Say what you like about the Tories, they’re cunning, ruthless bastards. The Conservative party’s organising principle is the pursuit and preservation of power. All else is secondary: policies, politicians, principles. Never forget the ruthlessness they displayed in defenestrating Margaret Thatcher when it looked like she might cost them an election. Iain Duncan Smith was brutally slain without the Conservative party even raising its heart rate, like Hannibal Lecter. No loyalty, no emotional attachment, no friendship is bigger for the Tories than the craving for office. Withdrawal from power is as painful for the Tories as its exercise gives pleasure.
Some of that low cunning was on display on Wednesday during the pre-budget report debate when George Osborne said Labour was no longer the party of aspiration. It was swiftly backed up by an online viral poster which said ‘now we know the real victims of Gordon Brown’s class war’ with a target aimed at workers earning over £20,000.
You’re supposed to develop a ‘political antennae’ if you hang around long enough in politics. When I heard Osborne’s killer lines on aspiration, mine went haywire. If the Tories and their newspapers can paint Labour as the party of inverse snobbery, chippiness and class envy, we will lose tens of thousands of voters. If we cede the ground of aspiration to the Tories, we may as well close the curtains and spend the next six months watching all those DVD box-sets we’re going to get for Christmas. It’s a matter of simple psephology: to transform the lives of people who live on £5 a day, we need the votes of people who buy their groceries from Ocado, take skiing holidays and whose children have trumpet lessons.
Aspiration is a trait found across the British class spectrum. The miners who wanted their sons to work in an office. The parents who left school at 14 who send their kids to university. The people who spend their weekends cutting their hedges, mowing their lawns and washing their cars. The single parents working two jobs to give their daughters ballet lessons. When Labour taps into this innate British characteristic we win elections. In 1945, we amply expressed the public desire for a better world. But it was expressed through the language of ‘no more dole queues’, ‘let’s build the houses quick’, ‘a future for youth’. It was an appeal to personal advancement as well as altruism.
In 1964 and 1966, Labour reeked of modernity. Again, we tapped into a restless national mood of social mobility, meritocracy and modernisation. It was socialism to the tunes of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Labour had a young cabinet, with ‘whizz kids’ like Tony Benn on the new TV sets in people’s front rooms. Harold Wilson shaved off his moustache to look younger, and donned a Gannex mac. The language of the ‘white heat’, the expansion of the universities, and the popularity of working class heroes such as Michael Caine was all about aspiration.
In 1997, Tony Blair won the south for Labour with a straight-forward pitch to ‘Mondeo Man’. The real encounter was with a man polishing his Sierra in his driveway in some southern marginal seat – Watford, Harlow or Crawley – whose conviction was that a Labour government would hold him back. New Labour was a titanic effort to banish the image that Labour was the party you voted for if you were on benefits, or worked for the council, and if you owned your own home and liked Delia Smith you voted Tory. (It was a bit more complicated than that, looking back on it, but not much).
If we return to the days of Labour being seen as a welfare party, a trade union party, or a party only for the poorest, our future defeats will make 1983 look like a Labour landslide. That’s why any return to the language of the class war is a temptation which must be resisted. References to the ‘playing fields of Eton’ are good for a cheap laugh, but they repel voters who don’t care where someone went to school. Attacks on our opponents because the choices their parents made for them 30 years ago is not the stuff of election success. It smacks of desperation. It is tawdry and unimaginative. It appalls the voters whose support we need to win the next election. They voted for Blair (Fettes) just as their grandparents voted for Attlee (Haileybury) because they trusted Labour would give them a better life. They’ll vote for a party led by Harman (St Paul’s), Balls (Nottingham High School) and Darling (Loretto) if they stand for aspiration too.
And they’ll reject a party led by Cameron (Eton) and Osborne (St Paul’s) if we can clearly explain that the only aspiration the Tories believe in is their own ambition for office; that if they get it they will denude the public realm of the services and facilities that allow individuals to prosper; that if you want to see your kids get to university, get good jobs and buy their own homes, you must vote Labour in 2010.