Labour have, for many years, maintained that the Conservatives are public school boys who are in politics for fun, while Labour come from the working classes, representing the hard-working families of Britain. Of course, this has generally been complete rubbish: both of Labour’s arguably most successful Prime Ministers – Clement Atlee and Tony Blair – were educated at independent schools, while Maggie Thatcher went to a Grammar school and John Major left at 16 (not that I would describe John Major as the Tories greatest Prime Minister, but he is their most recent).
At the same time, Labour have hypocritically argued that it doesn’t matter where a person comes from, it’s what they can achieve which makes the difference. They have no monopoly on this adage: aspiration is a fundamental principle of post-Thatcher Conservatism, too, and was re-affirmed by David Cameron in his leadership contest when he said “it doesn’t matter where a person has come from, it’s where they’re going which makes the difference” (or words to that effect).
After the disaster of Labour’s Crewe & Nantwich by-election campaign where they devoted most of their time to labelling Conservative Candidate Edward Timpson a ‘toff’. Today, a survey in the Financial Times shows that ‘toff bashing is on the way out’:
The vast majority – 81 per cent – of people think the issue of whether politicians come from privileged backgrounds is not very or not at all important, according to the survey for the website PoliticsHome.com. Only one in 20 rated politicians’ background as very important. Even among Mr Brown’s core target of Labour voters, fewer than one in 10 believed that the “poshness” of politicians was very important.
It looks like we’re finally getting to the stage where it actually doesn’t matter where a person comes from. In today’s world, the electorate are interested in ideas, not backgrounds, and Labour’s 100-year-old class war is on the verge of being lost forever.
(Hat-Tip PoliticsHome)