Is Brown playing the class card under the table?

Brown was right to play the class card, but he must play it with integrity - on Labour List today.

Gordon Brown has faced near-universal disapprobation this week for daring to mention that the personal wealth and privilege of members of the shadow cabinet might have the tiniest bit of bearing on their inheritance tax plans. The phrase "dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton" was particularly unsporting, something that Mr Brown would doubtless have been able to grasp had he attended Eton himself.

That's the problem with talking about class in Westminster. It’s just not classy, is it? It's not the done thing, not since Mrs Thatcher swept it all neatly out of sight for us. As Shadow minister Eric Pickles put it after Brown’s salvo last week: “frankly we aren't that type of country anymore."

More pressingly, bringing up class makes everyone look bad: commentators have been quick to point out that, whilst no Labour MP has yet billed for moat-maintenance, the party in government has always boasted its fair share of wealthy hand-wringers – blogger Dizzy Thinks rightly pointed out that seven current cabinet ministers went to fee-paying private schools.

However, amidst all this pouting about cheap shots, reverse class prejudice and the fact that, apparently, nobody cares anymore about the inevitable inheritance of power by the rich and privileged, not much has been made of the fact that Brown actually has a point.

It may not be fashionable or comfortable to talk about wealth and privilege, but wealth and privilege matter. It matters that, sixty years after the advent of the welfare state, one’s chances in life are still largely predicated by one’s birth and background. It matters that, nearly a decade into the twenty-first century, it is possible to accurately predict from several months before birth the likelihood of a particular jellied ball of cells and pre-natal fluid growing up to be a business-leader or a benefit-scrounger, as demonstrated in Louise Bamfield’s brilliant Fabian pamphlet, Born Unequal. It matters that some of those more felicitous balls of cells, several decades down the line, are now expatiating on fantastically illiberal policy proposals that aim to shaft the poor in order to protect the interests of the property-owning rich; proposals that would, if someone made Hansard into a Hollywood blockbuster, inevitably be played by Alan Rickman.

Schoolyard obloquy aside, it’s hardly the Prime Minister’s fault if the mere mention of Eton playing-fields happens to make some 5.5% of Tory parliamentarians personally squirm like snotty schoolboys caught with their hands in Matron’s biscuit tin. Unfortunately, Brown’s ideological attack on Conservative policy has since been overwhelmed by faltering personal follow-up shots, such as John Prescott’s unfortunate ribbing of Eric Pickles on last week’s Today programme. The asinine practice of attacking Tory candidates as airy ‘toffs’ has not won Labour any by-election victories to date.

This type of strategy demeans what remains of the principles of the Labour Party. Attacking people on the basis of their class alone looks like a petty, desperate strategy for the simple reason that it is a petty, desperate strategy. More to the point, the last fifty years have amply proven that a minister’s class can have little or no bearing on their loyalties or their policy decisions: the inherited titles of many members of Attlee’s cabinet did not prevent them from masterminding the NHS, whilst three decades later Margaret Thatcher, a butcher’s daughter with a grammar-school education, set about breaking the power of the unions and draining the efficacy of the welfare state. But neither this, nor the fact that George Osborne and Harriet Harman went to the same private school means, as Ken Clarke argued in the Daily Mail, that "the class war is over". The class war is merely over in the hallowed halls of Westminster, chiefly because it was never begun.

In truth, any sitting parliamentarian, whatever his or her loyalties, is practically and financially divorced from the breadline. The real question here is about how political power is wielded: whether privileged politicians are committed to ensuring that they and those whose interests they represent retain a stranglehold on the wealth and enterprise of this country, or whether they feel, as Aneurin Bevan himself put it, that "the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away".

For politicians more than anyone else, "the price of privilege is absolute integrity". Labour is right to raise the class card, and to question policy decisions reeking with an ideology of privilege and social stagnation that remains the philosophical foundation of the Conservative Party. But the choice to push the class issue will fail as long as it is propelled by petty spin-shystering: if unearned wealth and privilege are to become election issues for the first time in over twelve years, that change in direction must run like a course of antibiotics through the sickening heartsblood of Labour thinking. If Labour wants to play the class card again, it must play it with integrity, starting with a good, hard look at its own policy history.

