As MPs return to Westminster, Ian Hernon advises Labour to lay into the toffs many expect to form the next government
Now is the time for Labour to cry havoc and unleash the whippets of war.
Battered ministers and backbench MPs were this week shuffling back to Westminster. They were depressed at David Cameron’s apparent conference upsurge and the buzz phrase among the least downhearted was: “At least we will go down fighting.”
That is nowhere near good enough when we face the grim reality of a resurgent Tory Party that has managed to hide its bloody fangs behind a smile. And, if Labour lets them, they will sashay to power just at the time of an economic revival following a recession which has given them the excuse to do what they do best: hammer the poor and disadvantaged.
Cameron’s conference performance, particularly his apparent ditching of Thatcherism by declaring that he believes in society, managed to convince many pundits that he has sent the old party of vested interests, mass unemployment and social division to a gin-soaked retirement home.
However, the best – and certainly the most succinct – analysis of Cameron’s agenda came from a Ramsgate octogenarian who picked up the conference appeal by Tory chairman Eric Pickles to “judge us on what we do for the poor”.
J Blackman, in a letter to The Observer, said: “In my youth, they did have something for the poor: the means test. You have a piano? Sell it. I remember my mother and our neighbours contributing 6d to enable the old couple in the row to see a doctor. Tories as carers for the poor? Pigs might fly. The Tories are and always will be the rich man’s party.”
Blackman is right about the actualities behind the spin: a pay freeze for public sector workers, coupled with a rise in the threshold of inheritance tax to benefit the wealthiest 3,000 estates, is the most glaring example. Scrapping SureStart Centres at the behest of the CBI is another. Some Tory grandees have been privately bleating that “our kind” will also have to tighten their belts. Well, maybe one notch on a 48-inch waist.
He is also right in reminding people that old class divisions remain strong and potent, even if they have been blurred, and the passions raised are Cameron’s Achilles heel.
Match the notorious Bullingdon Club photos of him, Boris Johnson and, later, George Osborne, to the reality rather than the myth of their policies today and it can be an effective campaigning tool.
More Labour MPs may have been caught up in the expenses scandal over mortgage and housing allowances, but it is moats and duck ponds that most people remember.
A generation of squeamish Labour Cabinet ministers have shunned such crude “class envy”. They feared they would be branded as hypocrites because half of them are Oxbridge, or public school, or posh, or all three.
Or they simply didn’t understand that working-class loyalties remain, even for aspiring generations who have done well.
I am not suggesting that Harriet Harman and Ben Bradshaw, for example, should start wearing cloth caps or mufflers. But whippets are another matter and there are quite a few on the backbenches and low-to-middle ministerial ranks who are straining at the leash.
It is time to tear into the toffs.
