Only by embracing Keynes’ teachings (the teachings that have been scorned and rejected by the right and New Labour for the 20 years preceding the crisis), was this disaster avoided. Nationalising banks, quantitative easing, slashing interest rates, and a hefty fiscal stimulus dragged us back from the brink. And at almost every turn, the British right, led by the Conservative Party, opposed these vital measures. Had the Tories been in power, we would now be facing a full-scale depression. Progressive politics and economics had been vindicated – the left was right all along!

How, then, do we find ourselves in such dire straits? How is Labour facing a ‘generation in opposition’? How have the Tories succeeded in convincing people that our now massive public debt is a result of a bloated public sector, and not a reckless financial one? Unarguably, Gordon Brown shouldn’t have deregulated, and he was foolish to think he’d broken the business cycle – but these are all things that the left were saying! The Tories were envious of Blair/Browns’ pro-market approach. They looked on at the New Labour-City of London alliance in jealousy and admiration, not disapproval. Things would have been then same, if not worse, under a Tory government.

We can point to Iraq, an ugly and uncharismatic leader, an abused expenses system, and 12 years in power as excuses for when we lose the election. Or we can do something about it now, and prevent the train-wreck that will be a Conservative Government. The left needs to get out there and let the public know that the last thing we now need are drastic cuts in public spending. Gordon Brown is right to say that GDP growth is the best way to reduce public debt, and Conservative policies would only hinder this. The Government should be dedicated to keeping people in work and improving our public services, not scaling them back.

These are things that the public would agree with, if only we managed to get that message across. What we need is a clearer message, emphasized and reiterated over and over again. The labour leadership needs to get a grip of itself, of the arguments, of the media, and start the fightback.

The financial crisis should have lead to a renaissance of the left. However, Labour were too slow and too embarrassed to pick up on this. We didn’t seize the initiative, so the right did. Guido Fawkes and other right wing bloggers are setting the pace for grassroots politics, and the media seem to be captivated by them and their nasty message. But it’s not too late; the facts are on our side. If we write, organize, and campaign, we can, and will, turn the tide. We have to show that the choice facing Britain is one between Labour growth or Conservative cuts. If we can get our message across then we can win the election and ensure a better future for both the British Left and for Britain.

This is, of course, incredibly difficult to achieve. Given people’s natural instincts to blame, and eventually punish, the government in power at the time of a recession, it is a challenge to convince the voters that Labour has consistently acted to mitigate the recession. However, this is a goal which can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, as the economy starts to recover, which will almost certainly happen before the election, and people see that Britain has vastly outperformed the pessimistic estimates made by international bodies, it will naturally follow that the praise will go to Labour. We must also continue to propose and implement progressive, sensible economic policy. This is not the time to swing wildly to the left, nor is this the time for the radical left of the party to undo the work of the last 12 years that they have always distrusted.

The question is what should these policies be. Over the last decade, New Labour has done much to improve the economic situation it inherited from Thatcher, through such measures as the minimum wage, yet there is much still to be done. The first issue that should be worked on is getting people off unemployment benefits and back into useful employment. This remains a controversial topic, for Labour given the approach of Mrs. Thatcher, however, it is an area that has potential to not only provide great economic benefit but also to improve the self-esteem and living conditions of the long term unemployed. No Labour supporter, and indeed few on the right, would approve of attempting to coerce people into work by economic or social sanctions, if only because they clearly do not work. Instead a progressive, nuanced Labour should remove the huge disincentives to work which presently exist. Rather than taking Thatcher’s approach and starving the poor into work, we should remove those on the minimum wage from taxation and we should replace the current welfare system with a sliding scale that encourages people to work full time instead of effectively capping many people at a 16 hour part time week. Of course these changes would be initially expensive, but not only would the employment of a large section of our current unemployed be a far more useful investment than aircraft carriers, but in the long run the double effect of more economic output and fewer welfare payments would provide a platform for growth over the coming decades.

