The FishTank

It’s election season, and in a period already filled with echoes of 1979 it seems that class warfare has once again reared its head in the SW1A postal district. Is reinventing a strategy which hasn’t worked for Labour in forty years really something that can succeed in a modern context?

Class is, of course, something poorly understood; neither politicians nor pundits seem able to get a handle on what it actually means. Brown regularly confuses it with wealth, a confusion not dissimilar to his other problem in being unable to separate debt (the amount we owe as a country) from deficit (the amount we overspend in a year as a country). Perhaps it’s a lame attempt at politics, but it makes you wonder if all those Labour MPs who were lauding Gordon Brown as an intellectual titan in 2007 were themselves unable to tell the difference between intellectual argument and plain ranting.

Class, as understood by nineteenth century Britain, was nothing to do with wealth. Indeed, such was the profligacy of the upper classes in late Victorian and early Edwardian society that many of the upper classes were debtors. Being upper class they naturally avoided prison – unlike their less elevated fellow down and outs – but the point was that class was about something beyond mere money, it was about being able to trace one’s lineage back to that original bunch of slash and burn politicians – the Normans.

We don’t really talk about lineage in that way anymore. The decline of the country estate and the decimation of ancient families in two world wars robbed class of its obviousness. Youth culture ended automatic deference and so class became something people talked about without really knowing what it was. It became little more than an idea.

Except, of course, for those trappings that remained. There are, after all, certain things that everyone tends to associate with class: going to public school, speaking with proper diction, and here it would seem that Gordon Brown has Cameron and his colleagues bang to rights. Until, that is, you scratch beneath the surface. Cameron has what we used to call blue blood, certainly, but George Osborne – his right hand man – is from a family which gained wealth through a successful business. William Hague, likewise, has come from humble origins to success on his own terms. There may be more than a dozen millionaires in the shadow cabinet, but few – if any – have been handed that wealth without at least some spadework of their own.

In former days this would have been little defence. The leading lights of the Industrial Revolution garnered their ‘new money’ not simply by dint of intelligence, but by a complex web of patronage and social connections. Those born in the Limehouse gutter couldn’t even dream of such success, let alone use their brains to acquire it. That’s why people like Marx and Lenin were able to align wealth and class in the public perception, creating the idea that simply having money meant you were more privileged than the masses. The politics of envy was born from those men, and when allied to what were then genuine grievances about the conditions of the working masses, those ideas gave rise to the British Labour Party. For the best part of ninety years, Labour steered a difficult line between Marxism and the politics of aspiration until the day when Tony Blair abandoned Clause 4 and essentially ditched socialism in the knowledge it no longer held the keys to Number 10.

Why did he abandon Clause 4? Because things had changed and not due to Labour. The key development was that of Universal Suffrage – a by-product of the carnage of World War One. It capped a century of political reform that saw Westminster go from a gentlemen’s club where aristocrats enacted laws for self-enrichment to the place where professional politicians went to ride the gravy train, staying aboard largely by dint of currying favour with the working masses. It took time to roll across our society, but roll it did. By 1948 every politician knew who kept him in a job. Labour may crow about their social justice in creating the NHS in 1948, but the truth is that all the major parties had it in their manifestos. Only a victory at the polls put Labour in the history books for its creation.

Because with suffrage came the key driver of change: social mobility. As people aspired to a better life, so the politicians who found means to deliver it would prosper. University education became something for anyone with brains, professional jobs for anyone with qualifications, wealth for anyone prepared to put the effort into acquiring it. The end of conscription, the rise of consumerism and the pill completely redrew the social contract and by the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, the solidarity of the working masses had been reduced to a rump of unions, perceived by many other low-paid but aspiring workers to be little more than greedy good-for-nothings who held the country to ransom out of self-interest. Labour, in supporting whatever the unions demanded, made themselves unelectable for a generation.

So why turn the clock back now? What possible reason could there be to believe class is back? Ask most people what class they are and most, nearly all, would see themselves as somewhere in the middle. Even those people who choose to live on benefits wouldn’t define themselves as working class – much less an underclass. Ask them what they think about people being wealthy and they will be relatively equivocal: there may be groups of the rich – politicians, bankers – who are acceptable targets for opprobrium, but people who become wealthy through luck or celebrity will be considered perfectly fine – as a class.

And that’s why class is a dead argument. In Victorian Britain, the hardest working deadbeat couldn’t hope to become middle class, now even those who lounge around on the taxpayer’s pound can aspire to instant and extravagant wealth. To attack those who have succeeded in acquiring wealth is to attack the future people want. To criticise a rise in the threshold in inheritance tax as ‘just for the wealthy’ is to tell people that, if they do succeed, the government wants to claw it all back. Cameron may still have that mountain to climb in gaining popular support, but in the end it has nothing to do with his class. In fact, it has more to do with the tribal instincts of those who see Thatcher as a hate figure, and the scepticism of those who think that any politician who presents himself as well as Blair must be equally crooked. If Cameron succeeds in overcoming these obstacles and delivering on his promises, he will do a great deal to rekindle the popularity of aspiration and to finally bury the remnants of the Marxist cadre.