Labour will tell anyone who’ll listen, and especially those who support them, that at last the grown-ups are in charge and they are putting right a mess they were left. We should accept that they truly believe this, but that’s not the key measure they should use. Do the public believe that? Some will, but it’s becoming harder to argue.
It would seem to many that the Labour Government has been busy not just trying to govern, but quite transparently settling some long-standing scores. That’s not grown up and I suspect won’t help them. In the high moralising tones we’ve now become accustomed to, they seem to think hitting certain groups in society is a form of restorative social justice.
That might seem the right, even moral thing to do, but it only really works if the people you are targeting are, in reality, the sort of people Labour think they are. It’s becoming increasingly obvious, and should’ve been to them, that they are not.
Let’s start with small farmers. The Mirror’s chief political writer Kevin Maguire, a man who is good company and smart – but who I happen to know has a bust of Marx on his bookshelf at home – started his column yesterday:
“Keir Starmer didn’t deliberately pick a half-a-billion fight with tax-dodging rich landowners and feather-bedded farmers, but now it is one he must win it.”
Quite apart from the typographical mistake which is his not mine, we can argue about whether the Budget was in fact the very definition of ‘deliberately picking a fight with farmers’ but that’s not the words I thought were most instructive. It’s the portrayal of who farmers are, in the eyes of the left.
Left leaning supporters on social media have gone even further, demonstrating a deep-seated envy and dislike for anyone whose work place is a field not an office, as if tucked into every farmer’s pockets are wedges of cash, as they live off the fat of the land and somehow dodge doing their bit.
Having grown up on a farm I’m well aware that most farmers are nothing like that, and actually if ever there was a definition of ‘working people’, it’s them. Are there wealthy farmers? Yes of course. They aren’t the majority. Just as there are wealthy Labour supporters – even ones who can afford to donate the use of flats, suits and glasses. They can’t be great glasses though, because they seem to have blurred the PM’s view of lots of ordinary working people.
You don’t have to look hard for more examples. Look at the language used described those who choose to use their own money to send children to private school. To hear them you’d think every single parent was dripping with money, scorning ordinary folk by looking down their posho noses at the good solid “working people” of Labour. If that were true, I’d back them all they way, but it isn’t.
Labour also know a large section of the pensioner vote doesn’t go to them. They often see them in the same way Gordon Brown viewed Gillian Duffy; bigoted and too parochial to understand progressive policies and social justice causes. In a bid to take a payment from people who might indeed not really need it they’ve managed to remove it from millions who do. So, some of them will be a bit colder this winter? Serve them right for wrong think.
Of course, this is all on top of some older scores in Labour’s sights. If anyone took one of Rachel Reeves’ prawn sandwiches in her pre-election business charm-offensive they must now be wondering if they were off. If they swallowed the lines that the private sector had nothing to fear from a Labour Government, I’ll bet they feel green about the gills now.
Big business, capital, profit – these have long been dirty words on the left. Only Blair and Mandelson tried to tackle that and it doesn’t seem to have lasted. For the same people who stood shoulder to shoulder with Corbyn: everyone who handles anything to do with money is at best ‘a Banker’ and at worst a misspelling of that word. So now, ‘the boss class’ has one job in this new parliament, to pay for a public sector that is wasteful, inefficient and sprawling. I should know, I’ve worked in it most of my life.
Are Conservatives free of applying bad stereotypes to certain people? Of course. I’d urge the party to ditch them, as part of the coming policy review. Stereotypes, and especially manufactured scapegoats are not only wrong, they are unwise.
It’s like a class war of the early twentieth century is being applied to a very different society in the twenty-first. The last Conservative government may not have delivered enough of it but its ethos was to level up, not down. You get the sense that every parent that reluctantly moves their children into a state school, every small farmer frustrated by inheritance taxes, every pensioner worried about a coming cold spell, and anyone in business is there to be brought down a peg. I can’t help thinking, when they are, it is greeted by a little social-justice-fist-pump in Labour minds: they’ve had it too good for too long. They deserve it.
My real problem with this myopic world view is not that it’s flawed, though it is. Not that it’s mean spirited, though it is. It is that it leads to bad policy. It hurts people that Labour probably didn’t intend to. In order to teach some a lesson, many more are directly in the firing line. They seem either surprised that people are angry, or they shrug it off. It divides far more than it unites.
The Government of ‘change in the service of working people’ is increasingly working to service its friends, like the Unions. No change there.
All of this has been justified of course by blaming the Conservatives for a 22 billion black hole that even the OBR (so often quoted with regards to this point) doesn’t recognise. It is the result of a Budget that did things Labour swore blind they wouldn’t do, and now justify by relying on the kind of sophistry that the public hate in politicians.
I may not like it, they won’t care about that, but far worse, it actually undermines trust.
The crowning irony of that whole #bekind period of Labour’s online history, is this seeming determination to settle old scores is anything but kind. They’d be better off trying to see people as they are and not through some warped and manufactured class lens.