January 1, 2010

Down to work

Posted in Cameron, Conservatives, Labour, Politics, Society at 6:33 pm by Paul Sagar

It may be new year’s day, but 2010 is an election year so time to get down to business.

Sunny Hundal has already flagged up Boris Johnson’s London transport price hikes, many of which will affect the poorest the most:

From January 4th, millions of Londoners will return to work to find they have been hit by Mayor Boris Johnson’s huge fare increases:

- A single bus journey by Oyster up 20% to £1.20
- A weekly oyster bus pass up 20% to £16.60
- Six-zone peak single Tube fare by Oyster up 10.5% to £4.20
- A five-zone off-peak single Tube fare (outside zone 1) up 18.2% to £1.30
- Most Oyster pay-as-you-go Tube fares up by 20p per trip.

Overall tube fares will rise 3.9% and overall bus fares up by 12.7%

Sunny notes that “The fares will disproportionately hit poor people across London at a time Boris has continually praised rich London bankers and argued against taxing them higher.”

Indeed. And perhaps Boris has just scored a potentially massive own goal for the Tory Party.

Labour backbencher Jon Cruddas and Labour PPC Chuka Umunna have already launched the “Tory Stories” website to “scrutinize the activities of Conservatives who already hold power”. The idea is to give people an advance taste of what a national Conservative government would be like, in order to discourage them from voting blue.

This is a very good idea. And it can be made to fit perfectly with an electoral campaign focusing on messages about the many not the few, the ordinary hardworking versus the undeserving privileged. A campaign pointing out that the Tories say that we’re all in this together, but what they plan to do is give tax breaks to their millionaire friends. (A strategy of class war, but not as we knew it).

Borris Johnson’s fare hike should be at the heart of anti-Tory campaigning. A message like this:

“The Tories tell us we’re all in this together. But Tory London Mayor Boris Johnson – former drinking pal’ of David Cameron in the exclusive millionaire’s Bullingdon Club, who described his £250,000 salary for writing a newspaper column as “chickenfeed” – has already decided to hit London’s low and middle-income families with massive, above-inflation price hikes. Yet Boris says we can’t tax the bankers who crashed our economy because they are the “wealth creators”! Boris gives us a taste of what David Cameron’s Tories will do if they get their hands on power. It will be a government by the privileged few, for the privileged few, at the expensive of the rest of us.”

When this post goes up, there’ll no doubt be squawking aplenty from the Tory footsoldiers*, declaring their delight at the prospect of the Conservatives’ opponents using this sort of electoral strategy. They’ll claim that it’s anti-aspirational campaign suicide. But one can’t help noticing how over-anxious the footsoldiers are to push this message. Could it be that they’re worried? That they know as well as we do that the British people’s sense of fair play is on a collision-course with Tory reality?

–

* By Tory footsoldier I mean those individuals who have no interest in intellectual engagement or sorting out ideas or facts, but who desire only to wave the blue flag no matter what. Which is fine, every party needs them. And of course, not every footsolider is a Tory, and not every Tory a footsoldier.

Permalink