The class argument: tread lightly but carry a big stick

By Tim Nicholls /@tim_nicholls

David Cameron’s a toff: hardly breaking news, we’ve known it for years. Yet it now seems that assertion is likely to form a fairly substantial part of the election rhetoric. The Prime Minister has quipped that Tory policy was dreamt up on the playing fields of Eton, much to the annoyance of the opposition benches. So is it just a cheap trick, to highlight the dividing lines between the parties? Well, no, I don’t think it is.

The point of the argument is not that David Cameron went to Eton: for all that it is emblematic of privilege and class divide, it is also a very good school and it was presumably not completely his own choice to go there.

No, the real point is more sinister: it is that his policies are designed to benefit other people like him. In other words, it’s not that he’s a toff, it’s that he is looking out for the other toffs, many of whom he will have shared the Eton playing fields with. Brown’s joke was aimed at the policy, not the person.

Conservative dogma promotes the status quo. But the shunning of change works against the people that need change. Those people are usually not the other boys on the Eton playing field; they are the middle and lower income families all across the country, who will not benefit from a billion-pound boondoggle on Inheritance Tax. Class is important, but especially so when it is the protection of the privileged few at the top of the class system who benefit from political proposals.

That is our big stick, but if we’re going to use it, we need to be nimble and use it wisely. It has already been reported that many people do not like the idea of attacking Cameron’s schooling. It is argued that we should not be using the big stick at all. But I think to ignore class in this election would be wrong. I also think if we’re being criticised for using class, we are not doing it right.

We need to show that we are out for regular people, and that means the middle and working classes. We cannot now abandon ‘progressive universalism’, which sees support for people across the income spectrum. The Tories may have antagonised the middle class vote with their policies to hand money back to the super rich and thereby restricting state money to people on lower incomes.

That support may now be up for grabs and, frankly, we need it if we want to win the election. Of course, our support for those most in need should not waver, and we need to show how we will focus on improving the lot of the majority.

So while vicious, purposeless anti-wealth rhetoric will kill our chances of getting that middle-class vote, policies that show that Labour will still support them, too, could still win them round.

Class is important, but it is doubly important when the class of the opposition informs their priorities. We should attack those policies for exactly what they are and how they completely undermine the now-abandoned notion of ‘compassionate conservativism’. If we use the big class stick well, we can still show the wolf under the sheep’s clothing and shore up public support.

It’s not that Dave’s a toff, it’s that he’s looking out for others like him, to the detriment of the rest of us.