Sadly, Brown, Duncan and Prescott could be entirely forgiven for lashing out at the hordes of chuntering poshos waiting in the wings had they themselves been slightly more successful, over the past 12 years of government, at increasing social mobility. A Labour government which has presided over an increase in the gap between rich and poor needs to do some serious self-scrutiny before it rightly and tardily takes on the issue of unearned privilege.

Brown’s attack on Tory tax policies that rob the poor to feed the rich was both morally sound and in keeping with the interests of Labour’s core voters: let’s hope that it represents a Damascene conversion.

Tea and sympathy.

Right now, along with most British liberals, I feel like I'm sprinting up a down escalator. There's to much to do and too much to oppose and too much to say; I'm overworked and exhausted and running on empty, to the extent that I've had a mental health crash and had to call in sick to drink strong tea, contemplate the future of the Left and watch True Blood, simultaneously the worst and most compelling show ever made. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I mention all this partly to explain why all the posts I've been wanting to write, about gender at the Labour conference, about fucking Roman Polanski child rape apologists, about teenage mums and the notion of social justice and winning the argument on mental health and employment rights, are all boiling away in the charging ether of my hindbrain, and they're likely to stay there, because this weekend I need to chill the fuck out even more than I need to put the world to rights.

Because there's so much going on that I almost don't know where to start. It's been a bad week to be a lefty, a bad week to be a feminist, a bad week to care. Here's just some of what's made me angry this week:

Kate Harding reminds Salon readers that Polanski raped a child.

Melissa McEwan and Jill at Feministe give us the Roman Polanski defend-a-thon (trigger warning).

Anne Perkins sums up the gender agenda at the Labour conference fairly well (I was in that Tim Montgomerie event and almost threw a sausage roll at him).

...and Liberal Conspiracy uncovers Tory links to a European party with a right-wing, homophobic agenda. Hail our future lords and masters!

I've just got back from the Labour Party Conference, which was one of the most depressing events I've ever attended. Brighton was doing its tarty, gaudy best to lighten the mood, all brilliant sunshine, sparkling beaches crisply stinking of chips and sugar and the grand old seafront buildings lit up like the biggest wedding cake on the planet; but it was all to no avail. At the fringe meetings, the equality agenda was on the back foot, the feminist lobby was almost non-existent, and the loudest voices for social justice were those of the hordes of young Socialist Party members protesting outside the Conference zone on Sunday (Dave Osler has a great analysis of this over at Liberal Conspiracy).

The parties were the worst, hordes of apparatchiks drinking themselves into oblivion, staving off the terrible tory hangover we're all going to wake up with come 2010. One former MEP, hearing that I was a feminist blogger, told me that the only difference between the Tories and the Labour old guard is that the latter are 'only unofficially misogynist'.

At some point during the melee, I turned 23. And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I'll probably be in my thirties before a nominally left-of-centre government hold the reins of my country again. From now on, being on the left is going to be a real fight. And whilst I've cut my blogging and journalistic teeth in the last days of Labour, it's all going to be a lot harder from now on, with more ideological territory at stake. John Cruddas MP summed it all up perfectly in the Fabians' Next Labour debate on Sunday, when he declared:

"There is a train coming down the track.It's brutal and it's extremely right wing. It is incumbent upon us to step up and face it."

Right now, today, that train coming down the track feels almost unstoppable. On Tuesday I walked along the seafront with Hilary Wainwright and John McDonnell whilst those two seasoned old campaigners- veterans of 1968, feminists and formerly die-hard Labour activists - mused that the future of the left lay in direct action. The left is not beaten yet, but we're flagging, caught between two parties scrabbling madly for the centre-right, with only the Lib Dems pursuing any sort of liberal platform at their conference. I feel tired before it's even begun: not because I'm ever, ever going to lie down and let them roll over me and mine and our agenda of tolerance and decency and justice. I'm tired because I know I never will, and it's going to get a lot harder from now on. Normal service will resume shortly, but right now I'm going to drink tea and collapse. I hereby give every other lefty reading this permission to do the same: we need all our faculties for the fight to come.

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A small ray of sunshine: The Samosa, a new liberal-leaning, multicultural British comment site, launches today. I'm writing a column for them. You should check it out :)

Shiny Dave and the Lightweight's Cant.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Shiny Dave has made his bid for the big job. And I'm not so young nor so caught up in my own factional worldview that I didn't make the time to really listen to what he had to say. I tell you what, Mr Greasy has some decent speechwriters on board. He can say almost nothing and make it sound really quite exciting.

