Return of the class warrior
We might laugh at this fool, but Britain should be fearful of him getting his way
THE STATE of John Prescott worries me. Is he eating sensibly and taking enough exercise? Is his nice wife Pauline careful to stop him driving too fast? Do his security men keep a watchful arm ready, in case he slips on the ice on a frosty morning?
The welfare of the Deputy Prime Minister should be a source of concern to all of us who care about Britain’s heritage. He is an exhibit who deserves pride of place in any museum, a cage to himself in any zoo, a superb specimen of that legendary Labour Party beast: the class warrior.
Not for Mr Prescott nambypamby, airy- fairy 21st-century claptrap about the classless society, the land of equal opportunity where one man — correction, one person — is as good as another and New Labour’s big tent has seats for all.
He is one of the old breed, the true believers who look on politics as a perpetual struggle between privileged, stuck- up nancy-boys from posh schools with silly voices and the sons and daughters of toil who call a spade a spade, a pint a pint and Peter Mandelson a
no, sorry, not in a family newspaper.
Most of the time, Mr Prescott is kept on his ball and chain in the Cabinet Office and forbidden to cock his leg on carpets. But every now and again he escapes, as he has done this week, and a trail of puddles marks his passage.
Stitch- up
Just as Tony Blair is striving to save a cherished education reform programme from his own Left- wing, the Deputy Prime Minister has given an interview making plain that he thinks the whole thing is tosh, a stitch-up to benefit the middle- class at the expense of honest workers.
For good measure, he threw in a jibe about the new Tory leader that any Labour veteran of 80 years ago would have been proud of. ‘I see a bit of “class” is coming back,’ he said, ‘ with Cameron and his outfit, the “ Eton mafia”. We are always better against class. It’s the Eton mob, isn’t it? … I always feel better fighting class anyway — brings the spirit back into the Labour Party.’
Tony Blair must have muttered: ‘Thanks a bunch, John.’ He knows that Old Labour’s obsession with class war contributed mightily to making it unelectable for a generation. And anyway, the fact is that the world, and Britain, have moved on since the days when trades unionists in cloth caps were perceived as the salt of the earth.
Yet here is Mr Prescott waving the old flag — and winning a round of applause from the Labour Left in the House of Commons, who believe that their day might yet come again.
The irony, of course, is that nobody is a more prominent beneficiary of class prejudice than the Deputy Prime Minister. John Prescott does not owe his own grand role in Government — the cars and flunkeys and red boxes and front- of-the-plane air travel — to brains or imagination. He holds the office he does today simply as a symbol of what the Labour Party used to be, a gesture towards the old apemen of the trades union movement and what used to be called ‘the working class’.
Blair has always known that Old Labour neither liked nor trusted him. He has carried Prescott in his baggage since the party strife of the early Nineties, to keep the comrades on side. A modern Labour minister once described to me the experience of watching Prescott in meetings — on transport, at the time of which we speak. ‘ It was like watching some huge wild creature trying to get his mind around the erection of telegraph poles on his stretch of savannah,’ said my acquaintance.
Mr Prescott, of course, had to be removed from his role as transport supremo after a series of disasters even Tony Blair could no longer ignore.
Joke
Instead, he was given command of local government and planning, with results we see around us — our wonderful regional assemblies, together with all those millions of new homes and wind turbines which will soon render beautiful — in the eyes of the Deputy Prime Minister, anyway — the British countryside.
Depending on your viewpoint, Mr Prescott’s high office is either a Blair joke, much funnier than that of the Roman emperor who made his horse a consul, or an insult to the British people.
What is certain is that his credentials for power rely solely on the fact that a lot of old Labour types approve of him, because he was once a ship’s steward, and has learned nothing since.
Roy Jenkins observed that there have been two other big Labour figures since 1945 without any advantages of education — Ernie Bevin and George Brown — but both possessed a high intelligence which passed John Prescott by.
Where some of us stop laughing about Prescott’s class obsession is at education. Blair has made a mess of this vital issue, but at least today he acknowledges a key point: if bright children are ever to escape sink schools, they must be separated from yobs and those who care nothing for learning.
Pain
This is what sticks in Prescott’s gut. He hates anything that smacks of ‘elites’ and ‘privilege’ — and, yes, ‘middleclass values’. All his instincts are to keep the clever and the ambitious right down there with young lads and lasses who know that footie and the pub are the big things in life.
All of us want to live in a society in which opportunities are open to all. What stinks about Prescott’s vision is that he wants to make sure that if one kid can’t have something, nobody else will get it either.
His gospel is the old, old Labour one of equality of pain; levelling down, not up; holding back the whole nation and its children to the speed of the slowest ship.
I do not think John Prescott is a bad man. But if his attitude prevails, it will do a lot of bad things to Britain, by wrecking its chances of competing in the 21st- century world.
The class war is over. We have left behind, thank goodness, a Britain in which someone receives respect because of who their parents were or how they talk or which school they attended.
Boys who went to Eton tend nowadays to conceal the fact rather than boast about it, lest it damage their career prospects.
All that matters today is that effort and ability should have their chances, and be rewarded. We want our children to have the best, and to be the best.
John Prescott is fool enough to fight this. We might laugh at him, but we should also be deeply fearful of the consequences, if he and his kind get their way in this Labour Government.