Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.
There are two things that are absolutely certain about this election: whoever wins it is going to have to make swingeing, nay savage, spending cuts to bring down Britain's ruinous, and ever-ballooning debt levels. And an increasingly desperate Labour will again play the class war card to smear David Cameron and George Osborne as comfortable, privileged upper-class chaps insulated by their wealth from the pain produced by the cuts that the rest of us will feel.
I propose a cunning plan that would, at a stroke, defuse this potentially toxic issue, and set a shining example of rectitude and self-sacrifice to the nation at a time when we are already feeling bruised by the economic pinch before the real blows have even begun to rain down. How would it be if David Cameron and George Osborne donated a fifth of their income accrued over the course of this discredited Parliament towards reducing Britain's debt?
I hear your mocking laughter already. But before you start rolling about on the floor, listen up. There is a good Tory historical precedent for the sacrificial act that I am suggesting. In June 1919, then as now, Britain was on the ropes. We had just emerged from the bloodiest and most costly war in history - the Great War - which had not only taken the lives of almost a million of the British Empire's finest young men, but had left the nation floundering in deep debt.
The Financial Secretary of the Treasury in Lloyd George's coalition government at the time was an obscure and relatively recently elected Tory, one Stanley Baldwin, a moderately wealthy Worcestershire ironmaster. Acutely conscious both of the nation's sacrifice in blood and treasure; and that he himself had been a tad too old to fight, Baldwin resolved to set an example to other politicians. He had a low opinion of his fellow MPs anyway, famously describing the post-war House of Commons as "A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war".
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