This election is painting the party leaders in unforgiving primary colours, and the portraits are inaccurate. Ed Miliband’s critique of the distribution of wealth is too easily packaged up by his opponents and the media as class warfare. The Sun’s cover of Ed dressed in white bow tie, “Red Ed’s Downton Secret”, describes the Labour leader as a class warrior. Describing the Labour party’s manifesto as a weapon of class warfare isn’t just simplistic, it’s wrong.
Until Labour’s critics begin to appreciate the difference between economic and class arguments, it’s hard to expect that the insults thrown the other way will stop. Just as David Cameron really doesn’t want to harm the NHS – the Conservatives have pledged an additional £8bn to fund it in the next parliament – so Ed Miliband isn’t trying to overthrow the class system in either the socialist sense of the term, or our peculiarly British one. If last night’s debate revealed anything, it’s that the Labour party is surprisingly cautious, running for election on a platform which could hardly be less radical. Ed’s opponents should do him the courtesy of addressing his arguments, rather than the straw socialist that they have been attacking.
Class warfare, the lazy stereotypical deployment of inverse snobbery, has been attempted in the past by the Labour party and it backfired. The 2008 Crewe and Nantwich byelection saw Gordon Brown’s Labour party attack Edward Timpson as a “toff” who wouldn’t understand “the problems that people face day-to-day”. The line failed, and the Conservatives won their first byelection since 1982. The argument that people from privileged backgrounds cannot comprehend the struggles of those on the poverty line will always fail. For such a nonsensical argument to work, the inverse would have to be true, and those at the breadline wouldn’t be competent to make decisions about the economy or business. The Labour party’s rich history of figures such as Tony Benn also belies the falsehood of the “toff” argument.
Miliband’s critics are, however, wrong to portray him as a leader continuing Brown’s class war. The Labour party is fighting this election squarely on the economic arguments, and while some of their enthusiastic supporters in the media might go further, Ed has been careful not to deploy the language of class. Either he has learned the mistakes of the past, or he’s concerned about his own background, but he has been smart to keep to economics.
It may be easier to attack Ed Miliband as a class warrior than to address his central critique of the uneven distribution of wealth in our society, but it is hardly likely to be successful. The non-dom proposal is not about class, but about whether we want to live in a country that bends to the demands of the international rich. The arguments around housing aren’t about preventing the ownership of second homes, ending buy-to-let investment, or filling the green belt with prefabricated boxes, but about the failure to supply adequate and sufficient housing. Like the arguments being wheeled out that Miliband is ruthless and successful with women, dressing Miliband up in white tie looks eerily like another round destined to backfire. David Cameron won the popular vote in 2010 by more than 2m votes. People in the UK are intensely relaxed about the backgrounds of their leaders. A touch of poshness didn’t hurt Tony Blair, neither does it trouble Nick Clegg or even Ed Miliband.
Money and class are not the same thing. By the time Barack Obama entered the White House he was a rich man from his book earnings, and yet he was able to hone a message about the redistribution of wealth which was largely immune to John McCain’s arguments that he was a socialist trying to punish success. While the two Eds score miserably when it comes to public confidence in their economic credibility, polls show that when asked if the leadership of the Labour party shares the values of voters, they come out on top.
Miliband isn’t taking lazy, cheap shots at people who call their children Peregrine or Fenella. He is reassuringly unobsessed by class, and focuses his ammunition more effectively on economic disparity. He may not be able to persuade the public of Labour’s economic competence in the few weeks left until the election, but while his critics aim to portray Miliband as the class warrior, they are giving him all the freedom he needs to win over voters.
