If John Major was trying to attack Labour, it has backfired spectacularly

John Major interventions are like buses – you wait ages for one, and then two come along and run Cameron over in quick succession. First it was the need to do something – anything – on energy bills (which Cameron has manifestly failed to do so far, save some chatter about green taxes). Now it’s an attack on the privileged, distant, privately educated elite who run our country.

Of course Major covered his comments with the usual attacks on Labour – claiming that income inequality is all Blair and Brown’s fault. However that doesn’t ring true, as George Eaton brilliantly noted over at the Staggers:

“Major went on to blame the “collapse in social mobility” on Labour, which, he said, “left a Victorian divide between stagnation and aspiration”. Yet it was under the Thatcher government of the 1980s, not Labour, that those now occupying the “upper echelons of power” were educated. The current distribution of power, with the privately educated accounting for more than half of all cabinet ministers, 35% of MPs, 45% of senior civil servants, 15 of the 17 Supreme Court judges and heads of division, 43% of barristers and 54% of leading journalists was shaped by decisions taken by Conservative administrations.”

“The decline in social mobility owes much to the surge in inequality that took place after 1979 (the gini coefficient rose from 12.9 in 1978 to 22.2 in 1990), which Labour failed to reverse.”

Labour didn’t do enough in government to resolve the vast inequality that Thatcherism fostered, and it’s perhaps the party’s greatest failing from those thirteen years. But lets not pretend that Labour didn’t try. Sure Start, the Minimum Wage and tax credits were all hugely important in stopping the rot that the Tory governments of the eighties and nineties – that includes you, Mr Major – wilfully brought about.

The idea that Labour didn’t do enough to help working people on government is now an established part of the media narrative and the public conversation. Social Democrats across the developed world proved unable over the past decades to reverse the tide of neoliberalism whilst in government, being limited to mitigating its worst effects on one hand, and resorting to riding the wave of the boom on the other. It’s part of what’s responsible for the “you’re all the same” syndrome that now turns the public off politics and towards cynicism. And we have to live with that legacy every day.

But to claim that inequality in Britain – particularly the preponderance of the privately educated at the top of our society – is explicitly down to Labour is absurd, and won’t fly with the electorate. If you attack the wealthy, privately educated elite in society, the public don’t instinctively go “ah yes, that bloody Labour Party”.

No, instead what will be taken from this is that a state school educated former-Tory PM has attacked a political and social system that has created his successor and the “chumocracy” that surrounds him. Whilst Tories might try to spin that the Tory Party is becoming more representative, it still takes more than 50% of its MPs from private schools, and more than 6% of its MPs from a single school (Eton). And that’s before we even get started on the lack of female MPs in the Tory Party.

The Tory Party in parliament doesn’t look remotely like the country. (Neither does the PLP – but at least with AWS and the future candidates programme Labour seem to be making an effort.)

If John Major was trying to attack Labour, it has backfired spectacularly, and his mortars have thumped into his own troops in another example of painful friendly fire. But if you ask me, John Major knew exactly what he was doing.

He knows – as many Tories surely do in private – that the public image of their party as aloof, distant and privileged is enormously damaging for them. He knows that the public don’t believe that “we are all in this together”. And he surely knows that unless his party pivot away from the rich and powerful and towards those who want to get on in life, then 2015 will be a very tough election for them indeed…