Though Cowards Flinch

Today, like Withnail’s holiday, I read The Times by mistake.

While attempting to ignore the knot in my stomach which always accompanies exams, I popped into a local newsagent to buy a paper. Like all good corner shops on the Isle of Wight, it typically has a ratio of one Guardian or Independent for every hundred copies of The Sun. This time, it was even worse, and to save my eternal soul I moved on past the venom-spewing shelves of Daily Mails and stumped up the 70p donation to Rupert Murdoch in exchange for a copy of the Times.

I imagine it would have been a far cheerier experience to simply have sprung for a Mail and dipped my toe in the angry, murky waters of Middle England. I will admit to having done so during particularly boring periods while killing time in my GP’s waiting room. I could have written off their denunciations of Labour as par for the course. Instead, I wasted a good half hour today coming to the slow realisation just how confident the British establishment really is in the electoral death of the Labour Party.

The embarrassing attempts of Labour spin doctors to maintain the appearance of a class divide without any ideological grounding to give it substance, have quite obviously failed to leave the Conservatives shaking in their boots. The casual self-assurance and sense of direction which commentators expressed were in marked contrast to the Times’ previous timidity and its inability to bring itself to opposing the Labour Government in elections. The potency of Labour is, to them, spent, a busted flush, and it is easy to see why.

In an interview with Richard Lambert, Grand Cyclops of British capitalism, the Times argues…

These are exciting days for accountants. Rarely have tax issues moved so quickly, been so controversial and won so many headlines. And rarely have business lobby groups, led by the CBI, scored so many direct hits in getting government policy reversed, and at speed, forcing the Treasury into making rapid changes on plans for capital gains tax and non-domicile taxation.

Rarely indeed.

Labour wouldn’t need to patronise us by dressing up its activists in top hats and tails to prove the Conservatives don’t have the interests of working people at heart, if it actually demonstrated that in its policies. You don’t have to rely on embarrassing stereotypes to recognise that Britain remains an class society, and moreover that egalitarianism is a sound concept both morally and politically: the “debt-ridden middle-class” which The Times mentions has more in common with the debt-ridden working-class than the capitalist system responsible for and dependent on our indebtedness and insecurity.

Unless the Labour leadership understands that and acts on it, the Conservative Party and its fellow travellers in the press will continue to have untroubled nights.