The constituency of Crewe and Nantwich was a Labour safe seat until 2008; a seriously safe seat, in fact. It had been held for the 25 years since its creation by the formidable Gwyneth Dunwoody, so when she died, it seemed a given that Labour would be able to hold a coronation for whoever they wanted to replace her. The local MP is now a spry, Cameroon Tory in his mid-30s, Edward Timpson. If we’re thinking about how to win an election in 2010, we need to ask ourselves; how do we stop the Crewe and Nantwich by-election repeating itself on a national scale?

The short answer is “Don’t make it about class”. Labour strategists thought Timpson could be defeated by dressing activists up in top hats and mocking his millionaire public-school background. The seat swung 17.6% to the Conservatives, and the lesson was that class politics just doesn’t wash with the electorate any more. Yet more than a year on, the Left is still harping on the same tired theme of the ‘toffs’ across the aisle. Say they’re out-of-touch with the concerns of working families. Say that their economic policies are callous and will put hundreds of thousands out of work. Say that they will set back the agenda of social justice by 30 years if they get in to power. Once you’ve said all that, the fact that some of them went to Eton doesn’t seem so terribly compelling any more.

I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that a responsible Labour agenda shouldn’t deal with the incredibly troubling issues of equality and social mobility, but we have to talk about it in the right way. We should talk about the fact that a child born in Britain today has only a 5% chance of being in a different income bracket from its parents, and we should take pride in the fact that we expect people earning six-figure salaries to make more of a contribution to paying off the national debt because we think they can. Whilst doing it, though, we have to remember that equality and class aren’t the same thing; one is the vital heart of a modern progressive agenda, and the other is a dead paradigm that people just don’t find sympathetic any more. Every time Harriet Harman gives a speech vowing to end ‘class discrimination’, I feel like I’m watching a documentary about the early 1970s.

The problem is that voters don’t, for the most part, identify themselves by class anymore. It was said of Labour’s problems in combatting Harold Macmillan that “people had ambitions for their children, rather than their class”, and if it was a problem in the 60s, it is understandably a much bigger problem today. A few things have destroyed the sense of class identity that once mattered in Britain; unions have declined, and feminism, multiculturalism and the gay-rights movement have all encouraged the development of different ideas of identity. This means that class conflict has largely gone. There was a poignant moment in John Prescott’s documentary about class last year when he asked a girl living on a Newcastle council estate if she considered herself “working class”, to which she replied “Naaa-I’m middle class. How can I be working class? I don’t work”. Voters are interested in who will advance their interests; there seems to be no necessary reason that the Conservatives can’t do this too. Indeed, whilst Labour have vowed a public sector pay freeze and scrapped their own 10% tax rate, the Tories led the charge on closing the loopholes for non-domiciles. If that’s all people see, then it doesn’t help to say that the Tories themselves have money; we need to instead be reminding people that it is the same party that wants massive spending cuts and a £1 million inheritance tax threshold.

We aren’t even playing class politics well; the one-dimensional stereotype won’t wash with voters whilst ‘Dave’ is trying his best to be a man of the people. The photo of Cameron and Johnson on the steps in Peckwater Quad in full Bullingdon uniform is trotted out a lot, but all it seems to speak of young men with too much money spending it badly, not a callous disregard for the poor. The top hats in Crewe, or the drama scenes in ‘When Boris Met Dave’, make it look like Labour doesn’t have anything to say about the present, only an incompetent and unbelievable view of the past.

There is another, perhaps more insidious problem, with Labour using the ‘politics of privilege’, which is that it’s not entirely clear that Labour aren’t the party of privilege. The caricature of the Tories as a party full of posh people is at best false and at worst hypocritical, and voters can see this. Cameron and Johnson maybe Old Etonians, but Tony Blair’s school, Fettes, is often referred to as “the Scottish Eton”, and Ed Balls, Alastair Darling and Harriet Harman all went to private schools. David Miliband’s father may have been a great Marxist theorist, but David inherited his Primrose Hill mansion worth £1.5m; Shaun Woodward claimed mortgage interest on expenses in spite of being a multi-millionaire. The strategy used in Crewe and Nantwich of attacking hereditary advantage seems weakest when we remember that the Labour candidate, Tamsin Dunwoody, was the daughter of the previous MP. On the other side, Eric Pickles and David Davis were both born in to socialist families with manual jobs, whilst William Hague could hardly be said to be a public-school toff. If we want to claim that we are the party without privilege, we’re going to have to get a better PR strategy (and perhaps some more convenient back stories).

Equality and progress matter enormously. By defining the parties by class interests rather than real policies and beliefs, we lose our biggest advantages; whilst class lines are far from clear, there is a very real difference when it comes to the challenges of education, welfare, tax and discrimination. Boris and Dave aren’t wearing the Bullingdon tailcoats anymore, but they’re still not living in the real world; the electors of Crewe and Nantwich were allowed to forget that, but the country mustn’t be.