Ugly politics and no principles left

May 21 2008 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A FEW weeks ago, in the wake of the council elections, I wrote on this page that Labour was far from finished and could yet win the next general election.

I still stand by that, but if the party is planning to fight back it hasn’t made a very good start.

Tomorrow voters in Crewe and Nantwich will elect a successor to Gwyneth Dunwoody, the popular and famously independent Labour MP who died just a few weeks ago.

With a healthy majority of more than 7,000 Labour should really hold the seat. It’s only 165th on the Conservatives’ list of targets.

But the polls suggest that Gordon Brown is now so unpopular that Crewe will fall to the Conservatives tomorrow.

I’m not going to forecast who will win because prediction – like alcohol – makes fools of us all.

However, no matter what the result the Crewe campaign itself has suggested that Labour is in deep trouble.

The party has tried to make much of the fact that the Conservative candidate Edward Timpson, the privately educated heir to the Timpson shoe repair business, is a toff.

Leaflets have been handed out mocking his background and Labour activists have posed in top hat and tails to ridicule the Tory.

Unfortunately it has since emerged that one of Labour’s fancy dress enthusiasts is himself privately educated and at a school which was founded at an earlier stage of the 16th century than Mr Timpson’s old school.

This is ugly politics. And it’s stupid politics too.

Mr Timpson no more chose to be upper-class than he chose to be male or curly-haired.

So why make an issue of it?

If he had been going round Crewe telling voters he had spent his childhood working as a chimney sweep then of course it would be right to draw attention to his privileged background.

But to the best of my knowledge he hasn’t done any such thing. So what really is the toff-bashing except bigotry?

It smacks of a party which has run out of ideas and is now scraping the bottom of the barrel to find ways to motivate its voters.

New Labour abandoned pretty much everything the party stood for to get elected. And it worked.

But now that things have turned against them it seems there’s little core principle or belief left to fall back on.

Instead we get one public schoolboy running around telling everyone that another public schoolboy is a toff.

Is this what 21st century socialism looks like?