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Clive Lewis ruins Tory peer for conducting class war live on the BBC

Labour MP Clive Lewis ruined Tory peer Mark Harper for carrying out class war on BBC Politics Live:

Clive Lewis: you’re “protecting your class”

MP for Norwich South Clive Lewis said:

I love the fact that we’ve just gone from talking about wealth taxes, where Mark here is adamantly against them. But when it comes to punishing people at the other end of the spectrum, the people who are relying on those benefits, he’s quite happy to stamp his boot down. And I think it says everything, you’re protecting your class, it’s what you do and you do it very well

Former Tory minister Harper responded:

When you say my class, that is nonsense. I come from a working class family in Swindon. My dad was a labourer, my mum was a correspondence clerk. I went to a state comprehensive and I was the first person in my family to go to university. This class hatred of yours, nonsense.

Lewis retorted:

It’s not class hatred, it’s class analysis… you’re looking after the interests of the people that you represent in parliament, it’s what the Conservatives do… I don’t need to know about your background… You’ve had 14 years looking after your class, the wealthy, the rich, the corporations and look at the state of our country

The idea that a person’s background means they cannot join the elite through protecting them in parliament is clearly bogus. Margaret Thatcher was born into a lower middle class family with a grocer for a father and she conducted far-reaching class war in favour of elites, privatising public assets, deregulating the financial sector, and crushing unions.

On the flipside, Friedrich Engels was born into an upper class German family and he went on to co-author the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. This demonstrates Harper’s diversion to his background is from the same propaganda playbook as Keir Starmer and his ‘my dad was a tool maker’ mantra.

Class war

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis told BBC Newsnight in 2015:

The problem is that austerity is being used as a narrative to conduct class war. To be talking about reducing the state further when effectively what you are doing is reducing taxes like inheritance tax and at the same time you are cutting benefits – that is class war.

Harper served as a minister in the party that continued doing just that. The thing is, the Labour Party under Starmer has taken up the baton from the Conservatives and carried on with austerity (2.0). It’s only from opposition from the public and the party’s own MPs that Starmer U-turned on the winter fuel allowance cut and backtracked on the personal independence payment (PIP) slash, while still maintaining the cut to Universal Credit (UC)’s health element.

On top of that, Starmer is continuing with the Tory agenda of privatising the NHS. Labour appear to be using the promise of new health centres as a ploy for more privatisation.

The NHS ten-year plan document states that the government will:

continue to make use of private sector capacity to treat NHS patients where it is available and we will enter discussions with private providers to expand NHS provision in the most disadvantaged areas

It also says that Labour will:

develop a business case for the use of public private partnerships (PPPs) for neighbourhood health centres, ahead of a final decision at the autumn budget

So, Clive Lewis was right to call Harper out – but he also needs to look closer to home, too.

Featured image via screengrab

By James Wright

This post was originally published on Canary.