The Tories and class

Yow Min Lye

I am Tory. I grew up in a council tower block and went to a state school.

charles hercock

Come on Dave-stick the boot in.Given the mini-revival you are not kicking a man lying down

charles hercock

OK You Min my first job as a porter in 1967 paid £14 pounds a week.But we all bettered ourselves

Bocephus

When Brown talks about toffs he really means English. Anyone who lived in Scotland throughout the 80's and 90's knows that Labour politicians - especially Brown - conflate Tory rule with English rule. He is retreating to his Scottish base and letting his disdain for the English shine through. Remember this is the man who moved heaven and earth to make sure his children were not born in England despite spending most of their time there.

GeoffH

Yow Min Lye: So am I.

I grew up in an agricultural tied cottage and went to grammar school.

emil

YML

Yep - certainly working class parents, never had any spare money, holidays on the Provi, got into a grammar school, managed through hard work to join the "middle classes" and now this lot would like to put me back in poverty. My mum would spin in her grave but hell would freeze over before I voted Labour, not that any of the others really hold that much appeal to be honest.

H.Harman

I'm the heir of an aristocratic dynasty; I'm worth a fortune, I went to St. Paul's Girls School and I'm a socialist.

David Lindsay

That's why you are not in the Shadow Cabinet, Yow Min Lye.

What does Osborne know about needing to get on, or about saving for a pension?

Based on this post, "the centre ground" now seems to be used in the same way as "the middle classes", to mean the hugely rich whose wealth insulates them so completely that they really do assume their own lifestyle to be normal. In a word, George Osborne. Or David Cameron.

gareth

I am a Tory. My grandfather met Stalin as a delegate of the South Wales Coal and Steel Unions and was a communist. My grandmother rumbled his lot when he told her about his visit and how children were put in creches in that soviet utopian wonderland. "Children belong with the parents" she told him, and never gave the fools another thought.
My Uncle turned down Neil Kinnock for a teaching job at his school in Cwmbran because he was not good enough.

Quality. Could Harriet Harmon teach real children? Wedgie Benn hew the coalface? Gordon Brown play rugby? NEVER. Intellectuals and sympathetic, but not complete human beings. They're low quality sociopaths who think they've got something to offer - the irony always escapes them.
Those of us who work for a living - and whose religion is how we treat other people - really miss Margaret Thatcher now.

Coeur de Lion

I'm a sixth generation military man and you don't make money doing that. But we do have solutions. "Begone. You have sate here long enough" as one military chap once said. Roll on the day.

jimbo

My first job was working for Sainsbury's for £6pw in 1967. Lifelong Tory. Horrible company.

Dennis Churchill

Bocephus
That is why Andrew Marr (former Loretto boy) asked Boris Johnson about the Old Etonians in the Shadow Cabinet but never asked his fellow Old-Loretto boy, Alistair Darling, his views on the number of Scottish former Public Schoolboys we have had in government lately.
Who was that Fettes chap?
My Spell Check insists on changing “Etonians” to “Estonians”—maybe Macmillan was ahead of his time with his crack about Margaret Thatcher having more Old Estonians than Old Etonians in her cabinet.

john miller

You can tell the Tories have been well and truly browbeaten. Why on earth did Osborne say "anymore" at the end of that sentence?

Labour have been responsible for massive increases in house prices, thus reducing the chance to buy your own home, massive increases in inheritance tax, reducing the chance to buy your own home and, of course, Brown's famous raid on pension funds as soon as he got his feet under the table. They will be resonsible for double digit inflation by 2011 - a trademark of all Labour governments - so being a saver or an OAP will be bad news.

Osborne's statement implies Labour were once good for these things - which is untrue - and further implies that the Tories should seek to be what New Labour once were. More of the "heir to Blair" positioning.

Well, George, people have at last realised that they don't want anything resembling new or old Labour, but you aren't really giving them that choice are you?

No wonder the Tories are sliding in the polls.

Tanuki

Brown and his nouveau-Labour arriviste clique worry themselves about class.

Purely because they haven't got any.

JohnAnt

"the ‘whole issue of Tories and money is completely toxic.’"
Is it? At least it's usually their money and not mine.
The whole issue of the unfunded salaries and pension schemes of the Labour 'Coz-I'm-Worf-It' public service/MP/quango class is far more toxic - and that *is* my money. Or was.

Nicholas

They have stuffed the HoL with robber barons (and ghastly wimmin baronesses) and ruined that institution. Their class system is just as pernicious and injust as the old one, if not more so.

