There are Tories everywhere

By Grace Fletcher-Hackwood / @msgracefh

I once read an article by a Guardian columnist – I forget which one – in which she said, presumably with tongue in cheek, that before Labour came into power in 1997, she had sometimes felt uneasy in public when she remembered that the majority of people around her were likely to be Tory voters. How can you comfortably share a cafe or a bus seat or a pavement with people who don’t think there’s such a thing as society?

This week, I feel her pain. There are Tories all over Manchester. Actual Tory members and MPs and ministers. Tories on the streets of the Northern Quarter. Tories on the streets of the gay village. Tories on the trams, Tories in the bars…I’m scared to open my fridge in case there are Tories in there, keeping their hearts nice and chilled. There are Tories in the Town Hall! How do we know they won’t privatise it from the inside? I can’t even get in to keep an eye on them, because during the heightened security of a party conference, no-one can get into the building without photo ID, and I’m not sure where mine is. David Cameron is keeping me out of my own Town Hall! Where am I meant to go? I can’t relax in the coffee shops with Tories at every other table. I have to keep my hand on my wallet – hey, they stole £170 million from Manchester, how do I know they won’t steal my change? – and I have to remember not to sit between them and the door, in case a fox runs past and I get trampled by the pursuing horses.

It’s all very strange. Manchester is ordinarily a Tory-free zone – we had one Tory councillor, until the last local elections, but he had defected from the Lib Dems after being elected, so he didn’t count.

The thing is, in Liverpool last week I felt much more welcome than a woman wearing an I <3 Manchester t-shirt has a right to do. I couldn’t go anywhere without taxi drivers telling me how much they liked Joe Anderson and waiters asking for a Til Cameron’s Gone wristband. Months after regaining control of the council, Liverpool Labour was proud to welcome the party to a Labour city, and we were proud of them. It made sense for us to be there.

Now, I know that there are people in Manchester who work hard to attract big events to the city, and will have gone out of their way to encourage the Conservatives to hold their conference here again, and to bring as many padded-pocketed delegates into our bars and coffee shops and onto our trams (although hopefully not into my fridge). But I can’t help wondering how the Tories feel about being here. Whereas we were welcomed to a newly Labour Liverpool, the Tories have found themselves in a success story of a city that they have never, electorally speaking, been allowed to touch. They have few friends here. The weekend’s heat wave broke when they arrived and it started pissing it down. Rain is Manchester’s natural defence system.

And it’s not just the clouds that hate the Tories. By most estimates, 35,000 people gathered on Deansgate yesterday to march against them.

It was a peaceful protest with no arrests – the police maintained an extensive but calm presence. On my way back after the rally I bumped into Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of GMP, who was out policing alongside hundreds of others around the GMex, and gave the protesters credit for a largely incident-free afternoon – a few people got moved along for banging on the windows of the Bridgewater Hall, but it’s possible they were just over-eager for some culture.

The protest was dominated by unions, having been organised by the TUC, but there were a lot of different voices there. There were the people who would have been protesting no matters whose conference it was – CND, animal rights activists – but then there were the people who hate the pension cuts, the people who hate the NHS ‘reforms’, the people who hate the legal aid cuts. There was the ‘Occupy Manchester’ contingent hanging out in Albert Square; there were buggy-pushing mums and dads from Save Sure Start; there was a bloke in an anorak near me who had apparently just joined in for a shout.

It made the chants somewhat ragged. Last year when Tory conference was in Birmingham the default chant (you know, the one you all shout while people are arguing over whose turn it is with the megaphone) was ‘Tory scum out of Brum’, but nothing really rhymes with Manchester. It’s unfortunate that the Prime Minister’s name is David Cameron rather than, say, Ann Chester. Add that to your list of complaints about him. Chant-ruining bastard.

Anyway, I digress. While the unions shouted “no ifs! No buts! No public sector cuts!”, North West Young Labour tried to work out what rhymes with “halve the deficit over four years”, and the chap in the anorak kept shouting “It’s thirteen o’clock!” even after everyone pointed out to him that it was actually half-past, the song we all united around was that one that starts with everyone going “woooooooooo” and then goes “We hate Tories and we hate Tories and we hate Tories and we hate Tories and we hate Tories and we hate Tories.” It’s fairly unambiguous. We are the Tory-haters.

Cameron’s response was fairly unambiguous too – he told us all, via the Manchester Evening News, “you’re wrong.” That was it, more or less. Not just the trade unions – we know he thinks they’re wrong (wrong for standing up for their members’ rights, wrong for existing, wrong for having to work for a living when they could have just as easily been born as rich as him) – but all of us, with our various agendas and approaches, equally wrong. It’s not us the Tories are talking to this week – apparently, it’s just Clarkson.

It’s as though John Hemming’s wife cut out letters from the Daily Mail to make a ransom note for that kitten she nicked, and Cameron’s been making up policies from what he’s read on the back of them. “Says here ‘nanny-state speed restrictions’ – all right then, knock the speed limit up to 80mph. This one says ‘bin collections’…there’s a bit missing…and then ‘what about OUR human rights?’ Right, we’ll bring back weekly collections. Tell Eric to have a look down the back of the sofa for £250 million. What does that one say?”

“Something about women.”

“Women, eh. Bless their heads. Can we buy them all something pretty? No? Well, I’ll just tell them I’ll sorry and it’ll never happen again. Women love that.”

Thinking about it, maybe Cameron’s approach to the entire electorate is based on some sort of Mad Men-era idea of how to deal with women. Maybe the reason he keeps talking the country down, banging on about Broken Britain, is an attempt to lower the entire country’s self-esteem until we’re convinced no-one else will want us. Maybe that’s why he thinks that when 35,000 people march peacefully past his conference, all he needs to do is pat them on the head and tell us that we’re wrong.