Furthermore, we should not be so afraid to stand up for, and fight for, the public sector that we believe in. Currently we are allowing the opposition to dictate to us the tone of the whole debate about the public sector. Labour is constantly accused of hypocrisy on this front, and rightly so. We spent ten years espousing the idea that public sector investment creates growth, and yet as soon as the moment for investment comes, we are suddenly silent and surly, unwilling to stand by our convictions! There are two ways to save money and repay the deficit. The first is to go into our shell, hack away at public expenditure and hope the money saved is greater than the damage to the economy. The second is to continue to invest wisely as we have been doing, so that the economy grows by more than government expenditure. This is the principle that won us the last three elections, and yet the minute we are tested on it, we abandon it and simply try to limit the extent of Tory cuts.

We have seen that the political impetus and energy is still Labour’s to lose after twelve years in office, and I genuinely believe that Labour can win the next election. However, to keep this energy and to have any chance of capturing that fourth term, we must stick by the principles of New Labour, the principles that have led to a progressive Britain, and not use this test to opportunistically undermine the progress the Left has made.

A further chapter was added to the narrative this month, when E-ON, the energy company who manages Kingsnorth power station, revealed they had shelved plans to make it the first “clean carbon” power station in the UK. The controversial plans would have involved building an entirely new power station on the site, which would use experimental technology to try and increase the efficiency in the process of generating energy from coal.

But while climate activists celebrated this decision as a blow to the future of coal-fired power stations, it raised questions of how Britain’s energy future will look. Scientists in support of such “carbon capture and storage” technology argue it is a way-station on the road to low-carbon energy production, but admit that the technology needs significant investment if it is to be viable: even the Carbon Capture and Storage Association describe the “significant technical and financial risk” which carbon capture schemes entail.

So where does the government stand on the issue of adapting the energy industry? The Labour party has promised a “step change” in energy supply, based on an “£100 billion blueprint for renewable energy”, but the specific details of this plan are hard to come by. The Labour government has so far showed an extreme lack of vision for Britain’s energy future, perhaps due, in part, to the fact that the government has seen 15 Energy Ministers in the past 12 years.

This lack of direction is all the more dangerous for the fact that many British power stations, including four of the ten nuclear reactors currently in use, will go out of action in the next few years. Already, the UK relies heavily on imported gas, yet we lack appropriate storage facilities to maintain reserves: Britain can only store 15 days’ supply of gas in comparison to France’s 99 days and Germany’s 122 days.

In the face of all these challenges to energy supply, the Conservative Party has produced a 38-page downloadable policy booklet laying out plans for a “decentralised energy revolution”. The policy, based on the widespread introduction of feed-in tariffs, would allow individuals to generate their own energy and sell excess back to the national grid. Although David Cameron’s commitment to use the “power of profit” as an incentive for improved energy security may be seen by some as the same market-led approach which led “Beyond Petroleum” BP’s to invest nearly £1.5 billion into extracting oil from Canadian tar sands this year – a process which generates four times more carbon dioxide than traditional drilling – the Labour government’s reluctance to initiate such incentivisation has only disempowered home owners from becoming part of the energy solution.

This is supported by Ofgem’s recent prediction that domestic energy prices will rise by 14-60% in the next 10 years; strikingly, the “Green stimulus” scenario, where the government would invest in renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage to support economic recovery and the transition to greener energy, would lead to the lowest rise in energy cost (14%), in contrast to the “Dash for energy” scenario, where concerns about the security of our energy supply could push prices up some 60%.

A recent report by the Committee on Climate Change (an independent advisory body created under the 2008 Climate Change Act) comes to the similar conclusion regarding greater investment in new energy resources. Specifically, the CCC recommends the government build 8,000 new wind turbines, four new coal power stations using carbon capture technology, and three new nuclear power plants, which together would cut emissions from the energy industry by 50% by 2020.

