TUC conferences ain’t what they used to be. Gone are the days when prime ministers quaked as the labour movement marshalled its big battalions.
Unions are more interested in flogging insurance policies than calling their members to the barricades.
Nevertheless, the ghost of rhetoric past did briefly put in an appearance at the Brighton talkfest this week. Faced with runaway food and fuel inflation and a 2% public sector pay cap, civil servants, teachers and other public sector workers are balloting for co-ordinated industrial action this winter.
And ministers were talking a new, combative language. Harriet Harman called for a narrowing of the class divide. Gordon Brown lamented that social class was still ‘the best predictor’ of how a child will do in life. Even Alistair Darling, chastened after his recent indiscretions, took a pop at excessive City bonuses.
So is this, as the Daily Telegraph maintains, a return to the class-war politics of old? Hardly. The resurrection of the ‘C’-word has more to do with fears about ‘progressive Conservatism’ – with all its talk of social mobility and broken societies – stealing New Labour’s clothes,
Harman accused the Opposition of being ‘false friends of equality’ and of ‘sidling up to the unions’. The PM promised union leaders that he would work with ‘courage and vision’ on behalf of ‘hard-pressed, hard-working British families’.
However, with inflation at 5% and the fiscal cupboard bare, all that the chancellor could offer delegates was a firm series of nos: to their demands for higher public sector pay, higher taxes on the super-rich and a windfall tax on energy companies.
A package of home insulation measures, launched this week, was greeted with derision by union bosses – especially after Number 10 had raised expectations about more radical steps to combat fuel poverty.
All of which is bad news for Brown’s premiership ahead of this month’s Labour conference – particularly when more than 90% of the party’s funding now comes from union coffers.
‘Times are tough,’ Darling told the TUC. ‘But we’ll get through it.’ Of what, and whom, he was thinking, is not entirely clear.
