Ed Balls is back in favour at Number 10
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Let’s recap on the last few days:
Tessa Jowell, in an interview with the Telegraph, had this to say about class warfare: “I hope that our campaign, and I believe it will be, will be a decent campaign which is engaging the British people in a conversation, not a hideous to and fro of personality attack. This needs to focus on the different views of the two parties. I don’t think anybody can be responsible for the school they went to. …Most people don’t give it a thought for one day to the next whether Eton exists. Eton will go on existing as long as people want to go there. I don’t think this should be an election campaign about the 1960s intake to Eton, or whatever it was, I really don’t. But I do think it has got to be an election campaign that focuses on the choices that are beginning to be presented by both parties. This should not be a sort of head on personality clash between David Cameron and Gordon Brown. It should be a proper and intelligent debate. …I don’t think people have much appetite for personality assault or politics that is wholly negative.”
Jack Straw, in an interview yesterday with The Sunday Times said: “Most people have little choice over where they go to school.” He went on to describe last year’s disastrous by-election campaign in Crewe and Nantwich as “not terribly successful”. No s*** sherlock. Asked about Brown’s Eton remarks, he dismissed them as “just a quip”. He added: “It is not part of a strategy. People cannot choose their parents. The more serious charge against the Conservatives is about who they would favour when they are in government. The serious issue is not where they come from, but what their priorities are.”
Jowell and Straw, two loyal Blairites, have rejected Brown’s class warfare because they understand how badly it will play among the moderate voters, and we all know that Mandelson and Brown aren’t speaking at the moment – due in part to Mandelson’s discomfort at the PM’s refusal to be honest and decisive in the PBR plus Mandelson’s desire to stay away from class warfare.
The smart money says that Ed Balls is back in the game as Brown’s Number 2. Despite being shoved out of the way by Mandelson over the past year or so, Balls still knows how to appeal to Brown’s innate idiocy, clumsiness and lack of strategy. I think Mandelson’s guile has been trumped by Balls’s cynicism, and Brown instinctively prefers the latter because he despises Cameron so much. Now that Balls is back in favour, I’m increasingly of the opinion that this election campaign will be one of the most dirty, negative and hostile campaigns in living memory.
Witanagemot Blogs
To which I can only say: “Bring it on!”
Let people see what these people are really all about. Power.
JuliaM says “Let people see what these people are really all about. Power.”
If people can’t see that already, God help us.
‘I’m increasingly of the opinion that this election campaign will be one of the most dirty, negative and hostile campaigns in living memory.’
Has to be – they’ll run the election in the same manner they have run the country – deceit and lies.
Labour is like a weeping pustule on the UK.
This class thing is rubbish – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you have no control over who your parents are and so therefore shouldn’t be attacked for being born rich. Or poor, for that matter.
What’s important isn’t so much where you’ve come from – it’s where you’re going. And, in the case of politicians, where you’ll take the rest of us.
Labour appear to want to attack Tories over their circumstances of birth while hoarding those, and similar advantages, for their own families. In the few cases, of course, where (unlike Hodge or Darling, for example) they haven’t already enjoyed very similar privileges themselves. We know where they’ll take us – to the poor house. When we can’t borrow or print any more money, ‘Gulags for Slags’ will just expand into proper 19th C style poor-houses (work houses), no doubt run by fine 3rd sector institutions like the Christian Brothers. They know a thing or two about discipline, eh?
Personally, I doubt class warfare will do little more than invigorate a few hardcore lefties to drag themselves down to the ballot box, but that just emphasises how absurdly stupid the plan is – and by extension why it must therefore be Balls and not Mandelson calling the shots.
I wonder if this is a panto-esque object-lesson by Mandy – look what happens when I don’t offer you my wisdom!
Which would only be worth doing if he was losing the ear of Gordon which would, in itself, be another story!
I’ve always thought that class war campaigning, such as Labour are using again now, was a case of preaching to the converted, to people who will vore Labour anyhow. It doesn’t appeal to anyone outside the old left. It didn’t work in Crew and Nantwich, and it won’t work in the GE
The class war is intended to appeal to disaffected Labour core voters. Brown/Balls are offering the voting white working classes a choice – an anti-immigrant ‘war’ with the BNP or a ‘good old-fashioned, traditional Labour war with the upper class.’
This is ALL about shoring up the northern vote – it really has nothing to do with winning the election.
‘Balls still knows how to appeal to Brown’s innate idiocy, clumsiness and lack of strategy.’ Yes. Balls makes Brown comfortable with himself, whereas Mandelson offers Brown strategies that hurt Brown to adopt. And Brown is getting old; more and more he wants his intuitive understanding of the world to be correct, and prefers to use brute force to change it where it does not conform to his understanding.
But a sophisticated, advanced capitalist democracy must be dealt with on its own terms. Brown doesn’t even want to accept such a society, never mind deal with it; his entire mindset is to disrupt it, dismantle it, replace it, and rule the result.
The only option if Labour decide on all out class warfare is to publish on large posters a list of all the Labour cabinet ministers over the last 10 years, where they went to school, and where they sent their children to school.
Then they should pose the question : if Labour’s education policy is so good, why don’t you send your children to state schools, and why didn’t your parents send you to state school in the sixties?