Almost nothing, but not quite nothing. Limiting parliamentary terms to four years and introducing open primaries for candidate selection: good ideas. Not new ideas, and not Tory ideas, as many Labour and Lib Dem bloggers have been quick to point out – but then, real opportunities for constitutional reform are like bloody buses. You wait for them for god knows how long until eventually the whole notion of a bus seems like a stupid idea anyway and you start wondering if it might have been quicker to walk. The stop is getting crowded. People are muttering that the whole notion of buses is idealistic and unworkable. You consider ordering a taxi for just you and your mates and putting it on expenses. But then the bus arrives, and it comes without warning, and all that matters is that you're at the front of the queue with your ticket ready.

Shiny Dave has his ticket ready.

He's not considering real, widespread reform, however. He won't touch the Lords; he won't introduce proportional representation; most worrying of all, I distinctly heard him mention reducing the number of MPs, which redistributes power to glossy nobody and which gives whichever party happens to be in government, ahem, the power to totally redraw the poitical map of Britain according to their tastes.

I have listened to Shiny Dave, and I don't trust him to run a hotdog stand, let alone my country. In fact, screw it, I don't trust him with that puppy. He's a middle manager in sales, is what he is. Just look at his hair. He should be running a regional branch of a stationary company in the Midlands. He's a hand-shaker. A lightweight. A smiler, and not even a clever smiler. But today I have accepted that this man is probably going to be Prime Minister, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The last time I got this feeling, during the 2008 mayoral elections, a strange thing happened. I'm a recovered anorexic, and I haven't skipped a meal since 2006. Think of it like a teetotaler sipping lemonade in the pub and you're in the right ballpark. But when I walked out of my lecture that day and saw that Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was going to be running my city, I got the most terrific urge to run to the nearest loo and throw up my lunch. The world was spinning beyond my control; I was powerless; I wanted to exert my self-determination in the first and best way I learned how.

I didn't, of course. I took myself home and made tea, a sandwich and a cigarette and made myself eat, drink, smoke and chill the hell out in that order. I allowed myself one evening in which to be pissed off, scream at the television and get munted with my hippy friends whilst planning radical comic strips.

And then I got up the next day and decided to get on with things. Since then I've attended assembly meetings and protests, helped plan occupations of public buildings, been involved in organising women's networks and had the London Underground symbol of the tube station nearest my birthplace - Angel - tattoed into the nape of my neck. I love this city and I will not see it turned over to the right, or for that matter to apathetic media squallbabies with the BNP breathing down their necks.

There's hope. I look at the game unfolding in Westminster and I see the left being outmaneuvred at every turn. Liberal energies are mounting, have been mounting before and since the Convention on Modern Liberty – but we are disparate, bickering among ourselves, in retreat. I firmly believe that the last thing the British left needs at this point is a Labour victory.

I've spent all day interviewing very sick people who've been screwed out of the measly amount of benefits they were living on by Wee Jimmy Purnell, he of the twice-as-much-as-annual-incapacity-benefit-spent-on-TAXIS-ALONE-in 2008. I won't say that I can't imagine things being any worse under a Tory government, because I don't trust them and because I've got a great imagination, I used to win prizes in school and everything. But I just don't think the current Labour party is fit for purpose any more - it's serving neither the principles of its members nor the people of this country. We have been screwed in both directions, and it's time to slink off and lick our wounds.

I want to see a decent egalitarian socialist like John Cruddas in charge of the Labour party in opposition, I want to see them reconnecting with their roots whilst the Tories make the pig's ear of bringing us out of the recession that they're going to. And they're going to: Shiny Dave can be as right-on has he likes about 'the man and woman in the street' (whilst doing dodgy deals on abortion rights behind closed doors), but the fact is that those people are in the street because they've lost their homes, and winter's coming on. Whilst we're ladling up the soup ,I want people of the left and every Blairite in Whitehall to remember what the point of a Labour party used to be: to empower ordinary women and men to live decent, free and honourable lives.

