Privilege, New Labour, and why Harriet Harman is everything you'd expect her to be
In a follow-up to his 2007 essay 'Grievous Bodily Harman', the editor looks at the leadership campaign of perhaps the most reviled woman in Britain
The charm offensive in support of Hattie has begun. Sensibly, whoever's doing the PR for Britain's highest-profile female hate-figure chose the Sunday Telegraph to kick things off: nothing to lose and - if it turned out a halfway decent piece - then it would have to be deemed a triumph. Those who read it (Sunday Tel Magazine, 14.4.09) may well have seen the piece as the triumph of emotion over common sense: but whatever your view, she came out of it reasonably well.
'Charm offensive' is an oddly contradictory term to use about Harman, as to most men and a very large minority of women she represents everything they find fascist, muddled and unattractive about feminism. Like Brown's view of hard-working families and most things economic, she's stuck in the groove of a 45 rpm 1970s vinyl disc - You Don't Get Me I'm Part of the Union, perhaps - and exudes far more that is offensive than charming. For instance, while her public desire to 'get' Freddie Goodwin was to a degree understandable, she managed somehow to get the most vilified banker in the land a degree of sympathy because of her sheer disregard for the Rule of Law in pursuing the witch-hunt. This really was snatching humiliation from the jaws of pyrrhic victory.
Why does she need a charm offensive, then? Well, despite all her protestations to the contrary, Harriet Harman wants to take over the Labour leadership when Gordon is finally pushed kicking, screaming, briefing and smearing off the cliff edge he has wobbled upon since his unelected coronation in 2007. And there can be no doubt she needs all the PR she can get: in June 2008, an ANI POll showed she didn't even figure among likely successors, despite being Brown's de facto Deputy. By August 2008, 65% of grass-roots Labour voters wanted Gordon out before the next Election, but some relief was given the stricken Premier when the same poll revealed that nobody (and especially not Harman) would improve Labour's showing. The day following the first serious touting of her leadership bid in 2009 (which she continues to deny) the Guardian received a stream of emails opposing her, with one remarking he had 'finally found a reason to vote Tory - Harriet Harman as Labour leader'.
Harman tries to nullify this barricade of opposition by saying that people accuse her of being dim, when she has the doctorates to prove she isn't. But here is one of the prevailing confusions present in Establishment politics: that IQ is a term interchangeable with ability. It is a life-lesson available to anyone with a real career behind them that success comes from focus and perseverence, not IQ. Oddly for a Party obsessed with equality, 'New' Labour makes a similar mistake in the difference between ethnicity and culture. Those who can't stand Hattie (and their number includes the Prime Minister) will tell anyone prepared to listen in private that she never listens and never learns.
Strong stuff. But of course as we know perfectly well by now, it's all a foul misognyist plot to drop a triple-glazed glass ceiling on Hattie's head. Like all extremists, HH has an infinite capacity for reality-rearrangement in order to suit her book. And her book seems to say - over and over ad nauseam - that men are the sole reason women don't run everything, and what's more are not a necessary element in the upbringing of balanced children. The evidence opposing this view of human wiring is overwhelming, as was confirmed yet again last year by the Social Cohesion Unit - an apolitical organisation whose speciality is challenging shibboleths. Other research (particularly among teenagers of West Indian ethnicity) has shown that for 30% of those joining gangs, the search for a father figure was the main motivation. (Absent fathers are a sad but true element in their culture).
Few politicians have attracted more venom. Fathers4Justice is a group with some dubious methods, but their desire for nothing more than access to their children seems both fair and socially healthy to most observers. Harman has yet to acknowledge the point, and gives the impression that pretending there's nobody crawling about on her roof somehow keeps above the vulgarity of the fray. To others, her attitude seems that of an elephant denier who can't admit she's wrong. In this sense alone therefore, she is the natural successor to Gordon Brown.
The ridiculous illogicality (and impracticality) of her anti-prostitution Bill adds grist to the charge against her of gender bigotry. Not only does a law making the purchase of sex by men illegal (but not the sale of it by women) strike all thinking people as manifestly mad, it stands not one scintilla of a chance of survival when referred to the European Court - as much of her legislation is and will continue to be. Chiefly however, it demonstrates a terrifying naivety about human nature. What, one wonders, is there in Harriet Harman's background and genes to suggest the source(s) of a common-sense deficiency?
