Fighting the last (indefensible) war
I am just astounded by the Labour by-election campaign in Crewe and Nantwich. First, and most disgustingly, as has been ricocheting around the blogosphere, a Labour leaflet pretending to be a Tory party application form (subtle, eh?) asks: Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?
Since no-one has ever suggested that ID cards would be targeted particularly at foreign nationals, this appears to be a bizarre, indeed incomprehensible, attempt to play the race card.
But what’s really amazing about the Labour campaign is its strategy of portraying the Tory candidate Edward Timpson as a caricature toff, just because his family is wealthy. Reverting to class war like this really does show the depths of the party’s intellectual bankruptcy. It’s as if Blairism never happened. Labour are behaving like the apocryphal person who was stuck in the jungle and didn’t know the war was over decades after it had finished. Stripped of all the Blair triangulation, the party reveals that its motivating idea is just spiteful jealousy of the rich.
Nor is this a one-off in Crewe and Nantwich; it forms the core of Brown’s attack on ‘Old Etonian’ Cameron, the core of Labour’s education policy, the core of its welfare policy. And as the devastating attack on the government by the Labour MP and anti-poverty campaigner Frank Field has so brutally demonstrated, the cynical fleecing of the poor through abolishing the 10p tax band reveals that the purpose of this class war is not to benefit the poor at all but simply to hurt the rich. In the light of this, the idea that Ed Balls can make Frank Field look bad,as he has been attempting to do today, is risible.
But then, what is so remarkable is that the Brownies actually believe class war is a vote winner. In fact, it's why they are losing. The attack on Etonians is so puerile and out of touch, it’s embarrassing. People couldn’t care less where politicians went to school or whether they had silver spoons protruding from every orifice when they were growing up. What matters to them is how these individuals behave now and how they relate to their own lives. That’s why Boris won.
Apparently, according to a story in Saturday's Daily Mail, Labour have had to be told this strategy is backfiring. How could it not be? It’s crude and insulting — above all, to the intelligence of the electorate. Faced with a Tory party which is repositioning itself in a sophisticated and attractive manner designed to impress and bamboozle the voters -- and which has a good chance of working -- Labour chooses to respond by demonstrating that its knuckles are still scraping the ground.