Political notes

Top hats off, tin hats on: the class war is with us again. Tony Blair would have sooner donned a Fettes tie than started a row with the leader of the opposition about his background. Yet that is what Gordon Brown did during prime minister’s questions at the start of December, needling David Cameron for an economic policy “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton,” and teasing him for having a posh, tax-avoiding ally in Zac Goldsmith. Cameron should have seen it coming: such plutocrats came into politics on their own terms, trailing interesting accountancy arrangements.

The PM meant more than just a sideswipe. The rhetoric of a distant and privileged Tory caste is being revived. Despite the Crewe and Nantwich by-election (where attempts to paint a bland candidate as Lord Snooty backfired), Brown still sees class as a weapon in the battle for that elusive but vital territory: middle England. All sorts of pet likes and dislikes are espoused in middle England’s name, without real agreement about what this “middle” means. I leave it to Prospect readers to decide whether it makes more sense to calculate the means, modes, or medians when we throw about phrases like the “average family income”—whichever way, the official statistics are lower than many people expect: £24,000 if calculated as a mean. Therefore many, even those outside the poverty trap, earn a lot less. Middle-income England and its image often don’t mean the same thing.

As the general election looms, parties will claim to defend middle-class interests, but they will be talking about two quite different groups. The PM is peddling a message for those on modest incomes who fear the immediate financial consequences of unemployment. So he attacks the Conservatives for failing to back the borrowing of vast sums, on the grounds that it would leave the vulnerable to “sink or swim.” Intended savings, like withdrawing childcare vouchers, have been ditched for fear of a mum’s revolt. Ed Balls’s education policy is also openly aimed at those of modest aspiration who need reassurance about their children’s schooling and vocational training, but are not much moved by loftier arguments about user choice, or extra provision—two themes absent in Ballsian policy. David Cameron has a different comfort zone. He relates easily to upper middle England—though I’m sure he won’t be calling it that. His message of austerity appeals to the fretful-but-prudent, while flagship school reforms are meant to calm anxious aspirational parents. All of this makes the white working class the one battalion left out of the class warfare. Cameron talks about the poor to tell us that he is likeable and caring, but he’s less good on Britain’s 7.6m genuinely low earners—the group that the Resolution Foundation defines as “closer to crisis” than any others in the recession.

Classic Labour territory; or at least it was. Now the government’s electoral grip on this demographic has weakened, as one minister told me, “to a frightening degree.” A pincer movement of high immigration, social housing shortages and the withering of the party base has left the white working class without an obvious political home. Jon Cruddas is the figure who has best identified the malaise, but so far even he has failed to pinpoint what should be done about it. New Labour reaped dividends in electing professional women and making itself palatable to prosperous parts of the whole country. Yet in the process it shed its local heroes. Blair’s Trimdon Labour club is today a sad and deserted place.

“Back in 2001 when John Prescott thumped that mullet-haired protestor,” says a former union boss, “the response among a lot of our people was sheer joy.” Prescott connected in more ways than one with “our people.” Who cheers them up now? The task is Alan Johnson’s, the only cabinet figure who could joke that he wanted to go to Davos “because I’ve always wanted to see the Greek islands,” and sound natural as well as witty. But Johnson is stuck in his home office trench, ducking leadership challenges and looking becalmed. And so the real battles, like combating the BNP in Barking, go to Margaret Hodge, a lady bountiful from Islington guesting in the east end.

The real class problem for both parties is that they lack breadth. Cameron has a top drawer of expensively educated, clever, sociable characters. His shortage is figures, like Eric Pickles, whose voices carry more widely, without sounding aloof or strained. The PM, on the other hand, badly needs to regain the public sector and lower-income middle-class vote, while avoiding the old trap of defining Labour as the party of the downtrodden and resentful. Alas, he has never yet found a demeanour that sounds comfortable in the average living room. “My wife is from middle England,” he once ventured, clumsily. No, Gordon, no. Mrs Brown is a product of Camden School for Girls, alma mater of the capital’s liberal intelligentsia. That’s something else entirely. Learning to speak middle English is so much harder than it looks—even if you’re not an Etonian.