One need look no further than one famous ancestor, her uncle Lord Longford - a man who was throughout his praiseworthy and laudably selfless life wrong about almost everyone and everything. His most notable dupe was Myra Hindley, but also causes such as unilateral disarmament, prison reform and probation procedures attracted his space cadet ideas. (I am myself a radical on incarceration matters - prison is obviously an almost complete waste of time and money - but Longford was the only fellow-traveller with whom one felt obliged to disagree on every issue). Longford was Hattie's uncle, and thus one wonders what the arch anti-feminist Richard Ingrams might make of the old boy's niece: when asked what the most frightening thing about prison might be as he faced criminal libel charges, Ingrams confessed 'A visit from Lord Longford'.
But Harman has the full set of factors required for complete social muddle. She was educated at a nobby private school, and took a further degree at Oxford. She has never had a proper job. She is married to a leading Trade Unionist. Her father was a Harley Street consultant. She began life as an outspoken Bennite. And so having had a life of privilege, her desire is to close the door after her for any of those lower down the scale who might fancy a slice of it. She is predictably anti-Grammar School, but sent both her children to grant-maintained Grammar Schools. As Peter Cook would have said "All the tell-tale hypocrisies are there".
If I seem harsh on these points, then there are two very good reasons. The first is that without what was the real Labour Party (until the public schoolboys took it over in 1962) very few of us would be socially or educationally where we are today. A lot of us would be dead thanks to an inability to pay for medical help. The likes of Nye Bevan, Herbert Morrisson, Clem Attlee and their ilk changed the face of Britain to the advantage of over 90% of the population. Only the Bolsover Beast and Frank Field get anywhere near to their ethics and dedication in today's 'Labour' Party.
Secondly, the Butler Education Act of 1944 (an all-Party measure from the Wartime coalition) created the Grammar Schools which by 1963 had come within a gnats of putting most public schools out of business. They very nearly succeeded in this because they were educationally superior and free; but more important than any other single point, they allowed kids like me from ordinary homes to get a truly world class (rather than spin mission-statement cliche world class) education, go on to University - and use ability and hard work to move into positions of influence.
But Labour's snotty intellectuals hated the Grammar Schools - primarily because of guilt about the principle of selection, and also of course their own life of untrammelled privilege. Ever since, Labour has been completely confused about the difference between equality of opportunity and affirmative action. And the result has been that the same public school, Oxbridge-Silk pillocks are in the Cabinet and running the country....in precisely the same incompetent manner as their forebears left us unready for war, social change, Dunkirk, D-Day and a hundred other things from Hastings until 1944. Harriet Harman is (I'm sure quite unwittingly, because she doesn't do honest introspection) carrying the torch for this tradition.
She does this partly by being incompetent. Even Tony Blair (a great promoter of women) spotted this, and fired her from a post in social security in 1998 after just over a year in the job. But mainly Harman is that most deluded of all the well-intentioned, a genteel field-leveller. Because she has never had to play on that field, never lived cheek by jowl with the ordinary yeomanry, never known what it's like to want, and never had to face up to the fact that savages are not always noble: as often as not, they are shallow and bigoted and thick and superficial. They find a way to work the system: and they laugh their insides out at people like her.
Lord Longford, Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, Tony Crossman, Vanessa Redgrave, Shirley Williams, Michael Foot, Tony Blair, David Cameron - they are all from the same mould of wealthy and highly-educated salon reformers. Having failed to redistribute wealth, they try now to redistribute privilege. They are become the titled classes creating the entitled classes. But the end result is the same: unwarranted privilege.
Privilege remains the thing wrong with Britain. There is no difference at all between the privilege to be eternally nasty about all things British (while taking our shelter and money) the privilege to pass laws which legislators can avoid, the privilege to have it both ways on gender, the privilege to avoid religious criticism, the privilege to screw up and still get a bonus, and the privilege to call ordinary people oiks because they lack the 'correct' accent. Very few individuals (and certainly no one Party) in the British Establishment truly understands this. David Davis, Vince Cable, Frank Field and William Hague do. It goes a long way to explaining their popularity. By contrast, if the British people ever vote in Harriet Harman as Prime Minister, I'll eat my trousers in Trafalgar Square. She is the 2010 version of Michael Foot, and if the Party has any sense it will not touch her candidacy with a bargepole.