The strong commitments of this government to cut national carbon emissions suggest that we are at a turning point for British energy. Despite concerns over burdensome national debt, investment in the energy sector would be a significant positive legacy of the Labour government, and would help set Britain on the path to sustainability and self-sufficiency. With around 35% of the UK’s carbon emissions coming from the energy sector, the time for hesitation has passed. If we believe in the power of our society to adapt to environmental change, we must demand that our politicians take on this message of significant, immediate emissions cuts, and lead the initiative in the transition to low-carbon energy.

10 OULC volunteers

4 nights

8 tents

3x 6 hour shifts

4 broken cider machines

1 day of being impressed with the port-a-loos

5 torrential downpours

4 days of cold showers

3 packets of wet wipes

1 karaoke night

6 free drinks & meals

1 night of unlimited alcohol

£1,200 raised for OULC

Ben Lyons’ dancing: Priceless

Photo: sheepback.cabin

Deep recession. 2.5 million of the UK’s workforce unemployed. A collapse in share prices of over 50%. Forced closure of leading national banks. Sound familiar? What about all of this followed by an historic Labour Party victory? Given the current media coverage, this might not be how you expect the story to end. But in 1929 the country entrusted economic recovery to the party who promised the most radical shake-up of the national economy; the party who was the boldest and shouted the loudest. It was a national leap of faith. Labour had only formed a government on one previous occasion – even then it had been for just a single year. Labour’s appeal to the electorate was not based on their previous record in government – a tactic pursued by Alistair Darling who was already writing the epitaph on Labour’s 12 years of government at their conference in Brighton: “when the history of the past few years comes to be written, this government and this party will be proud”. Neither did they play the game of “they stole our policies”, a popular pastime doing the rounds at Westminster today. Labour castigated, rather than mirrored, the policies of embourgeoisement pursued with vigour by the Tories during the inter-war years. The party chastised the “Tories tax on the poor” and promised an overhaul of the railways and coal industry as well as a progressive programme of national insurance reform. They bravely set the dividing lines between themselves and the Conservatives and it struck a chord with the electorate.

This does not mean that Labour should pledge itself to a programme of (re)nationalisation or indeed the formation of a ‘Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth’ as the party promised in 1929. Yet much can be learned from the visionaries of the late 1920s who fought tooth and nail to secure only the second Labour government in British political history. If you had suggested to a voter in 1929 that Labour and the Tories were essentially the same party they’d have shown as much faith in your political opinions as Germans did in the Weimar Republic. Now the saying “they’re all the same” typifies the apathetic mood of the country. Voters find it very difficult to imagine how a Conservative government might differ from a Labour one – they just have a hunch that its time to find out. Both parties will have to make spending cuts, both present them as “tough choices”. Both parties plan to cut incapacity benefits and the next Chancellor, of whatever hue, is likely to raise VAT to 20%. And, to the probable dismay of Daniel Hannon, spending on the NHS will be ring-fenced and protected. Where are the dividing lines?

The problem is that they exist – Labour just expends too much energy claiming that the Tories have stolen their policies. Frustratingly this claim is not unjustified. Labour initiated reform of incapacity benefits in 2007; the Tories new independent schools – Michael Gove’s cure-all of the education system – sit not a million miles to the Right of Labour’s independent academies; and George Osborne admitted at the Conservative conference that he would retain, temporarily at least, the new 50p tax on top earners. Labour must stop being so reticent in areas where a bold policy initiative might give them the upper hand at the next election. There were positive signs at the Brighton conference. Labour no longer appeared so comfortable fraternising with the ‘filthy rich’ as they once did. Brown admitted that whilst the party once “gloried in a neo-liberal economic policy when it gave us the boom…we now believe you have to intervene”. This is a definite change in tack by the party and one which, if pursued, could redefine economic and financial policy. Darling has expressed his opposition to a cap on bankers bonuses but his plans to link those bonuses to long-term performance and to ensure banks have new minimum financial reserves should be posited as evidence of Labour’s new enthused efforts to crack down on the financial system. Presenting a sea-change in Labour policy would not only represent a popular appeal to voters; it might also shun the accepted, misconstrued Tory argument that Labour got us into this mess but the Tories can get us out of it. It was notable that David Cameron made virtually no mention of bankers or their bonuses at his party conference speech – it was Brown’s record as Chancellor which came under-fire.

