Don’t worry, George. The I-told-you-soers and the change-courseniks around you, they’ll cajole and aerate, but hold firm. You’re on course and they’ll never understand, until it’s
too late.
You remember what it was like. More often than you’ll ever admit, they hang you by your ankles and
crash your head on the floor, these ghosts, looming larger than they have any right. They were only adolescents, you all were, but the hurt and the shame and the fury are fresh as this morning’s dew. You learnt all the lessons you needed to about the arrogance of unwarranted privilege and how completely it shields those born into it. You yearned for that at first—who wouldn’t?—but you were denied. Instead, you saw old money’s
urgent desire to attack new, and recognised the weakness that this betrayed. There is no revenge in impotent rage or empty gestures, but what group that thrives and depends on fierce tribal loyalty could survive betrayal by someone they had clasped to their heart leading them to their doom?
The usual suspects on the left who decry your decisions see only the surface layer of the damage you're inflicting, but you know just how deep it’s going to cut. Those at the bottom of the pile, the ones without the wherewithal and the family connections, they were always going to get a rough deal come what may—they’re collateral. It’s those at the top you need to dislodge, and that will take a far more
colossal impact. For them to lose money and face, the country’s finances can’t just tank or slide off a shelf. The economy, along with any remaining notions that Conservatives have the faintest clue about governance, needs to be consumed in a screaming, deranged fireball. The fact that you will be consumed along with it isn’t even a price to pay; if it finally tends that ancient wound, any amount of chaos and hardship will be a blessed balm.
So, for now, hold your course. Your intended victims must have no time to shelter themselves from what’s coming. They trust you as one of their own, so reassure them as they get restive. Practise your most earnest facial expressions for when the PM—himself from the
right school, the
right background—asks you, brow furrowed, “Are you
sure…?” Every sign of economic failure, every
creak and shudder from an increasingly strained hull, be sure to blame on your opponents. Make the right noises as you talk your toughest to those siphoning huge amounts of taxable income out of reach, while signalling that they have plenty of time to get their new arrangements in place and continue uninterrupted, tearing an ever greater irreparable hole in the country’s finances. Give your firmest support to divisive and destructive plans like the council tax benefit and the “bedroom tax”, even as older Tories begin to sniff the social unrest they could lead to and scramble to dissuade their government from implementing them. More Berlusconi-style contemptuous and unworkable gimmicks such as “trade in your employment rights for probably worthless shares” could see right-wing credos discredited for generations, and with them the entire basis for rule by the very people who broke you.
Revenge is an ugly thing, George, but they are
even uglier. You owe it to yourself to take them with you. You can do this. You were born to it.
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