I know that I’ve advocated class war but this isn’t quite what I had in mind…
Crewe and Nantwich, in Cheshire, is a diverse constituency that (in tv terms) embraces 2 Pints of Lager, Footballers Wives and To The Manor Born all the same time. It has a bye-election next week to elect a replacement for the much-lamented Gwyneth Dunwoody (whom I rarely missed tearing MPs off a strip every Sunday night on Radio 4 on ‘In Committee’. Now you know what a sad wonk I am).
The campaign is exposing just how particular class war in Britain can be: while there’s always been constant internecine class warfare in Britain, it’s not as a rule between the peasantry and the toffs, it’s between the various gradations of the middle classes. Take the current series of the Apprentice for example; the one genuinely working class contestant immediately teamed up with the undoubted toff leaving, as always, the uncertain middles to fight it out amongst themselves.
The scrap is getting particularly vicious in Crewe, where we’re being treated to Labour accusing the Tory of being posh:
A central plank of Labour’s campaign is that the Tory candidate, Edward Timpson, is “one of them”, a posh boy who has not got a clue how people in a down-to-earth place such as Crewe think and feel.
Labour has mocked Timpson by dressing activists in top hats and morning suits, continually pointed out that he lives in a £1.5m mansion, and has gleefully drawn attention to the “exotic South American llamas” that roam the fields around his country pile.
But a quick visit to the Timpson pad 15 miles north of Crewe reveals that not all is as it seems. Certainly, his house is lovely, enjoying splendid views across to the giant Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank. But the lush fields that feature in the Labour photograph of his home are not his. And the llamas belong not to him, but to a local farmer. The roping of the llamas into the Labour campaign is one of the “dirty tricks” that Tory leader David Cameron claims he is receiving reports of every evening.
All is indeed not as it seems.
New Labour has a track record of copying Republican campaigning techniques and one that proved the most effective for the GOP (or at least it did for a long while) is projection: project onto your opponent the weakness you yourself have, in order to draw the media fire away. Labour are still campaigning like it’s 2005, but times have moved on and those campaigning techniques have long been discredited by Wikipedia and the fact-checkers of the blogosphere. Neither Crewe or national voters are fooled. For all Labour’s attempts to portray their candidate Moyra Tamsin Dunwoody-Kneafsey as Tamsin Dunwoody, girl socialist and ‘one of us’. it’s not the Tory candidate with the listing in Burke’s Peerage or the country pile with paddocks in leafy Wales.
The gradations of British class warfare can be infinitely subtle; who’s more in tune with the plebs, the wealthy one-nation Tory descendant of philanthropic cobblers or the well-born, well-connected daughter of a career parliamentarian attempting to hold on to her mothers’ seat as of right? Strangely enough it’s the latter whose supporters (in typically lower-middle fashion, deferring to the class just above them by handing them a sinecure) trying to convince a working-class electorate that she’s one of them.
Oh no, she’s not:
Dunwoody was born in Totnes, Devon, the daughter of the late Labour MPs, Gwyneth Dunwoody, and Dr John Dunwoody. Through her mother she is the granddaughter of former Labour Party General Secretary, Morgan Phillips and Baroness Norah Phillips. She was educated at The Grey Coat Hospital and the University of Kent.
It doesn’t matter which candidate is posher, both are posh. If they really must settle the matter over who’s the most posh, then the media’s going to have to start going into cultural signifiers like what newspapers their au-pairs buy, where their nanny was educated or whether they use napkin rings and say ‘toilet’.
Of course New Labour could have selected an actual working class candidate rather than another posh legacy Labour type whose spent her career getting the New Labour equivalent of wingnut welfare, but the one constant in this kind of electoral class politics is that the actual working classes are barely on the radar when it comes to candidates. No, they’re just consumers, box-tickers and payers of taxes, not actual participants in the process, and they’d better know their place which is to be sold to. Meanwhile the various gradations of privilege on both sides of the aisle carve up Parliament amongst themselves.
