Class warfare

John Rentoul remarks on the sheer speed of the implosion of Gordon Brown's government, while Daniel Finkelstein recalls a dispiriting precedent for the rhetoric employed in Labour's by-election campaigning: "In December 1976 the Labour Party televised a broadcast making a nakedly class based appeal. It satirised 'Algernon' a boy who went to an expensive school, who doesn't need social security and doesn't need to work.... Now all these years later the same mistake is being made again."

Labour's creation of the Hon Algernon, "born with a silver spoon in his mouth", didn't even reach the level of caricature. A caricature at least takes some genuine characteristic and magnifies it. It was fantasy to suppose that, in Britain's economic malaise of the 1970s, there was a practical course of - in the words of one policymaker who later adjusted to reality - squeezing the rich till the pips squeaked. It utterly misread social conditions. The rhetoric of class warfare does so again now. I support redistibution of income to enable the less well off to exercise autonomous choices. But there's no painless route to this; it requires transfers from modest earners.

It is probably flattering to Labour's by-election campaigning to impute some rationale to it other than a crude and desperate populism. The theme of "Tory toffs" is a partner to mawkish references to the late Gwyneth Dunwoody as the "mum" of the candidate, Tamzin Dunwoody, who is herself also a "mum". This isn't going to work, and it doesn't deserve to.

Incidentally, Daniel was, I think, 14 at the time of Labour's "Hon Algernon" broadcast. You have to be some political junkie to follow this stuff in adolescence, and then be able to recall it more than 30 years later.

Comments

[dirigible]

But there's no painless route to this; it requires transfers from modest earners.

Which, as a reasonably modest earner, I support as well. But Britain, and particularly London, seems to support transfers *only* from modest earners and not from the genuinely wealthy. Class warfare is alive and well under New Labour, it's just that the ruling class are winning.

[Chris Clark]

It seems odd to me that this policy of class warfare should be described as a new twist in the story of the modern Labour Party. Just as members are now trying desperately to firm up their base with a spot of toff-bashing, so Blair went after fox hunting by similar, if less overt and more successful, means and for similar ends.