The Conservatives called it laughable, but it was not funny at all. Gordon Brown, the politician who has royally shafted the middle classes for 12 years or so, now wants to appeal to their better nature to keep him in office so that he can put up their top-rate income tax to 50p in the pound and raise their National Insurance contributions. If proof were needed of the delusions that now sustain the Prime Minister in his Downing Street bunker it was his speech on Saturday.
Mr Brown said his theme for the coming parliament would be "social mobility" and a "fair society, where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams". How that squares with the new Equality Bill, which is the antithesis of meritocratic aspiration, is anyone's guess.
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But however brazen this pitch for Middle Britain may look, Mr Brown and his strategists (ie Lord Mandelson) see an opportunity here. The most provocative section of his speech deliberately accused the Tories of "betraying" the middle classes. Does he have a point?
Have the Tories become so cautious and so frightened of wooing their own "core vote" that they are in danger of scaring them off – not into the arms of Mr Brown but to other parties or to sullen indifference?
The chances of Labour winning the general election this spring are close to zero. All the polls show their support to be stuck at about 30 per cent, which will lose them close to 100 seats and turf them out of office. But the big question is whether the Tories can win the 118 additional seats they need for a majority of just one in the House of Commons. The Tory strategy has been to focus on marginal seats and on not appearing to be the party of the better-off. They worry about being trapped by Labour into looking like flinty-hearted scourges of the poor. They do not want to be manoeuvred into opposing populist policies that Labour
By Philip Johnston Published: 6:39AM GMT 18 Jan 2010
Comments 44 | Comment on this article
The Conservatives called it laughable, but it was not funny at all. Gordon Brown, the politician who has royally shafted the middle classes for 12 years or so, now wants to appeal to their better nature to keep him in office so that he can put up their top-rate income tax to 50p in the pound and raise their National Insurance contributions. If proof were needed of the delusions that now sustain the Prime Minister in his Downing Street bunker it was his speech on Saturday.
Mr Brown said his theme for the coming parliament would be "social mobility" and a "fair society, where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams". How that squares with the new Equality Bill, which is the antithesis of meritocratic aspiration, is anyone's guess.
But however brazen this pitch for Middle Britain may look, Mr Brown and his strategists (ie Lord Mandelson) see an opportunity here. The most provocative section of his speech deliberately accused the Tories of "betraying" the middle classes. Does he have a point?
Have the Tories become so cautious and so frightened of wooing their own "core vote" that they are in danger of scaring them off – not into the arms of Mr Brown but to other parties or to sullen indifference?
The chances of Labour winning the general election this spring are close to zero. All the polls show their support to be stuck at about 30 per cent, which will lose them close to 100 seats and turf them out of office. But the big question is whether the Tories can win the 118 additional seats they need for a majority of just one in the House of Commons. The Tory strategy has been to focus on marginal seats and on not appearing to be the party of the better-off. They worry about being trapped by Labour into looking like flinty-hearted scourges of the poor. They do not want to be manoeuvred into opposing populist policies that Labour has no intention of seeing through but which will sound good at the election.
This would explain an arresting statistic showing that, with the Tories under David Cameron's leadership, there is greater cross-party consensus at Westminster now than at any time since the Second World War. In the last session of Parliament, which ended in November, the Tories opposed just four out of 27 Bills introduced by Labour, or 15 per cent of government legislation.
According to Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart of Nottingham University, this is easily the lowest proportion of legislation opposed in all of Labour's years in office. While they have no comparable data before 1997, the academics suspect that this is lower than any session since the end of the wartime coalition in 1945. Between 2005 and the end of last year, the Government introduced 148 Bills yet the Conservative front bench voted against the principle at either Second or Third Reading in the Commons of just 32.
No doubt the Conservatives judged that in many cases it would be better to try to change the measures rather than vote against them outright (though the two are not mutually exclusive).
But the problem is that such an approach seems excessively timid and risks alienating the very people who have bankrolled a state spending splurge that has benefited them least of all and who are now about to be fleeced once more to pay for this profligacy, not just by Labour but by the Tories, too.
George Osborne's planned removal of "middle-class benefits" such as child benefit, trust funds and tax credits is sensible because the better-off should not be in receipt of state handouts; but it is supposed to be balanced by a cut in tax for the groups losing out, not an increase.
Furthermore, the Conservatives are planning to skew spending in health and education to help poorer communities, something that can only happen to the detriment of services available to those who pay for them. Why would anyone vote to pay more for less, especially when they face so many other financial worries, including higher school and college fees, declining pension values, the cost of care for elderly relatives and the rest? For goodness sake, they are even required to pay the benefits of people identified as enemies of the state.
One good reason, of course, is to get rid of the Labour Government; but that might not be a sufficient condition to install a Conservative administration in its place. The Tories need to stop always being on the look-out for bear traps dug by Gordon Brown on his path to the election and chart their own route.
The voters who helped to put Labour in power in 1997 rue the day that they did. They voted for New Labour but got the old variety: a high taxing, big-state monster that assailed hard-working taxpayers for a decade with its social engineering and redistributive obsessions. The middle classes will greet Mr Brown's appeal for their help with a loud raspberry.
But they still need to be convinced that if they vote in a Conservative government, they will not be feeling let down again five years from now.
Comments: 45
simon coulter on January 18, 2010 at 10:55 AM d'oh - THREE terms!!!
Colin at 10:12 is spot on. In fact the only way we are going to stop state dependency is if we finally go belly up and the IMF force it upon us.