This is a problem of presentation as much as substance: Labour should go to greater lengths to espouse its reformist agenda rather than relying on the mantra that the Tories are the party of cuts. Other proposals too need to be pursued. Electoral reform should be given serious consideration. First-past-the-post does entrench a two-party system and a move to reform this inequality might be seen as a brave step by the party to democratise British government – a welcome tonic after a summer of duck-houses and second-home renovations paid for by expenses. The fact that the Conservatives are anti-reform could be left unsaid but at least implied. Labour too should become champions of the environment. The Conservatives have stolen the eco-friendly ground from beneath Labour’s feet but there are still concerns that the Tories will struggle to satisfy investment in the environment with their penchant for spending cuts. Conservative MPs voted against green investment in the budget and Ken Clarke’s recent faux pas on wind-farms seemed to reveal the depth of division and hostility inherent within the party to investment in the environment. Labour could still seize the initiative on one of the most pertinent issues to modern, everyday life. A green drive might expose the shallow depths of the Conservative commitment to the environment as well as providing a positive response to recession: investment now could make Britain a leading exporter of green technology in the future. Part of this is also about reengaging with the British worker: no one wishes to repeat the plight of Vestas workers on the Isle of Wight witnessed over the summer. In 1929 Labour promised to protect “wage-earners, shop-keepers…lower-middle classes…workers”. As the financial system receives a painful scalding and bankers a severe telling off Labour should look to its core support and consider how best to protect the interests of workers in the services industry and in manufacturing. Labour’s electoral victory in 1929 was a close-run thing but a bold agenda and hard fought campaign transformed them from a party of relative obscurity into a party of government. Similar bravery needs to be shown 80 years on.

Beforehand the queue twisted around the corner of Catz’s lecture theatre, and familiar (and not so familiar) faces appeared well before the scheduled starting time. Mandelson attracted a range of Oxford students: the room was full to bursting with an eager congregation; the party faithful, the generally intrigued, and even a smattering of card-carrying Tories were all in attendance.

Of all the big names in British politics, this was one man who appealed, in one way or another, to the many, not the few. A career at once encompassing power, glamour and scandal has left behind a man carefully prepared for scrutiny, and his slick handling of the media has been both mocked and envied in equal measure. This was not your average Westminster visitor.

Lord Mandelson currently heads up the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation, a position requiring a bizarre and demanding mix of roles. His speech reflected this unusual blend, and unsurprisingly also touched on the upcoming election and the Conservatives under David Cameron.

He grudgingly conceded that Cameron has a “less disagreeable public personality than his predecessors”, but dismissed any arguments that this would be a deciding factor in next year’s election. “I don’t think that likeability and personality are the only, or even dominant, factors in what makes up people’s judgement.” He also raised the point that the public feeling for the Tories is one of acceptance, rather than passion. He argued that the wave of support on which Blair sailed into office in 1997 was absent for Cameron, because “people don’t know, or don’t believe, that the Conservative Party has really changed.”

Mandelson focused on Cameron’s conference speech, teasing out the ideological dividing line on which he believes the next election will be fought. While Cameron rejected the concept of big government, Mandelson challenged his assumptions, and emphasised his support for “a government big and strong enough to do the heavy lifting”. He added that the next general election would be a significant milestone in British politics, saying, “The next general election is going to be the biggest change general election in a decade.”

OULC’s Jamie Susskind and Ben Lyons caught up with Mandelson after the speech for a few questions. On the subject of unpaid internships, Mandelson was characteristically vague about his opinion, offering the explanation “what you can afford is going to be constrained by the number of people you want to have access to those placements.”

Following the rather odd question posed to Alastair Campbell the week before on what the two of them would get up to if stranded alone together on a desert island, Lyons asked Mandelson what he thought of the prospect. He pondered the idea, and concluded that they would probably spend their time working out how to get off it.

