When Gordon Brown produced his mildly amusing description of David Cameron’s tax policy – that it must have been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton – Fleet Street’s finest reacted like a roomful of old ladies who have just seen a mouse. They climbed onto their chairs, hauled up their skirts, and shrieked in unison: “Class war! He’s restarted the class war!”
It was a ludicrous overreaction. If poking a little gentle fun at folksy Dave’s posh educational background amounts to waging class war, what term, I wonder, could adequately describe the Russian revolution? In my book, class war requires a few firing squads and gibbets to make it authentic. That’s why I’m not a revolutionary.
As for Cameron’s own reaction, in which he described Brown’s phrase as “spiteful” – well, really. Can he not recall his own attacks on Brown across the despatch box, in which (among other things) he has sneered woundingly at his handwriting, even though he must have known it was down to his partial blindness? You can’t get much more spiteful than that.
Personally, I would welcome a bit more class-based politics from the Labour leadership. But drawing attention to Cameron’s very expensive education is just a bit of fun. More to my taste is bashing the mega-rich Zac Goldsmith’s “non-dom” tax status as he seeks to become one of the legislators who set the taxes for the rest of us.
An even more attractive target is the utterly mysterious tax status of Lord Ashcroft, who is a massive Tory Party donor
and spends his own money on trying to
fix marginal constituencies for the Conservatives.
But even these are pretty trivial matters, compared to the significance of Labour’s long-standing love affair with the City of London. No one can talk about Labour as the champion of the poor so long as Brown and Alistair Darling remain cuddled up in bed with the bankers. Until that love affair comes to an end, there can be no realistic talk of class-based politics, let alone class war.
By the time this column hits the news stands, we will have a better idea about whether that love affair has at last come to an end. We shall know whether Darling is going to hit bankers’ bonuses with a windfall tax and whether that tax will be a serious one or just a gentle slap on the wrist.
And, with a bit of luck, we may even have learned whether a genuine attempt is to be made to bring Britain’s piratical financial system under some sort of control, along the lines recommended by that notorious socialist Nicolas Sarkozy.
So far as the tax on bonuses is concerned, the omens were pretty good as I was writing this. The tom-tom beats from inside the Treasury and Downing Street seemed
to suggest that something really was going to happen. My feeling was that, having raised
all those expectations, Darling could hardly back down at this late stage.
However, my real anxiety was that the tax will happen, but will be so hedged around with qualifications and get-out clauses that it will not meet the needs of the occasion.
This Government’s track record, alas, is not good in this respect. All too often, it has yielded to pressure to Do The Right Thing, but has fudged the actual implementation.
A depressing example of this was the Treasury’s long overdue but nonetheless welcome decision to start using the Post Office chain as the basis for a proper “people’s bank”. I can remember advocating just that a few years ago in this column, when the (unsuccessful) battle to halt the last round of post office closures was still raging.
Had the idea been accepted then – and I was only one of many pressing it – those closures need not have taken place, and the new bank would have been strengthened by a few hundred additional outlets.
So I was pleased when I read the other day that, belatedly, we were going to get a Post Office bank after all. But my pleasure was sharply diminished when I read on, and found that the actual banking service is to be run by a private bank. And not even a British private bank, a foreign bank – namely, the Bank of Ireland.
Why, for heaven’s sake? What’s wrong with these people? Why, when they finally pluck up the courage to do something recognisably Labour, something which could bolster the appallingly low morale of their rank and file, do they have to fillet out half the purpose of the enterprise at the last minute?
But you, the reader, have the advantage of me. By now, you will know the best or the worst – or, more likely, the second best. Meanwhile, I see that Darling has been trying to minimise the impact of Brown’s comments on Eton, saying you can’t hold someone responsible for the school they were sent to.
This may have something to do with the fact that he, too, went to a posh school – Loretto, near Edinburgh. They didn’t wear tailcoats there, but they did wear kilts on Sunday.
As he once said: “I wouldn’t inflict on my own son what was inflicted on me.”