I wish both parties would forget the middle class and start to look at helping another group of people for so long neglected. I speak of the ordinary people like my wife and I who , along with many many more people, worked for moderate wages/salaries and managed to buy a house and bring up children without any state help. Now we are both retired and we are too rich to get any state help and too poor not to need it! Our pensions do not keep pace with coucil tax rises, fuel price rises, car and house insurance rises etc and we are steadily getting poorer and poorer. When will someone speak out for us? It is so unfair that we have lived an ordinary working class life without any of the so called benefits that "being poor" seems to generate and we now feel ignored. None of the main parties even recognise our problem of sliding into poverty as we are always told we can sell our house to realise money! What a reward in our old age. I'm not interested in the working class or middle class. Ours is a growing group and perhaps the politicians should take note.
On all the big issues the Cameroons are much closer to Liebour AND THEIR COMMON INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST/FINANCE/CORPORATE DONORS than the ordinary decent people. The Lib-Lab-Con differ only on the minor issues. In a truely conservative society, like we used to have when we ruled much of the Globe with a small government, 'Schools n Hospitals' would be organised by the grown-up citizenry, as they are still too important to leave to the easily-corrupted politicians and their rotten State System.
Everyone will suffer with Tory economic policies. The Tories say that we have to cut back on spending - this will only result in a "double-dip" and everyone will be worse off. The IMF and all other Govt's say that we should continue with stimulus packages. The trouble with politicians as a whole is that they are only promoting policies so that they will win votes. You can't trust them with our money (tax) and you can't trust their economic policies especially the Tories in this respect.
I am very much a lower working class ex voter. I hate Tony B Liar with a passion, and believe this bloke and his wife epitomise everything crap in the UK. But I will not be voting for Boy Dave and his old Etonian mates either.that have had their chance, (about fifty times in the past 70 years) and FAILED everytime. Do not vote for any of the self serving toerags.all you will get is more of the same, and in six months Cameron will be more hated than B Liar.
Horace Wimple on January 18, 2010 at 09:55 AM "Why on earth would this country elect a man who has no principles and has no idea what to do with power or give control of the economy to Boy George who has never run anything. Why give power to a party the majority resolutely do NOT want?" Thanks, Horace, sums up Blair perfectly. And look at the utter devastation that particular war criminal and his cronies wrought on the UK, especially England. The really despicable thing about it, as we now know, is that it was all done on purpose. To attempt to argue that this country is not virtually ruined - both economically and socially - or that 'Thatcher' was responsible for that ruin, just proves anyone espousing such weird rubbish to be either utterly thick or suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, i.e a socialist. The country is rubber ducked - Labour did it, and did it intentionally. Simple, incontrovertible FACT!
Everyone knows that somebody is going to have to pay for this mess. The Tories have been sanguine and honest about this once again being the lot of the middle class - a given despite which they have been returned to power time and again after a single term Labour disaster. What we have to examine is how things have changed, such that Labour secured four terms of office and have done immense damage: is it really possible to convince every significant voter tranche (as in early New Labour manifestoes) that they can be net recipients of state largesse forever - and that there is nobody anywhere who has to pay for it, no day of reckoning ever to come? Everyone cannot be in the Client State - where is the group which gives the input that funds the bottomless pit of output? It's a Ponzi scheme, pure and simple. Is this what *dumbing down* has been about – creating an electorate so ignorant, so stupid, so malleable, so inattentive beyond the sound bites – that they never question how Labour policies can be paid for, in the short term, let alone indefinitely? Labour has had one strategy – and it as damning as it is shameful. To make as many people as possible in Britain perceive themselves as the clients of Labour in government and absolutely guaranteed to vote for them like Pavlov Dogs. They have increased poverty, increased benefits dependency, flooded us with immigrants, invented endless meaningless state sector jobs, and racked up the pay in that sector without any link to productivity. In short, a tiny cabal, hijacked the bankrupt, job-done, Labour Party which was on its true last, utterly unelectable, dressed it up as crypto Tory and promising all things to all men behind the *New* brand – and used it as a machine to secure office via the triumph of presentation over content. The damage to Britain via what they have DONE, as distinct from what they have SAID, and media management has been core to their strategy, is as Old Labour as anything which went before. We are on our knees and it will be the Middle Class who have to pay – and they will agree to do so by voting Tory - because if Labour get back in it will be the IMF ruthlessly imposing all that Cameron and Co must try to do. Brown, Balls - and *something for everyone, all the time, forever, with no reckoning* - is over.
Pusillanimous Cameron is like Macbeth's cat in the adage. "Letting I dare not wait upon I would" He should adopt the SAS motto: "Who dares wins" but he won't dare because he is a loser. Cameron has many of the character traits of Lord Dunquerque's son, Lord Lundy, who was renowned for his lack of backbone. Lundy went into politics: "But very soon his friends began To doubt if he were quite the man" Indeed many people such as I, who write their comments under articles in the Online Telegraph, have thought this for some time and more and more Telegraph columnists have recently come to the same conclusion. I am of the opinion that Cameron is terrified of winning the election and the prospect of becoming prime minister is a horrifying nightmare. This would explain why he has never even tried to provide a proper opposition to the worst government Britain has ever had. We may feel sorry for him: I certainly would not want to be prime minister! However our sympathy for him must not blind us to the fact that the country is in very dire straits and an effective and courageous leader is desperately needed. I'm afraid that Cameron hasn't even got the guts to resign so true Conservatives such as Hague, Hannan, Davis, Redwood and Duncan-Smithah must do something decisive very soon. Either they must stage a coup to depose Cameron or join UKIP en bloc. : e
Labour will win. Nobody will vote for reduced state benefits that are an essential feature of daily life in the UK. Perhaps they should not be, but the truth is that they are. A huge proportion of the UK's population now depends on large handouts (up to half net income in many cases) and will not give up the big boost in living standards they have had over the last decade. Got it Cameron?
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