He added that if he was forced to take a member of the Cabinet to Lyons’s hypothetical island, it would probably be “one of the Milibands”, because “they are both friends of mine, and I enjoy their company”.

He earnestly finished by commenting, “Don’t believe the cynicism of the media, believe in yourself, and your convictions”, and on that note, ‘Things can only get better’ began to play in the background, and all were transported to a happy day twelve years past, in the time where snappy sound-bites were enough to get the nation, and their votes, on side. Or perhaps we imagined that.

OUL's Sam Burt out campaigning on a Sunday morning

The last Council elections were awful for Labour; we lost 291 councillors and control of our last 4 County Councils. Strikingly, in amongst these results, Labour actually gained a seat in the Oxfordshire County Council, literally the only place in the country where we did so that night. This highlights just how important OULC’s weekly campaign session with the Oxford Labour Party is.

We go campaigning every Sunday during term time, and collect vital information from as many voters, in as many different parts of Oxford, as possible. This lets us do two things: firstly, in the weeks before a general election, we know exactly which houses to target and with what information, be it on Labour’s record on the environment, housing or Andrew Smith’s performance as a local MP; yet perhaps more importantly, it lets us all keep in touch with the real world. Cooped-up in Univ, Magdalen or Christ Church, it becomes easy to imagine that all of Oxford is dreaming spires, Pimm’s and punting; through campaigning we go to all parts of Oxford and actually discover the very real problems that people have in their day-to-day lives.

This term, in anticipation of a general election next year, we are focusing on areas such as Cowley, Blackbird Leys and Headington. We meet in Sofi 2, the café by Carfax Tower, at 10am every Sunday, have some breakfast, and then go campaigning until about lunch time. While we’re out campaigning, we don’t try to get into debates with people (although this can be entertaining). Instead, we try and find out what their concerns and issues are, locally and nationally, and see if Andrew Smith, or the local councillors, can do anything about it.

If nothing else, campaigning can be really good fun. You meet dozens of similarly-minded people, for breakfast or lunch and then go campaigning. There’s nothing quite as entertaining as sharing stories about your most bizarre moment with your fellow campaigners; just this morning I was told by a lady that she always votes for whichever party is in government because she “doesn’t like change”.

I remember before the first time I went campaigning, I thought it would be terrifying. In fact, it really isn’t, and you can always ask to be teamed up with someone from the exec if you want to be. It can actually be really enjoyable, and is massively important for making sure that Labour stays connected and competitive in Oxford. I hope to see you out some time!

I have my darker political moments, the days when it becomes difficult to hold onto that progressive optimism in an age when every main party is talking the language of austerity and cuts whilst banks are given blanks cheques signed by the taxpayer. Socialism, it would appear, can be ever so attractive to the rich when their precious market crashes and burns.
Quite what we here on the ‘Left’, whatever that highly generic term means anymore, are supposed to think when one of our last great public services struggles for a cash injection to modernise whilst banks only to need click their fingers to gain instant financial relief, is not clear. No one seems to be asking that vital question of why the hell it is the irresponsible rich have screwed up and receive instant recompense whilst men and women across the country are now faced with picking up the tab.
For years we’ve had the same story of low public expenditure, low taxation and liberal job markets and have enjoyed our secular worship of the twin gods of supply and demand. As our generation has been indoctrinated in this market run society in which wages drifted into murky waters of insufficiency we’ve all accepted that if we want to get anywhere in life we’ve got to take onboard a lifetime’s worth of debt.

