to be redistributed to the NHS.
3. They have private pensions and they don't want their tax money to be redistributed to ordinary pensioners.
4. They have built up private fortunes from the exploitation of others and speculation and they don't want their tax money to tide the people they exploit over during times of unemployment. Unemployment is a natural state for them. If Cameron stopped working tomorrow his life would not be affected one jot.

The nature of the state in a capitalist society is that it is a referee in the class war. It is an arbiter between the exploited and the exploiters. It is a Robin hood that takes from the rich, takes from the rich what they have stolen from the poor, and gives it back to those who deserve it. And that is why Cameron wants to roll back the state and give it back to his Big, society friends.
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Cameron wants to roll back the state and give it to his Big, society friends.
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Now this is Philip Blond's true red Toryism. It is a shift in philosophy that builds on Fukuyama's End of history. The argument goes like this:

If bourgeoisie capitalism is the model of society that we choose then logically we cannot attack capitalists for accumulating capital and exploiting workers and extracting the highest possible profit. This is in fact necessary for the running of this kind of society. We must be "competitive" in the sense that workers must accept lower wages to produce higher profits for companies so that we can "compete". An endless cycle of deregulation and increasing exploitation will make us "competitive" until we are all earning the wages and living in the conditions of Chinese garment workers.

Philip Blond's "Red" Tory gobbledygook is merely the thought and ideas of people who want to defend the way capitalists exploite society and defend their domination of society. And defend not even those capitalists that produce things, those get sold off to European, US, Chinese, Japanese and even Indian companies, no, defend the rights of the City speculators to gamble for a living. Red Toryism is not even a philosophy it is the dregs of a philosophy.

Why has Cameron lost the debate?

I think David Cameron has completely lost any debate for a simple reason:

Cameron and his disguised neo-Thatcherism. He want to bully us all back into a service mentality. But look around you. Nobody wants to be "in-service" except the servile. People have expectations. They have rights. They have demands. The British electorate is not naturally servile to the establishment, whether the establishment calls itself the "Big Society" or "Freddy the friendly frog" or "Rupert Murdoch, the bear".

The attitude and philosophy of service the Tories desire is best seen in the attitudes and philosophy of domestic service. In Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian times a vast percentage of the British population, and especially women, were in service. Look back a few generations and it's probable that your forebears were servants. You. The person reading this. Your great great grandmothers were subjugated to the whims, sexual advances, unreasonableness and so called "generosity" of well-off householders and of the establishment. I know mine where. They were probably servants at the Hall.

And the job of private people, the social entrepreneurs of their day, was to help the poor and benighted. Your forebears. Cameron's establishment mob want a return to these "good old times". They want private people (while making a profit) to be involved in doling out charity to the likes of you and me when we need it and Cameron's mob want us to be grateful for charity. To be grateful for the jobs the rich provide and to be grateful for the opportunity to be exploited.

But if the British people choose Cameron then they can only be brain dead. Or delusional like the Monty Python prisoner egging on his dungeon tormentor in the prison and praising him for doing an excellent job keeping the likes of him in their place.

Cameron is worse than Thatcher. You have been warned.

Round 1 to Brown.

Live debate

20:40
Cameron lying low. Looking nervous. Trying to act self-effacing.

20:41
Brown looking Prime Ministerial. Good point about arbitrary cap. I like the emphasis on tolerance.

20:42
Cameron the PR operator is showing his teeth with the old policy on immigration. Appealing to UKIP and to the BNP. It reminds me of all the people, the ultra-right he is allied to in Europe. You can't hide your true views.

20:44
Clegg sounds in tune with Brown.

20:45
Brown is talking about the measures he has actually taken. That's substance.

20:46
Clegg is contradicting himself.

20:47
Concrete policies from Brown. He's winning.

20:48
Another Tory nasty party policy. The unemployed are lazy. Immigrants take our jobs. These are the ideas of Michael Howard's Conservatives. Cameron is showing nothing of the Red Tory speil. It's just a PR cover.

Labour and Liberal Democrats win first round.

Law and Order

20:50
So what's this go to do with Red Toryism. Lock em up! Law and order fetishism. Same old nasty Tory Party. Philip Blond is just PR spin.

20:51
At least Clegg has a bit more to say about the causes of crime. That makes his proposals more credible..

20:52
The Tories don't talk about parental responsibility. Brown does. So much for Cameron's spinning.

20:53
Deal with drug addicts. Is this a Daily Mail writer? Forced rehabilitation for people on drugs. How many people take soft drugs in Britain? Slippery slope fallacy ad infinitem. Clegg has a good analysis. No soundbites. Cameron speaks in pre-election soundbites.

20:55
Cameron is weak here, because he will not ask for Police accountability

20:57
Brown spiking Cameron's Big Society spiel. Voluntary work is important.Clegg against Knee jerk locking up. Tories in favour.

