John Prescott v the Snobbocracy

Yesterday, Iain Dale published a light-hearted post asking some of his 114,000 readers to nominate John Prescott's greatest achivement.

I should have known better than to get involved of course...but I rose to the bait and suggested that perhaps his greatest achievement was managing to reach high office at all given his deprived background and the degree of social prejudice that he has had to encounter as a result.

It duly provoked a tidal wave of abuse with one poster suggesting I should be locked up in a padded cell next to Ian Huntley and another branding me "sad" and suggesting I need psychiatric help.

You can read the whole thread in all its glory HERE.

Update: Many of the comments on both Iain's blog and this one carry the assumption that Prescott owed his election as Deputy Leader to his links with the unions and to the "Old Labour" block vote. This is not quite historically accurate.

In fact, Prescott got the gig largely as a result of his steadfast loyalty to John Smith the previous year during the 1993 conference row over one-member-one-vote (OMOV) in contrast to the incumbent deputy, Margaret Beckett, who made the mistake of appearing to give only lukewarm backing for the idea.

Hence when Smith died and the two leadership jobs came up for grabs, it was Prescott rather than Beckett who was the modernisers' choice for deputy, bizarre though this may seem in view of their subsequent careers.

Doubtless some of the unions supported Prescott, but most of the left-wing ones, including the one of which I was then a member, voted Beckett-Beckett for leader and deputy leader.

The great Tory transport U-turn

This story has not had a tremendous amount of coverage, but I think it's potentially another very significant step on the road back to electability for the Tories.

In my view, rail privatisation was the single most damaging act of the John Major premiership and thus the single biggest reason why they deserved to be kicked out of office in 1997. It was clearly a scorched-earth policy designed to make things as difficult as possible for their successors, and in that, it more than succeeded as John Prescott and Stephen Byers both found to their cost.

Working-class MPs: A good or bad thing?

Commenting on the death of former miner and Labour MP Kevin Hughes, the former Europe minister Denis MacShane has lamented the decline of working-class representation in Parliament - historically speaking the original raison d'etre for the Labour Party's existence.

Macshane blames it on Margaret Thatcher and her destruction of the coalfield communities, but for my part, I put it more down to the progressive convergence between left and right and the resulting homogenisation of MPs' social backgrounds, as well as the narrowing of the window of social opportunity that existed in the 1960s and 70s for the likes of ambitious working-class boys like John Prescott and Alan Milburn.

Either way, Macshane's comments have provoked what, to say the least, is an interesting reaction on the otherwise excellent Labour Watch site, whose author writes: "It is difficult to argue convincingly in support of the idea of more MPs like Dave Anderson, John Cummings, and Ronnie Campbell in parliament."

Shame on him! Quite apart from the fact that the trio he singles out are all from the North-East - a bit region-ist for a Lib Dem, don't you think? - the constituencies they represent are all themselves heavily working-class.

Is Labour Watch seriously arguing that consittuencies such as Easington and Blyth Valley with large numbers of former mineworkers would be better represented by policy wonks like David Miliband or law lecturers like Stephen Byers as opposed to, er, former mineworkers like Cummings and Campbell?

As MacShane quite rightly says: "We have fewer and fewer working-class Labour MPs like Kevin Hughes now, and parliament is the poorer as a result."