Rachel Sylvester
Win a trip to football heaven
We are all middle class now, as John Prescott said before the 1997 election. It was the new Labour mantra, a symbolic statement that the party had moved beyond its working-class base. Tony Blair wooed Worcester Woman and Boden Man, from the daytime TV sofa, with his sun-dried tomato pasta recipe, his people carrier and his promise to promote aspiration. “The class war is over,” he told voters and his party, with a Hugh Grantish smile that sent Middle England into a swoon.
Now, sitting at the knee of Lord Mandelson — champion of the filthy rich and lover of Britain’s finest stately homes — Gordon Brown has turned his back on years of Eton-bashing, Bullingdon-baiting and unspoken disapproval of the conservatory-building classes. In a speech to the Fabian Society conference on Saturday, he declared his allegiance to the “squeezed middle”, on whom his future depends. “My predecessor and friend Tony Blair said that we had campaigned as new Labour and would govern as new Labour,” he said. “Let me say to you today, we have governed as new Labour and now we will campaign as new Labour.”
It was an extraordinary volte-face that reflects the weakness, not the strength, of the Prime Minister’s position. For years, Mr Brown defined himself, in contrast to Mr Blair, as the protector of the poor rather than the defender of the middle classes. He described himself as real Labour rather than new Labour, made clear that he was a mushy peas, not a guacamole, man. He promised to abolish child poverty, while imposing stealth taxes on those on moderate incomes, and opposed public service reforms such as foundation hospitals, aimed at keeping the middle classes onside. His wife was from Middle England, Mr Brown said, but he was a Presbyterian Scot who understood the importance of duty and hard work.
Now, however, Mr Brown has been persuaded by the man who replaced the red flag with the red rose that, to win the election, he must woo the Centre, where ballet classes and Sicilian olive oil matter as much as beer and sandwiches. But, having positioned himself on the Left for so long, it is hard for him to sound convincing. His short-term strategy of shoring up his reputation with the Labour Party to secure the leadership has made it harder for him to reassure middle-class voters now that he is one of them.
When Mr Blair said that he wanted to govern for “the many, not the few”, he meant the middle classes. When Mr Brown used the phrase he meant the poor — so it doesn’t quite ring true when he now pitches himself as the saviour of the “mainstream majority”. As one minister put it: “Gordon speaks ‘new Labour’ like somebody speaking English as a foreign language — the words may be right but the whole thing is just a tiny bit off key.”
The real test is not rhetorical flourishes, but the policy reality. Yesterday, the Government issued its response to Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility. The former Health Secretary’s analysis, Fair Access to the Professions, is a manifesto for promoting aspiration from the Billy Elliot of politics who started out in a northern mining village and ended up in the Cabinet. Mr Brown accepted 83 of the 88 recommendations, including plans to promote internships for poor children, encourage universities to accept more state school pupils and to create army cadet forces in comprehensives. But he rejected the one proposal that could really break down social divisions by shaking up the education system.
Mr Milburn’s most radical idea was that parents with children at a failing school should be able to remove their offspring and get a voucher for 150 per cent of the cost of a pupil’s education, which could be used at another school. Parents would have more choice, and schools get a financial incentive to take extra pupils, creating a virtuous circle, he argued, that would create a market and improve standards across the board. This would be a far more effective way than the creation of a social mobility commission to level the playing field (of Eton, or anywhere else). But it was a step too far for Mr Brown and Ed Balls, his Schools Secretary, who want local education authorities to keep control of admissions. Their view is that this is the way to ensure equality — but is the current system really fair?
It is scandalous, more than a decade after Mr Blair said that “education, education, education” was Labour’s priority, that last year more boys from Eton gained three As at A level than all boys on free school meals in state schools. Despite all the money poured into education, too many children still do not get the results they need to have the chances in life that they deserve. According to Lord Patten of Barnes, the Chancellor of Oxford University, leading universities want to widen their intake but some applicants just don’t make the grade and “we shouldn’t have to pay for the inadequacies of state schools”.
In 1997, Lord Adonis, now the Transport Secretary, wrote a book, A Class Act, in which he argued that “the comprehensive revolution has not removed the link between education and class but strengthened it”, creating “apartheid” between state and private schools.
It was, he said, a “tragic irony” that “comprehensive schools have largely replaced selection by ability with selection by class and house price”. Of course, there are some brilliant exceptions, and primary schools have greatly improved, but in too many areas the analysis still holds true. “If you really want to increase social mobility, you have to sort the schools out,” a Blairite minister admits. “And that means challenging the assumptions of the Left.”
There is no more direct route to middle-class hearts than education. If Mr Brown wants to end social division while appealing to the squeezed middle, he should be braver about school reform. Otherwise he will find this centre-ground territory seized from him by David Cameron.
Rachel Sylvester is a weekly columnist and political interviewer for The Times. Before that, she wrote about politics for The Daily Telegraph. She was also political editor of The Independent on Sunday.
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