Anthony Barnett (London, OK): What was going on with Labour’s “Toffs” campaign? Tory delight at the disastrous failure of “class war” in Crewe and Nantwich needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Hatred of the Etonian network is far more intense among Conservatives than it is in the Labour Party. After all, they have to live with the beast. I suspect this is the subtle message Iain Dale is signalling when he links to the neat cartoon strip by Hoby.
What the episode surely exposes is a contemptible hypocrisy in Labour ranks. Having given up on the class struggle long ago and now, under New Labour, far from confronting the realities of power and hierarchy openly applauding the “filthy rich”, Labour feels a residual guilt expressed in classic displacement activity. Its most blatant example was the ridiculous use of the Parliament Act itself to over-ride the Lords and “ban hunting”, using the excuse of animal welfare to criminalise a ridiculous but slowly declining activity, thus predictably reviving it.
While I am on the subject I am reading Dai Smith’s excellent biography of Raymond Williams, who as a scholarship boy in 1939 went to Trinity College Cambridge from Pandy where his father was a railway signalman. Trinity was an ultra traditional part of the university where of course there were many fewer students than there are now and overwhelmingly from public schools with private incomes.
According to Williams,
"If I… say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people. All I did now know then was how cold that class is. That comes with experience."
It is the coldness many Tories will be feeling in the near future.