I sometimes wonder what the reaction would be if you could go back to a typical country pub in, say, 1943, and tell the people gathered there, service personnel and civilians, that in 66 years time they would not be allowed to smoke in it or drive home afterwards. The Nazis they were fighting were of course led by a fastidious anti-smoker and vegetarian who was a national socialist like the present criminal gang pretending to govern here.

2trueblue

Aspirations, thats what Labour haave taken from peoples lives. They have given us nothing in return, but they have made themselves rich in the process of denying us democracy, transparency, freedom to move about our own country, (now have 1 cctv for every 1000 inhabitants), destroyed our economy, pensions, education, infastructure, and mde an elite class called politicians. That is what Labour have done. No one knows what a mess will be left behind if the electorate gets rid of them but I would rather take my chances and a few of my aspirations and help get rid of them. The problem for the public is to see through the smoke screen Labour continually puts up.

Boudicca

I'm a divorced single parent; I work in the public sector; I went to an all girls secondary modern - and I'm Conservative. Well I used to be, anyway. Now I'm planning on voting UKIP.

As Cameron said - it's all about trust. And since he ditched the cast-iron guarantee on a Referendum, Trust is in short supply.

Derek

A thought for 2010, taken from Christopher Hitchen's article earlier this year on the fall of the Berlin wall: "...the Communist leaderships of Eastern Europe had almost wholly ceased to believe in anything but their own survival and self-interest...and we can draw on the memory of a time when civilized peoples, so long forced to hold their tongues and hold their breath, all exhaled at the same moment and blew the old order away without a shot being fired."

Dirty Euro

Labour is the party of the working and lower middle class.
The two class mistakes it makes in class are
1) To think it is only a party of the working class, when it is for both the working and lower middle class, and to a smaller extent the middle - middle class.
2) When labour realize they a party of the middle class to some Tom Harris types think that includes upper middle class. So they think they represent as a demographic group as a priority the people who go to expensive private school. This is a daily mail con trick which thinks everyone who is middle class earns 80,000 a year, went to Eton and belongs to an exclusive golf club.
The real "middle" section of the population is knowhere near that wealthy.
We must remember we are after Ford Mondeo man. Ford Mondeo man does not earn 80,000 a year. Not anything like it. For Mondeo man is the centre ground not with all respect Bentley man.

Colin

I grew up living in an old water tank on a rubbish tip...

You lot had it easy.

BTW, I'm not a Labour supporter.

Ronnie

For goodness sake!

I grew up in a soiled newspaper, was beaten to death every night by my Dad and eventually graduated top of my class in Starfleet.

But I'm a Tory because the newspaper in question was the Telegragh.

Ian Walker

I was on benefits from leaving school until the mid-nineties, the worst of the last recession.

Now I own my own company and employ a dozen people. The corporation tax bill I just received went to pay off the mortgages of about 30 MPs. Needless to say I think the whole lot of them should be strung up.

But in the absense of a bloody revolution, I think getting rid of this shower, who have helped me not one iota on my fifteen-year climb out of a grubby bedsit, would be nice.

Class only exists in the head of deranged pseudo-Marxists like the rotten remains of the Labour Party.

Dirty Euro

If you are all working class why do you vote for parties that cut taxes fore the rich and increase taxes on the poor as Mrs Thacher did with cutting the top rate of income tax, and increasing VAT which is a tax everyone pays. The treasury wanted to increase VAT to 20%, rather than National insurance which shows a terrible tory in built bias in the treasury.

JONNY

John Miller there is no evidence the Tories are 'sliding in the polls'.
They stick obstinately around the 40 mark.
If Labour's gaining it seems to be at the expense of the Lib-Dems.

Verity

I wouldn't trust a Chancellor of the Exchequer whose brother is a Muslim. Shariah banking, anyone? No penalties for bigamy, followed by more benefits, a la Gordon Brown, for multiple wives?

Too creepy.

BGarvie

I am working class and I support David Cameron. I cannot stomach Brown who has betrayed the working man.The pathetic Brown, Johnson, Harman, Mandleson and their colleagues are all champagne socialists. Woodward, Labour MP with a Butler??? And they pretend to represent the working class??
They have abandoned their princilals and let the country down. Labour have ruined our pemsions, ruined our savings, ruined our jobs, ruined our businesses, ruined our economy and ruined our hopes. Stuff Labour.