Politics
Class war in the House
Published 28 February 2008
The Michael Martin affair has exposed a raw tribalism that still separates the two major parties
"If you want a war, you can have it." These were the words of one former Labour minister when I mentioned the row over the expenses of the House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin. Relations between reporters in the parliamentary lobby and MPs are rarely cosy, but some long-serving backbenchers are saying they have never known the situation to be as bad as it has been since stories emerged about Martin, his wife and £4,280 worth of taxi trips. A growing number of Labour MPs (and some from the other parties) are now convinced that attacks from the lobby on Martin - a former sheet-metal worker from Glasgow who left school at 15 - are based on snobbery and class hatred. Two sketch-writers, Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail and Simon Hoggart of the Guardian, are singled out as serial offenders.
On the face of it, this has nothing to do with class and everything to do with legitimate journalistic scrutiny of how Speaker Martin spends public money. The public should be left to make up its own mind whether the expenses are legitimate. Mrs Martin says she needed to make the trips to prepare for official receptions she was hosting for her husband, and this may well be the case. It has to be said, however, that the resignation of the Speaker's spokesman, Mike Grannatt, a government press officer of some experience, for misleading journalists over the presence of an official on the taxi trips, is not encouraging. Nor does it look good when the man whose job it is to manage the daily running of parliament appears to be an obstacle to reform.
But anyone who believes this row isn't about class should spend some time in the tearooms and bars of the Palace of Westminster talking to Labour MPs. "Speaker Martin is a lightning rod for all of us," said one close ally of the Prime Minister. "I have never known such an open and vicious example of class snobbery in all my time in parliament."
There was a time when "class" was a dirty word in new Labour circles. Rather like "equality" and "redistribution", it reeked of the dark days of opposition when the Labour benches were full of sheet-metal workers. Under Gordon Brown's leadership those times are gone. Backbenchers are free to vent their class resentment. It is no coincidence, I am told, that John Spellar, the indefatigable former defence and Northern Ireland minister, has been selected as the attack dog of choice to take the argument over Speaker Martin to his media critics.
Known chiefly as one of the most right-wing Labour MPs, Spellar has been speaking officially in his capacity on the members estimate committee, which is at present conducting a review of MPs' pay and allowances under the chairmanship of the Speaker. But the Warley MP, who won a Kent County Council scholarship to the exclusive Dulwich College, is said to be driven in his politics by an acute sense of class injustice.
Yet not everyone in the Labour Party is convinced that embracing such visceral class-warrior politics is a healthy change of direction. One former cabinet minister I spoke to said: "Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the trouble with Michael Martin is that he looks like a block on modernisation." It doesn't matter what is really motivating the sketch-writers (and it is in their nature to be bitchy to MPs, whether they come from Glasgow or the Home Counties): this has become a story about class because MPs have willed it to be so.
The atmosphere in the Commons has reached such a pitch that it extends well beyond the specifics of Mary Martin's allegedly decadent, taxi-enhanced lifestyle. After an absence of a decade, class politics is back with a vengeance. With the unseemly stampede to claim the centre ground of British politics, it might have been assumed that such politics would be left behind in the crush. But the opposite has been the case. As the ideological differences between the two major parties have been set aside, a raw tribalism has filled the vacuum. When both Conservatives and Labour talk the language of free-market economics and social liberalism, all that is left to divide them is the conventional class allegiances.
Despite the deep mutual loathing of the two party leaders, under Gordon Brown and David Cameron the two parties have never been closer in their policies and ideology. This only serves to heighten the sense that what really divides them is that Labour remains the party of the working man and woman and the Tories remain the party of privilege. The über-elitist background of the Conservative frontbench team helps this impression, however much they try to play it down.
This is a problem for the Tory leader as he tries to persuade British voters that his party really has changed. However, the new class war is potentially more of a problem for Labour. The Conservatives have always represented their class interests and always will. Barring a revolution, such interests will always be with us. The class interests of the Labour Party in the 21st century, however, are a little harder to define.
Many people in Britain still work in factories and some are even sheet-metal workers, but however you cut it, the working class is shrinking fast. More importantly, for a party that still calls itself Labour, MPs who identify themselves as working-class are disappearing. Former trade unionists from a manual labour background, such as Michael Martin, are being replaced by a new generation of management consultants and apparatchiks.
Core Labour values
The real question for younger Labour MPs is how they define themselves against the other parties without reverting to the old politics of class identity. Oddly, this may mean a return to certain core Labour values: an abhorrence of poverty, social injustice and inequality. Some Labour MPs are worried that young people joining the party are more interested in civil liberties and global warming than in the millions of people still living in poverty in Britain today. Yet it is for those who still believe that Labour has a duty to the poorest in society to offer a persuasive argument that the party can and should make a difference, rather than simply manage the status quo better than the Tories.
If Labour backbenchers are looking for a cause more worthy than the Speaker of the House of Commons, they could do worse than commit themselves to honouring pledges to end poverty in Britain. Blair and Brown proved they could do what was once unimaginable: run a successful economy and increase investment in public services while winning over swaths of middle-class voters. What the Conservative Party has yet to prove, despite the rhetoric, is that its frontbenchers, most of whom do not have a single member of their extended families who has known a day of economic hardship, really care about those who have.
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