One of the most effective strategies in class war is to simply deny its existence. There is no war because there is no class difference. I am talking about the war as waged by the party of the rich on the poor. The Tories must be getting pretty desperate, as Cameron is seen as overwhelmingly out of touch (an Ipsos Mori poll last September found that 70% thought this, a figure not hit by any Tory leader of the past 35 years). They cannot be delighted about the prospect of the end of the phone-hacking trial either. This panic has made them recruit a new poster boy, and being conservative they can only look backwards. Arise Sir John Major! No longer a grey drone a la Spitting Image, Major has been dug up as the human remains of social mobility. He will stand beside party chairman Grant Shapps as he attempts to rebrand his party by saying: The Conservatives are the workers party and we are on your side. The workers party? Somewhat audacious to say the least. It is rather like rebranding Marmite as Nutella. Remember when the Tories rebranded as green? That went well. Can we now look forward to a cabinet of Etonians lecturing us about workers rights as they demolish them? Which workers this new party will champion is hard to say but worker is a much more amenable word than working-class, which suggests systems and divisions beyond individual control. Having waged war on shirkers – be they old, disabled, single parents – all now scrabble to be on the side of workers. Tory strategists also know that their party cannot automatically hoover up would-be Ukip votes because many of those people have a strong distrust of elites. Inroads have to be made into former Labour votes: blue collar workers in the north and Midlands. Hence this Humpty Dumpy nonsense. (When I use a word, says Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.) This is what happens when politics dances on the pin head of the centre. Labour has to sell itself as the party of business, Tories declare themselves the party of workers. It is utterly barmy, but then in this looking-glass world, Nigel Farage can represent himself as a man of the people though he went to public school and is the son of a stockbroker. Boris Johnson has long burbled his way into some sort of licensed classlessness. For in all the babble about hardworking families with squeezed middles and alarm clocks, who does represent workers? Dare I suggest not the party that opposed the introduction of the minimum wage? Yet the Tory party is trying to resuscitate what used to win it elections, the sense that it was the party of aspiration. With talent and hard work, anyone could be anything. They could even buy the council house they rented. What now can be offered to the workers? The ground has shifted and from an overt attack on workers rights to the more subtle takeover of cultural production – music, art, film, media – by the well-to-do. It is increasingly hard for a child of the workers to succeed. Some do and are deified as supreme beings, but to look to celebrity to provide social mobility is not good enough. This is brief escapism, not actual escape. Again the Tories have to pull off an ideological sleight of hand, one copied from the Republicans. The parties of the elite have to locate aspiration as an individual trait with success as its manifest destiny. How else can Cameron and his circle-jerk cabinet of mutual congratulation explain how they took power? Against which of lifes odds have they struggled? No, it is truly their amazing characters that have ensured their position. The problem, as Cameron told us last year, is that young working-class people and ethnic minorities lack aspiration. Its not the system at the top, it is about those locked out, feeling they cant get there. Replacing any sense of collective class consciousness with the idea of individual drive is paramount. The X-Factoring of everyday life allows a discriminatory system to see itself as blameless. The Tories need to promise something for ordinary voters but Labour has also been busy talking about itself as the party of work, for no one wants to be seen as the shirkers party, though globalisation means the world of work is a deeply insecure place. The boundaries between work, caring and benefits are way more permeable than the political discourse allows. Low pay remains a fundamental issue. Therein lies the rub. Any workers party has to be on the side of low-paid workers when, in fact, the Tories are run by independently wealthy millionaires. Their only aspiration is to guarantee that the system that has produced them keeps working. What is increasingly clear is that the coup staged at the last election by the Tories was also an internal one returning the partys control to the old elite. They cant sell classlessness as a dream when it is so clearly part of the delusion that has let them seize power.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:00:03 +0000
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