egafd.com

All politicians come out with doublethink at some time or other. He's a classic example from the Guardian.

Winston Smith in that great book, 1984 described doublethink as "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic."

Here's a priceless example. Cameron's Father's Day message telling off men who refuse to pay maintenance for their deserted children, "It's high time runaway dads were stigmatised and the full force of shame was heaped upon them. They should be be looked at like drink-drivers, people who are beyond the pale. They need the message rammed home to them that what they're doing is wrong."

His message came only days after his Welfare Reform Bill was passed in the House of Commons. The bill will make the Child Support Agency charge mothers an upfront fee of ?100 for pursuing wont-pay fathers and will then take a permament commission of between 7 and 12% for collecting the money.

Hey, you don't expect the deficit to be reduced in a parliament just by taking benefits from recovering cancer patients, do you?

Some of this stuff is beyond piss-taking.

Cheers
D

David, it's along time since I read '1984' but isn't it called 'double-speak' rather than 'doublethink'? You may be right though.

As for Cameron, it was decided by the powerful influential people around him when they despatched him to an elite school as a kid that he would be the PM years later. Same with Osbourne. He is there because of how well connected he is, and for career and ego reasons. Whether he is any good at the job is something that was probably never considered by those around him or by himself. Hence why silly things like him holding a position that contradicts the one he held the previous week occur.

Terms from 1984 include 'doublethink', the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, and 'Newspeak', ' the deliberate impoverishement of language promoted by the state.

Max
How right you are. WE don't want leaders that were sent to elite schools.
We want people like Gordon Brown who was education at....oh hang on a minute.
No Tony Blair he had a good state educat.... on shit.
NO Willian Hague, good yorkshireman, bet he went to a compre....oh hang on.
Oh fuck socialist worker Prescott it is then. With his 4 houses and 2 jags.

But if we all got into politics the country would be fucked. There would be no one left to make any money, just spend it.

It's not about what kind of school you attended determining whether you would be good at it or not, it's about your and your family's motivation for you being in politics. Whether these well-connnected Etonians would be any good at it was a secondary consideration, the main one was ego and getting the 'top job'. I would only be in politics if I thought I would be very good at it, would do right by the country and the people, and if the pople really wanted me. Even if my powerful relatives could arrange it for me, I would not do it if I thought I wasn't completely up to the task. This makes me rather differnt from Cameron, Osbourne, and a number of others.

For Bernard, not Andy.