George Osborne’s piece for the Guardian this morning reads as if has succeeded in getting the middle class Labour electorate back to his place for a coffee. He’s dimmed the lights, and a well-worn Marvin Gaye compilation CD can be heard playing softly in the background as the espresso machine goes about its lawful business.
Now all he needs to do is say the right things, and he’s home and dry. So the smooth talking bastard starts muttering all the words a North London Labour voter longs to hear; progressive goals, baby. Social justice. Fairer society.
Don’t you just hate ‘growing inequality, falling mobility and rising poverty’? Hey, me too. Wow, we have so much in common.
OK, so he can’t help sounding a little glib, perhaps that bit too studied. But as we all know, by the time things get this far, the routine usually works, provided only that the intended conquest is half-drunk and up for it anyway.
That is what is so worrying; having been ignored and neglected by their political partner so long, left-of-centre public sector Guardianista types are bound to be feeling a bit vulnerable and perhaps even flattered by the attention. Will they be able to resist a night of illicit Tory passion?
What we have before us is a textbook example of triangulation, the US-originated technique of taking the values held most dearly by your opponent’s electoral base and then proclaiming them as your own. Dick Morris would have been proud.
The article is nicely ghosted, too. It opens with an attack on New Labour from the soft left, and from there the rhetoric just doesn’t let go. By the time a Tory shadow chancellor – and I’ll repeat that job title just to make the point: A TORY SHADOW CHANCELLOR – denounces the working of the unfettered free market economy, one is left feeling slightly breathless at the chutzpah of it all.
Osborne comes on like nothing so much as Polly Toynbee in drag, and he's, like, totally ready to lead. You could almost imagine him delivering these sentiments in a speech at the annual Compass Robin Cook Memorial Conference and bringing the audience to its feet. Oh Norman Tebbit, that thou shouldst live to see this hour.
Much of the cleverness is in the way that Osborne cuts so much with the traditional Croslandite grain. Blair and Brown have ‘dismally failed to deliver social justice’. This is indisputably the case.
By pointing to the real failings of the last 11 years, as judged from a social democratic perspective, Osborne has ideologically disarmed his target in a masterful display of fancy footwork.
Any cogent political case against the brand of Conservatism cannot help but simultaneously be a critique of what New Labour has done in office for the last decade and more.
For instance, Osborne insists: ‘We know that redistribution alone, as the sole policy tool to tackle poverty, has failed.’ Well, of course it has failed, if redistribution takes the form of redistribution from the working and middle classes to the super-rich, as it has under New Labour.
The politically sophisticated can read between the lines easily enough. ‘New fiscal framework’ translates as vicious and sustained public spending cuts, ‘tackling the root causes of poverty by harnessing the private and voluntary sectors’ equates to further privatisation of the welfare state.
But we’ve all ended up in bed with people we really shouldn’t have ended up in bed with. If he keeps on dressing up Tory chat-up lines in Labourspeak, the Old Etonian smoothie has every reason to expect a decent hit rate.
Comments (12)
"So the smooth talking bastard starts muttering all the words a North London Labour voter longs to hear; progressive goals, baby. Social justice. Fairer society."
I suspect many will vote Tory. Although they want to hear those words, for many it will be to salve their liberal conscience . I suspect as much as many proclaim a concern for the poor, unemployed etc, they also worry about their house prices, schools for little Harry (state of course, but they do need the cash to pay for the extra tuition to give them an edge), the nice holidays in somewhere 'authentic and undiscovered' and of course the purple broccoli to impress at the dinner parties .
Oh dear, am I sounding like Mod :-)
And he'll get such an easy ride that a sizable proportion of the electorate won't realise what they've woken up with for at least half a decade.
Knock on the head champagne, chocolates and Marvin Gaye. Osbourne doesn't have to make much of an offer at all.
Indeed, his pals are so cocky that it is being put about that public finances are awful that taxes will have to go up when they get back into office.
Osbourne's seductee has just been gang-raped, robbed, battered and bankrupted by previous seducter.
It's a case that nothing can get any worse, anything must be better. Barry Manilow sounds absolutely great.
Good piece but the oleaginous smoothie that Osbourne is an Old Pauline oleaginous smoothie. Just thought I'd clear that up.
Gordon Brown is now considered a joke in pubs, cafes and restaurants up and down the country. That means the next government is a Tory one as people do not vote for jokes. People may voted for candidates who they hate but are seen as strong and competent.
Pish.
Neil:
Bizarre situation in the USA highlighted on C4 tonight. Democrats who wanted Hillary Clinton to be the candidate are deciding to vote McCain rather than Obama. Apparently their numbers are enough to swing some of the key states.
They have been out of office for two terms of 'Satan' Bush, and yet they would rather be out for another one than unite behind the leader.
Imagine that. Despising your own parties leader so much that you would vote for the opposition that believes in the opposite of your own beliefs.
Cheer up chaps. Gordon says you'll win the next general election. He's got a great team, he's got a great vision, he's got a... er, plan - don't give up on him now. Get out there and deliver those leaflets, engage the voters and win them back. You wait - at the party conference he'll having them dancing in the aisles.
As Dave shrewdly identified it, this is just all triangulation: there is nothing compassionate about Camerons Conservatives, radical yes, for instance they want to bring in U.S style 'Winconsin' style welfare which is basically no or very limited benefits. which can vary from state to state. NL are just as bad though, their extremist 'welfare reforms have expedited this process making it easier for the Tories to bring it in.
There are no mainstream parties advocating genuine social justice: an equitable tax system where the rich pay their share, a decent benefits systems and a large scale public housing programme and crucially a sustainable living wage. All the parties are now attacking the the poor while coating it in Orwellian terms like 'worklessness' and are supported by their friends in the 'charity/third sector' who smell new contracts.
I suspect even Heath would have baulked at some of the measure the Tories plan to implement or impose and indeed would have rejected the odious James Purnells 'remedies for worklessness'
back to the workhouse soon, eh?
Sorry Dave but I think you misjudged this.
Osborne isn't trying to win over the middle class Labour electorate - he's trying to win back the middle class swing voters that the Conservatives lost in 1997 and have failed to claw back (until now).
Sorry LFAT, but in that case, what's it doing in the Guardian? And since when did talk of 'progressive values' ever find the Nasty Party's clitoris?
Strop, obviously we will have to shift emergency supplies of purple broccoli to North London next spring (btw: it turns green when boiled).
Cameron is just making it easy for nicely brought up people to dream, er nice thoughts. And, here's the rub, find some excuses to vote Tory because their want to defend their privileges. Just as Miliband offers the likes of Polyana Toynbee to swevan (Middle English word of the day). Or Nick Clegg (who?), a man so satisfied with himself he gets high sniffing his armpits, poses as a Mr, er now what was it?
If Osborne is after ex-Tories, surely he's got to get them in similar position to the inheritance tax move he pulled last year. So, Dave's right, he's after Labour voters, and trying to disorient those who've given up on Labour because of it's abandonment of social democratic policies.
But is it too crude to note that the love-god Gideon will be in the wealthiest cabinet for a long time?
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/2707_tory_richlist.shtml
Oh dear, that news of the world story has gone down the memory hole. Here's another link: http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/859311/the-shadow-cabinet-rich-list-part-1.thtml