Wednesday 1st October

One of the Tories favourite statements is that the Labour Party are all about Class War, especially whenever reference is made to Public Schools like Eton, or the Bullingdon Club or any other forms of privilege.  And there is some truth in that.  It really should not matter where one comes from, how one was educated, how rich ones parents were etc:  Although it does seem strange that a small clicque of people from very similar privileged backgrounds is actually running the country.

However when you consider that the Tories have not only given their millionaire chums a tax cut, along with a year’s warning so that they could arrange to delay bonuses and dividend payments etc: and have consistently made cuts to people on benefits and held down wages for ordinary people in the public sector, it seems that they are indeed the ones who are waging Class War.

George Osborne has now gone even further and the two major announcements/inducements in his conference speech were to cut the tax on inheritance recipients in some cases, so allowing these people to keep more of their money, and to cut the maximum benefit from 26k to 23k a year and to freeze the level of benefits for two years, in other words to take even more money from the poorest in our society.

And it doesn’t end there; the whole thrust of their campaign is to appeal to the not so badly off, those slightly older who have made it already, who generally vote Tory anyway, who undoubtedly read the Daily Mail and who might just be tempted to vote UKIP.  In America in the last Presidential elections the Republicans dismissed almost all poorer voters as not worth appealing to as they were receiving some help from the Government and would likely vote Democrat anyway.  The Tories with the guidance of Lynton Crosby are doing the same thing, dismissing all recipients of benefits as probable Labour voters anyway, but appealing to the rich and better off by tax giveaways.  It seems the post war consensus may be finally breaking down and Class Warfare becoming respectable again.