Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

Dear Harriet Harman,

What a shocker.  What an incredibly naive piece of propoganda.  Your speech at the TUC conference yesterday made several things abundantly clear to me: you are out of touch, you are desperate to reignite your core vote and – most importantly of all – you are not learning the lessons that history has provided you with.  I guarantee you that your attempt to reignite class war in this country will come back to hurt you.

When our economy is falling apart, unemployment is rising, house prices are plummeting and fuel prices are rocketing, one might think that you would concentrate on reassuring the public that the government has it all figured out.  Instead, you decided to wind back the political clock by saying that people’s life chances are impacted by “where they were born, what kind of family they were born into, where they live and their wealth”.  Interestingly, you dropped the word ‘class’ from the text of your speech when it was delivered. Could it be that you are well aware Labour will turn off millions of voters by harking back to decades gone by?  Stoking the fires of class warfare may seem like a good strategy for bringing the Labour voters back home, but you obviously haven’t been paying much attention to British politics over the last year.  If you had read a paper or two in that time, you would know that Labour’s defeats in Crewe and Nantwich and the Mayoral elections were due in no small part to Labour’s class warfare – which the voters were appalled by.  The simple lesson that ‘class warfare doesn’t work’ is seemingly lost on you.

Not only is class warfare crass, there is a wonderful irony that it should be you (niece of the Countess of Longford, no less) who is so keen to fan the flames.  After all, you sent your children to a grammar school and a grant-maintained school – something which I doubt was received well among the Labour benches – and having been to St Pauls Girls School, one of the most prestigious private schools in the country, I would have thought you’d know better.  I appreciate that when each and every poll shows Labour in dire straits, your natural reaction would be to run to your core vote, but let me give you some friendly advice.  The Conservatives were destroyed at the 1997 and were left scratching their heads about where to go next.  Like you, they chose to focus on rebuilding their core vote and this was reflected in their enormous (and, in hindsight, poorly chosen) emphasis on Europe and immigration.  While these issues were important at the time and remain so today, they demonstrated to the public that the Conservatives were narrow-minded and unable to relate to voters.  You are more than welcome to pursue the same strategy but don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Labour is already heading for one crushing electoral defeat and if you choose to focus on class warfare, I suspect this may be magnified into two or three general election losses.

Social mobility is about education.  In this country, it is widely acknowledged that to get a top-quality education, you often have to pay for it.  Social mobility has floundered under a Labour government because, despite all your protestations about increasing pass rates and record exam results, nothing has changed.  Tony Blair realised this, yet his own party strangled the life out of every education reform he put in place and Gordon Brown has since put the final nails in the coffins of each policy.  One wonders where you could have missed the point any more even if you tried.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory