The Labour Party seems intent on playing the class card in the next few months.  Alan Johnson was at it last weekend, backed up with fanatical support from the likes of Liberal Conspiracy.  After twelve years of ‘Labour’ Government, the Labour Party no longer have any moral right to play the class card or call working class loyalty to their cause.  The Labour Party have lost any moral authority to play any kind of ‘class card’.

It is over a century since, when talking about the response of reactionary peers to Lloyd George’s great budget, Winston Churchill famously said that, “they have started the class war.  They had better be careful.” The Labour Party today better be careful that their class war strategy doesn’t focus too much attention on their shocking betrayal of the working class and their traditional core vote.

This is a Government that has allowed manufacturing industry to decline whilst focusing all of its attention on a bloated financial sector in the South East of England.  The party that was, according to Harold Wilson, “a moral crusade or it is nothing” has allowed poverty to increase, inequality to increase and social mobility to go backwards.  On Labour’s watch, the professions are dominated by a social elite.  Labour have created an environment where once proud working class estates are now troubles by the kind of anti social behaviour that doesn’t trouble the middle class intelligentsia like Balls and Cooper.  They have created an environment where health inequalities and educational inequalities are unacceptably wide.

And they have no answers to any of these issues.  It is progressive Conservative policies, in areas such as education, that are explicitly aimed at improving social mobility and helping people in deprived areas.

The Government have spent twelve years ignoring the working class who once formed the basis of the Labour Party.  How dare they, now they are in electoral peril, turn to the people who have been scandalously abandoned for over a decade.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 2:35 pm , written by David Skelton and is filed under Change, General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.