Jack Straw and Tessa Jowell are utter berks…
…but don’t worry, it’s just a quip, not part of a strategy.
Gordon Brown draws a fundamental distinction between Labour and the Conservatives, and suddenly everyone is focussing on his one remark about David Cameron having attended Eton.
The real point Gordon was making, which everyone seems so quick to ignore?
“Mr Brown made the comment [about Eton] at prime minister’s question time, claiming Tory plans for inheritance tax cuts would help millionaires but cost public service investment £2bn.” [BBC]
So weeks later, Tessa Jowell has to come out and say how beastly ‘class war’ is, and associate it with attacks on the backgrounds of individual politicians. As opposed to Cameron’s millionaire-loving policies which Brown was actually attacking instead of trying to emulate, for once.
This seems to be a developing theme from inside the leadership, that people are getting jittery about all this talk of investment in public services, rather than Tessa Jowell’s favoured ‘reform’ (read cuts, presumably).
She’s not the only one, apparently, with Lord Dracula, er, sorry, Mandelson apparently falling out with Brown about the current electoral strategy. The media seem to be insisting it’s part of a ‘core vote’ strategy designed to appeal to the working class.
No wonder the types who like tax breaks for the rich, whilst the rest of us don’t get a break, are feeling uppity. What a shower.
Well, let’s look on the bright side. At least there appears to be some kind of dividing line being drawn in the hierarchy and that creates some kind of opportunity for debate about what ‘class war’ actually is, and why its appropriation as a term means it always appears in inverted commas. Who’d have thought that the term would take up so many column inches?
So far as personalising is a mistake, I’d agree. We want it to be seen in broader terms of who has the broadest shoulders, etc. I’m sure this isn’t what Tessa is getting at, however…