Tory Chancellor George Osborne told his party conference a week ago to ‘Choose jobs; choose enterprise; choose security; choose prosperity; choose investment; choose fairness; choose freedom; choose David Cameron; choose the Conservatives; choose the future.’ Good stuff, eh? It was widely supposed to be a parody of Renton’s rant in Trainspotting, where, in a mood of punkish defiance, he rejects conventional society’s demands in favour of self-determination and, implicitly, heroin. In my view, that’s crediting Osborne’s speech writers and the Tory audience with too much cultural awareness. Nevertheless, Welsh tweeted: ‘Would rather have [murderers] Fred and Rosemary West quote my characters on child care than that cunt Osbourne (sic) quote them on choice.’ Well at least he can spell the murderers’ names and the foulest word in the English language OK.
Some say that Welsh was no more than parodying and expanding WHAM! and their CHOOSE LIFE blast from ten years before Trainspotting. The very suggestion! You mean Welsh may not have been entirely original? And to add that the whole bloody lot of them were beaten to the ‘choose life’ idea by Moses, let’s say two and a half millennia ago, well that just proves you’re a geek.