Unlike the Tories, Labour’s historic mission is to protect people from overweening power

By David Beeson

The most painful thing to hear people say about the coming election is that “it won’t make a difference, they’re all the same, I’m not voting.”

They aren’t all the same, it does make a difference, and the people who are thinking of not voting stand a big chance of being the victims of a bad choice.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Michael Ashcroft saga and the Tories like to dismiss it as just negative campaigning. But actually there’s a serious message behind the noise. Ashcroft wants to sit in our legislature and make laws for a society to which he doesn’t want to contribute financially.

Now let’s get this straight. I’m not suggesting that what either Ashcroft or David Cameron did about all this was illegal or corrupt. I’m not denying that, as Cameron has pointed out, the Tory Party has plenty of other sources of income and isn’t by any means massively dependent on Ashcroft.

However, what I do find significant about the whole business is what it says about attitudes in the Tory Party. It says that while it is more than happy to denounce Britain as “broken”, it sees nothing wrong with a phenomenally wealthy man who wishes to mould society to his wishes but doesn’t contribute to it himself. It’s that apparent indifference to basic principles of equity that I find disturbing.

All that stuff about whether Cameron is a toff or not, or whether it matters either way, really boils down to his apparent belief that there are people – the inhabitants of the world to which he belongs – who deservedly enjoy uniquely privileged existences. Wealthy and powerful, they are convinced that nothing is more appropriate than that they should run the country, without having to accept the same normal restraints on behaviour that apply to the rest of us. The party Cameron leads expresses those aspirations.

Now a criticism that can legitimately be directed against Labour is that it hasn’t done enough to shake the grip of such people on society – and, more to the point, hasn’t done enough to speak out for those who are at the other end of the scale. Abolishing the 10p tax rate was a move that was petty and mean and flew in the face of Labour’s historic mission to stand for the powerless – as well as being massively counter-productive in electoral terms.

That being said, even if it falls short of it at times, at least Labour does have that historic mission. That’s why those things that have been done to protect those who most need it have almost exclusively been done by Labour: it was the post-War government that brought in the NHS, and it is the current government that tripled expenditure on it.

And it isn’t just the poor that Labour protects, but many other groups that privileged circles regard as ‘outsiders’. One of the greatest British geniuses of the twentieth century, Alan Turing, was driven to suicide by the prospect of being prosecuted for his homosexuality, in the 1950s; it wasn’t until 1967, under the Wilson Labour government, that the law was repealed that led to his taking his life. And the Tory response? Thatcher brought in Section 28 with its ban on ‘promoting homosexuality’, whatever that meant.

The Section was repealed by the current government. It was the Labour government that also incorporated European Human Rights legislation into domestic law. It granted devolution to Scotland and Wales. It negotiated an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Labour is fallible, sometimes untrue to itself, often disappointing. But it has achieved real and important successes, and they have tended to be successes that protect all of us against the overweening power of the most privileged. The Ashcroft affair reveals what Cameron constantly tries to hide: that the Tories are the embodiment of that overweening power.

So it does make a difference who we vote for. If we’re not one of that tiny privileged clique whom Cameron will look over with tax cuts, but one of the vast majority with hard-won rights to defend, then you need Labour more than ever. That’s a message you need to heed in the polling station.