Allan Massie: Brown turns back clock with an ill-conceived revival of class war

Published on Monday 28 December 2009 20:56

AS CONSERVATIVE leader and three times prime minister between the wars, Stanley Baldwin said that his political aim was "to prevent the Class War from becoming a reality in Britain". He hit his target.

The Labour government which took office in 1945, two years before Baldwin's death, was led by respectable members of the middle-class, none more so than the prime minister, Clement Attlee (Hailybury and Oxford) who, like John Major half a century later, liked to be kept up-to-date with cricket scores even during Cabinet meetings.

His deputy, Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson's grandfather, belonged to the small-c conservative London lower middle-class, while the principal authentic representative of the working-class, Ernest Bevin, creator of the once great Transport and General Workers Union, was a staunch anti-Communist, who had served as minister of labour in Churchill's wartime Coalition. Now, as foreign secretary, he was adored by his officials, almost all Oxford or Cambridge graduates, many of them Etonians.

Only the Welsh Aneurin Bevan occasionally broke ranks, once describing the Tories as "lower than vermin", for which outburst he was kicked down the steps of White's Club in St James's by a chap with the splendid Whig name of Fox-Pitt. But Bevan had many upper-class chums, including Bob Boothby (Eton and Oxford), and his favoured tipple was champagne. It was notable too that he had actually been given lunch in White's by another member of that Establishment club before Fox-Pitt's assault.

Nor were subsequent Labour leaders keen on fomenting class warfare, whether in Opposition or Government. Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan and Michael Foot steered clear of this sort of thing, Wilson's jibe about the Tories choosing the 14th Earl of Home as prime minister being no more than a neat and legitimate crack. (There were Tories, among them Iain Macleod, who were far more disapproving of the choice of Alec Douglas-Home as Harold Macmillan's successor; engineered, according to Macleod, by a "magic circle" of Etonians.)

Callaghan, who hadn't gone to university, was another small-c conservative and a chum of the Queen Mother. And any attempt to associate Tony Blair with class warfare would be patently ridiculous. As one of his Fettesian contemporaries once remarked to me, "the only reason he joined Labour was that there was more room at the top".

Nor were leading Labour politicians in the second half of the 20th century shy of sending their children to fee-paying schools. Harold Wilson, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins all did so. Tony Benn admittedly, in the course of the journey in which he divested himself of his inherited peerage and his double-barrel name, made a point of sending his to a comprehensive, but Holland Park Comprehensive was then the classiest in West London.

Given this history, Gordon Brown's attempts to make class an issue in the coming election look odd. All the odder indeed when you consider his own background, which is scarcely proletarian (to employ a descriptive term long out of fashion). Brown, as a son of the manse and of a mother whose family ran a small business in Aberdeenshire, is solidly middle-class.

Moreover , as a youthful academic star, he might even be described as privileged, while he was jockeyed into his safe seat in parliament as a favoured son of the Scottish Labour Establishment. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who had to overcome male prejudice, or John Major, who left school with only a few O levels, Brown has never had to struggle. His path to the top was quite unusually smooth.

Indeed it was almost as smooth, if in a different way, as David Cameron's or George Osborne's. Until Blair stole a march on him and then delayed the handover of power , Brown scarcely encountered a single obstacle on his way to No 10 Downing Street. Unlike Cameron, he didn't even have to win a party election to become Labour's leader; instead he came unopposed into what he considered his rightful inheritance. Indeed his accession was more like Alec Douglas-Home's than that of any leader of either main party in the last half-century.

His attempt to make an issue of the social and educational background of his Tory rivals has evidently embarrassed many of his colleagues, Peter Mandelson most obviously, and not only because Mandelson's own heredity makes him an authentic Labour toff. More importantly, for Mandelson, it flies in the face of the New Labour achievement, which was to dissociate the party from social resentment and to appeal to aspiration.

Brown himself was one of the architects of New Labour, but seems to have forgotten why it won so handsomely, and is now displaying a laager- mentality. Appealing to class resentment may shore up some of the traditional Labour vote, but at the cost, as Mandelson and other Cabinet ministers such as the brothers Miliband realise, of alienating the Centre where elections are won and lost.

For the truth is that class warfare in Britain is dead as mutton. A certain chippiness may still be found in some quarters, including, sadly, it would seem, No 10 Downing Street, but this is all. Baldwin achieved his aim. Cameron and Osborne, whatever their educational background, are a long way from the old Tory Establishment confident of its natural right to govern.

Indeed I have heard old-fashioned upper-class Tories refer to them as spivs – which is how the same people describe Peter Mandelson, a moral, rather than social, criticism. Brown's acolyte, Ed Balls, more astute than his master, has recently shifted the point of attack, saying their background is irrelevant, and that it is more important that they are promising tax cuts for the rich and hardship for everyone else.

He instances their intention to raise the threshold at which inheritance tax is payable – and indeed Osborne would be wise to put this on the back boiler, even though house price inflation means that many middle-class people are now caught in the inheritance tax trap.

Balls's argument may have some appeal, but not to those whom New Labour identified as key voters – aspirational Mondeo man and woman. As for Brown's suggestion that Cameron & Co are incapable, because of their background, of empathising with the hard-working poor, let alone those suffering from social exclusion, such empathy requires imagination rather than direct experience, and is displayed by the Tories' shadow education minister, Michael Gove, with his plans for schools reform in England, and by the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith with his Centre for Social Justice.