Times are Toff for Cambridge University Tories

Many Cambridge students may have noticed that Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA) has been distributing a university-wide ‘Fresher’s Guide’ in the past week or so. Glossy, full-colour and ten pages, it shows just how well-funded the Conservative Association, and indeed the Conservative Party in general, is. Interestingly, on the first page CUCA gives ‘special thanks’ to Jeffrey Archer, presumably for the production of the booklet. Whether the help given was financial or otherwise, it is obviously true that CUCA have been accepting aid from a convicted criminal, perjurer, liar and fantastist, possibly the most discredited and hated man in British politics.

This is nothing to the content of the booklet. It contains articles on the best options for buying champagne in Cambridge, an article giving (extremely pretentious) tips on formal wear, including tips on handkerchiefs as fashion accessories, cummerbunds and bowties, as well as advice on black and white tie, reviews of a range of restaurants including swanky ones most normal students could only dream of attending, and a guide to tying a bow tie. It projects a fantasy image of a gilded, privileged Cambridge that only ever existed, insofar as it did at all, for a small number of extremely wealthy people. It may appear to be tongue in cheek, but given how seriously CUCA members take these absurdities (as I hear from a source I have inside CUCA), it is not.

In the context of a global recession where ordinary working people are losing their jobs and homes, the Tories are clearly most interested in flaunting their wealth and privilege, and frankly it makes me sick. I’m most worried about my mum losing her livelihood and home if her public sector job gets the axe under the Tories. The Tories live in a cloud-cuckoo land where one can ‘save water’ by ‘drinking champagne’, where the colour of one’s cummerbund or silk handkerchief is more important than making a living, where mummy and daddy can pick up the tab for nights of orgiastic excess.

What kind of image does this project to working class freshers or potential applicants to Cambridge? It re-affirms every stereotype bandied about concerning Oxbridge snobbery, elitism and Brideshead-style excess. CUCA is single-handedly going about the task of setting back access by about 70 years. Cambridge, the Tories imply, is a place for ‘people like us’, people who can afford and enjoy posh restaurants, champagne and white tie. It’s not for the likes of you, people from ordinary working class backgrounds – this is the whole message of CUCA’s sermon. In short, they have squarely positioned themselves as a glorified social club for wannabe toffs, social climbers and minor aristocrats.

The Labour Club is campaigning for the People’s Charter, a manifesto for change that will give ordinary working people a fair chance, a sane economy and a new moral start. We are concerned about bread-and-butter issues because we know that life isn’t one long round of white-tie dinners, champagne receptions and aristocratic indulgence for most people. In the context of a Tory Party led by a small clique of Old Etonians who frequented the Bullingdon Club, that bastion of wealth and privilege in Oxford, CUCA’s cavalier and supercilious attitude is perhaps hardly surprising, but it is shocking and shows just how profoundly alienated from the lives of ordinary working people the Tory Party is.