It’s somehow fitting that the end of fresher’s week coincides with the end of conference season; both involve drinking a little more than is healthy, sleeping a little less than you’d like, and the odd regrettable romantic encounter.
In an allusion to regrettable romantic encounters, Labour announced that teen mums would be looked after in hostels rather than given the keys to a council house. Even more regrettable was the almost immediate christening of this scheme (depending on which hack you talked to) as either ‘huts for sluts’ or ‘slag goulag.’
Unfortunate monikers to one side, all of the party conferences focussed on the seemingly imploding public finances. Austerity here, cuts there, and ooh, can I have another vol-au-vent please? Because as well as the debates, conference is an opportunity to hoover up industrial quantities of free drink and canapes from 7 in the morning till very late; that anyone actually gets around to doing anything productive at all is a minor miracle.
Apart from the economy, tackling anti-social behaviour formed the core of the Labour and Tory conferences (the Lib Dems instead went for publicly contradicting themselves as much as possible). Gordon Brown was first off the mark with plans to crack down on the 50,000 worst families. What this means if you’re the 50,001th worst family, let alone what metric will be used to determine worst-ness, is anyone’s guess.
The Tories, alongside frantically trying to avoid being snapped drinking bubbly whilst telling everyone they’d cut their pay and make them work longer (of which more in a minute), want to introduce Judge-Dredd style instant punishments and restrict super strength lager to stop the problem of binge-drinking. Cue Cameron almost instantly being caught quaffing Pol Roger and earning the nickname Fizzy Rascal.
In a continuation of personality politics initiated by Blair, the media used every possible opportunity to probe this champagne drinking, with particular reference to the pedigree of Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Johnson as former members of the Bullingdon Club. There are of course several reasons why this line of questioning is depressing.
Firstly, in focussing on the personal the media (and Labour) are missing the political; the Tories announced plans to send the Army into schools to sort out discipline without so much as a batted eye-lid from the press corps.
Secondly, it opens up every traffic-cone stealing indiscretion of undergraduate life to later scrutiny; is that really a direction we want public life to go in? Everyone is guilty of over-exuberance as a student; whether this manifests itself as rampaging around in tails, having fights with fire-extinguishers, bribing a porter in order to sneak strippers into the library, or throwing a bin through the window of McDonald’s ‘in protest at the re-election or George Bush’ (you know who you are), we are all undoubtedly guilty of some indiscretion which we now (or will later) regret. Should this over-exuberance count against you twenty years later? Union hacks are noxiously dull as it is- let’s not turn them into puritans as well.
Returning to the conferences, Cameron’s speech was solid if a little boring- probably intentionally boring in fact in order to set a sober tone. To be fair, he could’ve come out in a tutu and the press would have reported it favourably. Moving forward though, all eyes will be pinned on the opinion polls over the weekend to see how conference season has panned out. Despite leading in the opinion polls, the Conservatives need to gain 131 seats to form the next government. The electoral calculus behind this, if nothing else, will keep the champagne at Tory HQ on ice for a while yet.