The Labour party in government is not the British left; it never was, and this is not the end for liberal values and egalitarian ideals in this country. We'll take a little while to work off some justified disappointment, we'll have some catfights and drink some (much cheaper) booze, and then we'll pick up again and carry on as we have been since it all went down the porcelain man in 2003: challenging, holding them to account, organising underneath their shiny brogues and dreaming up big ideas for the just society we want to live in. With one difference. Now we won't have to waste our time apologising for the behaviour of ministers who do not represent our interests. Now we can get back not to first principles - those are by definition yesterday's politics - but to new principles. I believe that a Labour defeat can signal a new beginning for the British left, and one thing's for sure: we definitely won't run out of work to do anytime soon.

After New Labour: report on Guardian/Soundings event last night

So, last night I found my tiny self at a debate organised by Soundings and Comment Is Free, provocatively titled 'After New Labour'. I was starving, having been writing all day when I should have been eating lunch, and had just about enough time to pick up the world's largest blueberry muffin on my way to King's Place. As I was due to write a piece for the Graun (Pennyred articles commissioned and turned down by Guardian currently stand at 6), I was ushered into a little room containing The Rt Hon Harriet Harman Rt Hon, Madeleine Bunting and someone else who knew them both so was obviously famous, and - me, and my muffin. Dilemma! I have an annoying tendency to shake and fall over when I haven't eaten. But Harriet Harman was right there! I couldn't just scoff down a muffin in front of her without even introducing myself - could I? Or could I? In the end I made my excuses and sprinted outside for sugar, cigarettes and other vices, before heading back in to ask cheeky questions and generally have a great deal of fun. A report/thinkpiece follows. Enjoy.


*


After New Labour, we have been delivered a shrill and remote language of progressive politics. Every speaker at last night’s Soundings/Comment Is Free debate agreed on the urgency of abandoning old rhetoric and working towards what John Cruddas called ‘a new sense of economic and social solidarity’, but such high-mindedness will be scuppered if Labour continues to define itself against the Conservative party.

My generation does not remember an ideology of Old Labour. Some young people who were born after the fall of the Berlin wall have already cast their first votes. Our parents may have voted for Blair in 1997, and we may even remember the excitement and pounding pop anthems that signalled the fall of the Major government, but we do not relate to that excitement. We do not play well with big, simple political ideas for one very good reason: big, simple ideas no longer seem relevant.

The global credit crunch has delivered the final blow: we have come to the end of ideology as a significant rallying factor in party politics. The New Labour generation, raised with the syncretic paradigms of internet technology, is bright and informed enough to understand that answers that look too easy usually are too easy. Radical socialism no longer quite suits; neither does the sacred cow of free market capitalism, currently flailing its hooves in bovine panic.

In the midst of this crisis, the same Labour party which not ten years ago declared an end to ideology is now casting about like a teenager anxiously trying to define itself. The party needs to move on from its adolescent wavering and realise, like every growing kid, that nobody cares how it defines itself anymore: it will be judged on its actions. At last night’s event, Harriet Harman lauded New Labour as ‘a delivery mechanism for Labour values’ – but the 18-26 year old cohort no longer has a clear idea of what those values are.


The party is still, as Harman noted, ‘driven by our experience of what it was like to live under a Tory government whose values we abhorred,’ but with what Chuka Umunna identified as Labour’s failure to ‘deal a blow to the Thatcherite consensus’, my generation can only point to New Labour when the cruelties of neo-liberalism begin to bite.

What will win votes is not ‘a return to Labour values’, but principles and practical planning, two noted absences from the current Conservative platform. If we are not offered practical principles, my generation will vote for personality, as we already have in London this year (not that anyone's grateful).

Umunna, by far the most engaging speaker of the evening, was the only one explicitly to agree that Labour must offer something more than a platform of ‘not the Tories’. He noted that the notion that the individual prospers in the context of a strong and active state has always been at the heart of Labour’s mission – ‘it’s not that hard to say, so why don’t we say it?’,

Labour must stop defining itself by what it is not, and instead step forward with real principles to win back the 4.3 million voters who have abandoned the party since 1997. One of these core principles must be the potential of the state as an engine of wealth redistribution. The collapse of the derivatives market provides a perfect opportunity for this government to raise the pitifully low tax thresholds for the wealthiest 10 percent, who own 71 percent of this country's wealth - so long sticking place for a British progressive consensus attempting to reconcile itself with New Labour values.