I'm waiting for Cameron's bullshit about the big society and the attack on the state. Let's hear about the cuts. Thar she blows.....

21:00
Cameron bullshitting about the police. Planning cuts. How will Cameron do it? Nope, doesn't say. Instead he attacks Clegg. Long prison sentence fetishism.

21:21
Cameron blames Brown for bailing out the banks. Come on! Interviewer cuts off Brown. It's a fix!

MPs Expenses

20:04
Clegg shouldn't attack MPs. He is an MP himself. It sounds hypocritical. People want mea culpa.

20:04
Brown, the Scot, has a good idea. Also he is credible. He is careful with figures, whatever the Tories say.

20:05
Wasn't Cameron one of the Prime culprits? Didn't he actually use a lot more money on expenses than other people, though he was technically "clean"?

20:07
Good point of Clegg's. Murky party funding. Nice jab. Lord Ashcroft in his off-shore haven in Belize.

SCORE!

20:07
Good point. All of us represent neighbourhoods which deserve representation. Nice jab at the hereditary peers. Cameron sounding too posh. Don't go there David.

20:10
Cameron wants to take representation away from people. His idea is poorly thought out. Brown is avuncular. Brilliant.

20:11
Cameron is attacking Clegg. Bad move.

20:11
As Cameron and Clegg bite each other, Brown is looking statesman-like. We should raise the standard of debate here.

20:13
Clegg paddling away from Brown. But he won't say if he does agree with Labour.

20:13
Cameron looking weak. Brown. But I want a more fundamental reform. Good for Brown.

20:15
Good question. Brown. Concrete proposals. Full-time education. Brown is wiping the floor.

20:16
He's going to get elitist pretty quick. Streaming. Same old Tory policy. Support for private education. Sends his child to a state school. Hm. How old is the child? Probably quite young. Let's see what happens to his child in a few years. If he doesn't go to private school like his good old Pa and then on to Oxbridge and the Bullingdon.

20:18
Don't agree with academies at all. Brown should not be saying this. Good that he says he will not cut budgets.

20:19
Discipline in schools. God this is traditional Tory policy! Order children about? I teach in a place where kids are free and they do fine and they mature faster.

20:21
Smaller class sizes. Well said Clegg.

20:22
Attack on the state coming. Same old nasty party. Attacking based on flabby anecdotes. This coming from a private school boy whose parents paid tens of thousands of pounds for him to go to Eton. Every penny counts? You bet it does. Look where it gets you.

20:23
NI stick. NI money goes back into the state and education.

20:24
6 billion. Complete invention. Cameron avoiding the challenge from Brown.

20:25
Clegg making cheap comments. Is he a serious contender? He's looking more like a lightweight every minute.

20:26
Clegg is irritating me. He sounds childish.

20:28

Cameron contradicting himself. Don't reduce taxes. Reduce taxes. Brown...

Attacking Cameron as a cutter £6 billion Tory cuts.

20:30

So Cameron is trying to spin his cuts. Brown scores!!!!Don't put people at risk by withdrawing.

20:30

Cameron talking about Mothercare. Invest in the economy this year. Don't pull out the money. We have to be responsible.

20:31

Clegg is a tosser. Sounds like Vince Cable light.

Brown interrupted at a crucial point again. It's a fix.

Army and defence

20:33

Pwoper. Clegg looks and sounds like a school boy. Cameron's ITV worm is dipping LOW! He looks awfully slick and untrustworthy. What would the Tories have done.

20:35

Why are we in Afghanistan. There is chain of terror. 3/4 come from that border area. Build up.

20:39

Cameron's establishment mates talking to him about modernisation. Clegg reaching out to Cameron. Yuck.

20:40

Cameron looking stiff and fake. Brown looking confident humble and prepared.

20:41

Cameron threatening China. Eeek!

20:42

Cameron looking down his nose. Where's Saatchi and Saatchi. He's looking posher and posher. He looks worried. He knows he's lost.

Health service

20:46
Brown is making strong promises. Good. We'll hold him to them.

20:47
Cameron using his dead son to win a debating point.
We expand it. Cameron says. How. By privatising it of course.

20:48
Clegg brings in his son too. Yuck.

21:50
PR agent goes into spin. Eeek. Horrible to watch. David Cameron has lost the debate. Code. Choice driven system, Means privatisation.

Say it Cameron.

PRIVATISATION

21:51
Do you belive a cutter. That he will not cut.

21:52
Good attack on Cameron.

20:53
Cameron is a ridiculous PR man. He's fighting back with anecdotes.
This debate is going to boost Brown enourmously. What a surprise.

20:54
Good attack on top earners.

Interrupted Brown again...three times.

Elderly care

20:56
Nobody believes Cameron. Mr Slick is totally flustered.

20:58
Brown has come into his own.