One David Harvey, wrote about this bank bailout being a massive consolidation of the banking industry at the expense of the populace in general; nothing new there. In fact there is a particularly relevant precedent in the case of Mexico in 1982 when the IMF mandated austerity for the populace in order to protect the banking industry and the New York Stock Exchange. However the real point he made was that credit finance has been a mainstay of our economic system since the late 1970’s as a means of covering the shortfall between what the labour force has been earning and what it has been spending. Since we live in a consumer society, which lets face it, loves to hate the poor, spending was always likely to run ahead of the earnings that have been sunk by the declawing of the Unions in the mid 1980’s.
Given that we have a Labour party who “are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” and seem to have, at a basic conceptual level, gone for the self-interest virtues of the market over any fuzzy socialist notions of co-operation; it becomes difficult to see its current political compass as being part of the solution at all.
Of course it was quick to rediscover Keynesian policies and exhume them when the banks came rattling their collection tins outside Parliament, which leaves a lot of us who now face higher taxes, a higher retirement age and a future in which we’re all going to struggle under the ‘burden’ of increased public expenditure wondering just why it is that our government were happy to enforce this on us after years of telling us that to they couldn’t afford to raise taxes to pay for public services, or education or health or maybe even the poor, which to be honest don’t seem to have got any richer recently.
What this situation has entailed is the now cast-iron certainty of a Conservative administration stepping into power come the next general election and even more reasons to despise tax and despise government ‘meddling’.
Lest we forget, we’ve got a generation of people singing songs of market supremacy when they owe their health and their education to the large-scale edifices of the socialist experiment of the Attlee administration. I for one know that if it were not for the social democratic institutions that exist within this country I’d be lucky if I could read, let alone write this little rant, let’s not even go into the health side of things.

Most importantly, none of this was achieved by simply giving up.

Renewal and change, pleasant buzzwords in a world of class division and social injustice; if I could make such words mean something I would make them mean the rediscovery of Democratic Socialism, and the recollection that we’ve a duty not just to the under-privileged of today but to those of tomorrow. I don’t think that socialism is about bowing to the market or a mere managerial style of government, I happen to think it is about continuing the work towards a classless and equal society. So if like me you’re subject to the doubt that comes when faced with a looming Conservative government the message is; “This is our chance to reclaim our party, reclaim our principles and carry on this fight.”

Perception is important, and there can be little doubt that the 2008 conference, and the shift of the BBC to Greater Manchester, has a great deal to do with the government’s decision to delegate more powers to a city region.  Economically the case is already proven. The City Region of Greater Manchester already accounts for a fifth of the North’s economy, adding £47 billion to the UK accounts. This is more than Wales, which has its own Assembly, on both a raw numbers and per capita basis.

Yet since 1986, with the dissolution of the Metropolitan Counties, the city has been punching far below its weight. The siphoning off of £500 million designated for improvement of the Metrolink system to in effect prop up London’s Jubilee Line in 2004 ensured that many voted against the congestion charge this year, sceptical that money would be forthcoming. While Manchester is paralysed by the effect of deregulation, Transport for London remains a public concern. When politicians and civil servants keep public transport in public hands where they live and work, one must conclude that they consider it to be the most reliable system. Which begs the question why, and by what right, they subject the rest of the country to chaos. That such a progressive city as ours pours millions into the pockets of Stagecoach boss Brian Souter, an anti-gay, anti-union fundamentalist, rather than back into the local economy via a public service is a travesty.

With all this in mind, it is important that pressure is applied to our political leaders for greater devolution of powers. The Manchester City Region needs its own authority to match its own identity. It needs a council drawn from each of the fifteen districts, and most importantly it needs a mayor. We can then strip away the bureaucracy of the North West regional assembly, and confusing muddle of the county councils. Each district can elect a local council for local issues, and a representative for the City Council.

With the political infrastructure in place, this city would have a voice on the national stage, while its citizens would still have a direct link with their representatives. Under the current arrangement, impotent and anonymous local councils take decisions which people then ascribe to national government, and complain to their MPs about. Constituents do not get their problems addressed, councils are not scrutinised, and MPs divert time from holding the government to account to being social workers. A devolved assembly would bring transparency to the system.

The strength and determination with which this old, industrial giant has renewed itself is something every citizen should be proud of.  It has survived the decimation of its industry, the machinations of Margaret Thatcher and the devastation of the IRA, and it has come back stronger. Though I like the weather, I am not a North-Westerner. Though I like the history I am not a Lancastrian. I am a Mancunian, and my city deserves a voice: as one city, united.

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.