In the wake of this financial crisis, Brown's government will enjoy a unique window in which to tax the wealthy, in response to a real public hunger for tax justice. My generation is crying out for socio-economic fairness, and the forcible lowering of petrol prices at the pumps this month is a baby step towards the platform of real social solidarity which Cruddas and Umunna echoed the call for last night. ‘After New Labour’, the Labour party’s first question must not be what it now stands for, nor what its values are, but what precisely it plans to accomplish with another term in power.

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ELECTION NIGHT ON PENNYRED: THE DOOMED YOUTH OF TODAY ARE HOLDING AN END OF THE WORLD PARTY AT MY MEATSPACE RESIDENCE, WITH GIN, CHEMICALS, BBC-ONLINE AND MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF DORITOS AND BLIND HOPE. THERE WILL BE A SMALL AMOUNT OF LIVEBLOGGING, DEPENDING ON WHETHER OR NOT I'M SOBER ENOUGH TO HOLD THE KEYBOARD STRAIGHT. STAY TUNED TO THIS SITE AND TO LIBERAL CONSPIRACY.

The people's flag is palest pink...

Genitals, Ladymen, comrades, compatriots and fraternizers:

I've been at the Labour Party Conference for two days and my back and brain are aching. The sweet scent of power and privilege overwhelms the subtle breeze of socialism blowing through the hallways. Everybody knows that the party needs a new direction, and some people are even starting to say it out loud: what Hazel Blears MP yesterday called 'the unsayable'. The fact that Labour is 'not about altruism, or philanthropy, but about personal advancement and gain for working people' - for those poorer social groups who are now leaving the party in droves for the Tories and the BNP. Labour is not about the good-hearted rich giving out sweeties - it's about the people making a better deal for themselves. And now the party has retreated to Westminster, the cost of abandoning its communities is racking up. One councillor from Stoke, a new BNP heartland where skills are amongst the lowest in the country and where the Labour presence dropped from 60 to 16 seats at the last election, noted at a debate yesterday: 'we can have all the policies we like, but if we're not out there knocking on doors, then the BNP will be.'

The Comrade Did Not Mention Socialism!

...is what John Denham MP wanted someone to yell out from the audience, but nobody did. I'm tempted to do it myself this afternoon when Millie gets up to talk about foreign policy, but I'm on the mikes for that event and I like my job.

Last night I went to a party, drank four glasses of free champagne and compared dresses with important political ladies for a set period of time before going outside to smoke with the other interns and attempt to throw up my own lungs in a paroxysm of horror. What on earth happened to the Labour party? What happened?

(I spent the rest of the evening shouting about the RMT to Boris' transport minister and attempting to get people to stand on chairs with me and sing 'the red flag'. I'm not sure I'll be invited back.)

At every event they're edging closer to coming out and admitting that Labour has abandoned the grassroots. Peering out from their glittering Westminster bubble, even the chummy delegates and media flunkies here in Manchester are starting to get a little bit worried. If they don't mobilise, if they don't involve the communities and do more to address the needs of the people who vote for them and buy their newspapers, the number of expensive dinners on their horizon looks to significantly dwindle.

All this gets forgotten, of course, as soon as Club Miliband arrives at any given venue. The thrill of celebrity is thick on the air from the moment the security detail arrives, and even the bomb-squad sniffer dogs have been scampering up and down the halls with excitement (either it's excitement or there's something they're just not telling us). Everywhere he speaks, crowds of hopeful delegates and camera crews follow in his godly wake, waiting, just waiting for him to say something new. Anything new. Something hopeful, something fitting from the son of the man who wrote 'The State in Capitalist Society'. But no, there was nothing. Just a Blairite turn of phrase and Millie was away, avoiding the awkward questions with the flair of a schoolboy trained for power. He's shaved off the stupid little moustache, but he's still no Barack Obama.

We used to be more than this, and I'm coming to realise that it's this very thing - the glitter and privilege of power - that's been thrown in our eyes, divorcing us from our principles and our roots. In the week that big business was sent to the naughty step, in the week that the Telegraph - the Telegraph! - wondered if maybe Marx was right all along, let's remember where socialist politics began and what they were for. Let's remember that before it's far too late.

Raising Our Game

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