Unfounded Premises

 

 

 

As far as I can see the BBC’s coverage of the Tory manifesto launch hasn’t been a bloodbath though you could complain of the lack of a rounded journalism  in their reports, for instance when telling us about the right to buy from Housing Associations as if  this wasn’t already possible…the difference now is that the Tories are offering to subsidise that purchase….or indeed that many occupy such homes on a shared equity basis…ie they own part of the house and rent the rest….we are given the impression that this right to buy will denude the Housing Associations of stock..and yet that right is already there. Also it is rather odd that the BBC and others get worked up about the Tories trying to win ‘working class’ votes….allegedly stealing Labour’s clothes…that’s nonsense…many workers have always voted Tory….Thatcher won office because they backed her….the Telegraph’s cartoonist recognises that long history….

 

The BBC’s correspondents seem to like the imagined paradox of Labour claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and the Tories the party of the Working Class…however such distinct labels are purely in the minds of the Media who are looking desperately for something interesting and clever to say about a very long election run up.

Both Nick Robinson and Peston are amusing themselves with the supposed incredible new world turned upside down with profligate Tories and prudent Labour…Here’s Robinson’s skit…

This week of political cross dressing goes on.

David Cameron tried to re-brand the Conservatives as the party of working people – the day after Ed Miliband claimed that Labour was the party of economic responsibility.

Peston gives us this…

It is a topsy turvy fiscal battle between Labour and the Tories.

Hard on the heels of the Tories promising to increase NHS funding by £8bn a year in real or inflation-adjusted terms, without announcing spending cuts or tax increases to pay for it, Labour is characterising itself as the party that won’t make any unfunded spending increases.

And this....he’s keen to press the analogy…

There is something a bit surreal about a Labour manifesto whose first page is a promise to borrow and spend as little as possible, in contrast to the Tories’ weekend claim that they would spend £8bn more on the health service but won’t say how to finance that spending.

 

So…Labour are now prudent bean counters and the Tories are the party of the working man?  And that is a surprise?

Such ‘cross-dressing’ has always happened…but don’t let that fool you as Peston and Robinson have…..here’s what Miliband said in 2013 to the TUC…still working clas it seems..or they think they are……

As the Labour Party – the party of working people – we have a special responsibility to stand for a better politics.

So I want to build a better Labour Party.

Working people should be right at the heart of our Party.

What a contrast to the Conservative Party that stands for a few out of touch people at the top.

How about this…

We are the party of work. Labour – the clue is in the name

Stephen Timms MP is the Shadow Employment Minister

Or Labour’s Rachel Reeves (Yawn)…

We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work, Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.

 

Thatcher and Tory governments before her were helped into power by the working class vote…as the Daily Mail recognises…

In a bold pitch to blue collar voters who delivered Lady Thatcher’s three election victories, the Prime Minister will call the Tories ‘the party of working people’.

Only last year the BBC were telling us that the Conservatives had been the party for workers…

The strange death of the Conservative working vote

Politics.co.uk also recognised in 2012 that the Tories had once had support from the Working Class…

Will the working class return to the Tories?

Party insiders concede that the Tories cannot win an overall majority in 2015 without winning over significant support from blue collar workers. Conservative historians point to the 1950s and early 1960s, and then the 1980s when ‘Essex man’ dominated Thatcher’s thinking, as periods when the Tories benefited from working class support.

“Our idea is to try and recreate that coalition,” John Stevenson, whose Carlisle constituency is dominated by blue collar workers, told politics.co.uk.

Here the New Statesman admits that Labour hasn’t been the Party of the Working Class for a long time…

Working class voters and the ‘progressive’ left: a widening chasm

The triumph of identity politics means too many progressives appear willing to dismiss the white working class as socially backwards and not worth listening to.

Unless the left is comfortable becoming a movement of upper middle class liberals and ethnic minorities (no shame in that of course), it ought to start listening a bit more to the concerns of its electoral base while it still has one. For, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, it isn’t possible to dismiss the working class and elect another.

 

 

Voting patterns have always changed…here’s a study from 1976 that suggests the ‘working class’ were already disenchanted with Labour in the 1960’s…

Here Peter Kellner tells us that more often than not people vote Labour purely out of habit or because their father did not because of ideology…

New polling for Progress shows that working-class attitudes are not what some in the Labour party imagine them to be, writes Peter Kellner

Labour remains more popular with working-class than middle-class voters; but that popularity derives far more from tribe and tradition than values and ideology.

 

So the ‘working class’ has always voted for the Tories in some measure and Cameron is not ‘rebranding’the Tories as the party of the working class…it has always had a reasonably large scale support from the ‘workers’…. but what of Labour suddenly having a death bed conversion to ‘prudence’?  Nothing new there either…though it never lasts of course…spend and tax is always coming down the road sometime soon...here’s Gordon Brown telling us that we’ll have no more boom and bust under his prudent regime….

May 20, 1997, speech by the chancellor to the CBI: Exploiting the British genius – the key to long-term economic success:
“Stability is necessary for our future economic success. The British economy of the future must be built not on the shifting sands of boom and bust, but on the bedrock of prudent and wise economic management for the long term. It is only these firm foundations that we can raise Britain’s underlying economic performance.”

 

 

Peston and Robinson are having some fun at our expense because of course presenting the Tories as ‘profligate’ with recklessly unfunded policies whilst Labour has carefully and responsibly costed all of its policies is tripe….as we know from what the IFS said and what we can read for ourselves in Labour’s manifesto…and the fact labour won’t commit £8 bn to funding the NHS despite promising to do whatever it takes.  The Tory pledge to fund the NHS to the tune of £8 bn if there is economic growth is a conditional offer not an ‘unfunded promise’…if the economy grows they will fund the NHS...not hard to understand….

Because of our long-term economic plan, we are able to commit to increasing NHS spending in England in real terms by a minimum of £8 billion over the next five years. Combined with the efficiencies that the NHS Forward View sets out, this will provide the funding necessary to implement this plan in full.

The BBC’s two expert economics gurus are presenting a skewed version of reality and what the parties really represent and what they are saying and promising, thus skewing what people think perhaps, and how they vote?…..hardly what you would expect from the BBC with all its resources, training, integrity and professionalism.