POLITICS

The PM is going to raise the issue of class, but this is not inverted snobbery. It's inverted socialism

BRUCE ANDERSON

The Prime Minister raised the issue of class last week for three reasons, which did not include inverted snobbery. In ascending order, his motives were: teasing, low poli- tics and high social vision.

There is nothing wrong with a tease, as in John Major's 'New Labour, old school tie'. While hardly in the class of Sir Alec Dou- glas-Home's 'Come to think of it, he must be the fourteenth Mr Wilson', it raised a good laugh from the audience. But it was not just a tease.

Mr Major has the sharpest political instincts in the business. When he visited a council estate a few weeks ago, those instincts came into play. He sensed a grow- ing disillusion on the part of traditional Labour supporters. The language of new Labour does not resonate with them, nor do the accents. So the teasing has a politi- cal purpose: to drive a wedge between new Labour and its traditional proletarian sup- porters. Mr Blair would like to take them for granted, leaving the working class light- ly garrisoned while pouring his troops into the battle for middle-class votes. Mr Major intends to launch a flanking operation and a second front.

This is justified, politically and morally. For decades, the Tory Party has been trying to break into Labour's tribal territories. At election after election, Tory Party workers discovered that on social issues and on many economic ones, old-fashioned Labour supporters are right-wing. They are also stubborn. Their conversations with Tory canvassers always follow the same pattern: an enthusiastic endorsement of hard-line Tory policies, concluding in an immovably firm assurance: 'No, no. We're Labour here.' John Major is better placed than any previous Tory leader to change all that. He also has moral weapons.

For a hundred years, the main aim of the Labour Party was to improve the lot of the working class. To Labour's intellectuals, this was part of a grand socialist project to liberate human potential. The trade-union wing saw it in more basic terms. The job of a Labour government was to redistribute wealth and ensure that the other lot coughed up a bit more to help our lot. But none of that is new Labour speak. Social- ism has been replaced by ethical platitudes, and though Mr Blair has one intense redis- tributive ambition, it does not concern mid- dle-class assets, but middle-class votes. Old Labour's policies may have been flawed, but its feelings were genuine. New Labour seems to have neither policies nor feelings. With the exception of the high command of the Referendum Party, no group in British politics is so remote from ordinary people as Tony Blair's staffers are: there is infinitely more common touch in the Bishops' Bar in the House of Lords. Whatever brought these young Blair clones into politics, it had nothing to do with the working class. The Blairites regard their working-class supporters with a mixture of contempt and apprehension; there is a sim- ilar ambivalence towards their own Deputy Leader, John Prescott. They cannot patron- ise him to the extent that the Kennedy staffers patronised Vice-President Johnson, whom they nicknamed 'Uncle Cornpone'. John Prescott is a far more pivotal figure than LBJ was — until Dallas — and the Blair youngsters fear his tongue and his temper. They do not want to annoy TB by snubbing his Deputy unnecessarily, so though they laugh at Mr Prescott, they do it behind their hands. New Labour knows exactly what role it wants John Prescott to perform: a similar one to Boxer's in Animal Farm. His job is to exhort the simple-minded and, with the help of the Daily Mirror, to reassure them that Labour's values are unaltered. Meanwhile, with the help of the Guardian and the Observer, Mr Blair will assure middle-class voters that new Labour buys its values in Sainsbury's like everyone else.

Mr Prescott will not suffer Boxer's fate; the new Labourites know that they would need him for subsequent elections. When his usefulness does end, he will not be sold to the knacker's but sent to the Lords. But his views are as irrelevant to the Blairites' dreams for the Labour Party as Boxer's were to the pigs' plans for Animal Farm. Lenin described the Communists' bour- geois and social democratic allies as 'useful idiots'. That is how new Labour regards its working-class supporters. The Red Flag was still sung at Blackpool two weeks ago, but if new Labour do win next year, they should go over to the parody version:

The working class can kiss my arse I've got the gaffer's job at last.

Mr Major would prefer the workers to raise their sights. He would have half agreed with Nye Bevan in lamenting the poverty of the working classes' expecta- tions, but only half. He is well aware of the social forces which still depress expecta- tions, and he abominates them. This is his strongest political emotion: an abhorrence of patronising attitudes, of anything that says to those at the bottom of the heap: `This is not for the likes of you.' He has been there and been told that, but man- aged to escape. He now wants to help everyone else to escape too.

This is nothing to do with redistribution; he is offering hand-ups, not hand-outs; lad- ders, not levelling. Majorism is Thatcherism for all. Nor is it anything to do with inverted snobbery; it is more a matter of inverted socialism. Mr Major is fond of quoting Rabbie Burns:

The rank is but the guinea stamp .

A man's a man for a' that.

This does not mean that he is uneasy about rank. He brought Robert Cranborne into his Government, sending him to the Lords by means of a writ in acceleration, a proce- dure which had not been used since 1951. Once Lord Cranborne had been promoted, Mr Major reminded the party conference that the Cabinet now included a man whose ancestors had been prime ministers when Shakespeare was writing his plays.

I have always felt — as a Scot — that I have never known an Englishman so devoid of class feeling as John Major is. The other evening I found corroborative evidence. When John Major was chosen as candidate for Huntingdon, there was some ill-feeling among the squirearchical element in the constituency, who would have preferred one of their own. The retiring MP, David Renton, set out to restore harmony, which meant that he closely observed a younger, less assured, less self-confident John Major in a context where class was an issue. Lord Renton was emphatic that snobbery and inverted snobbery are equally alien to the man's nature. Put him between a duchess and a dustman's wife, and he would pay them equal attention, equal respect.

Mr Major believes that he has hit on a significant area of vulnerability for new Labour, so we can expect more teasing, more class references. John Major would like the working class to understand how much new Labour values them.

A glitch crept into my piece last week. It read `Sir Leon [Brittan] has never reached the tonsured stage of incipient baldness. It should have been has now reached'.