Jonathan Todd

I’ve written for Labour Uncut that Alan Milburn is wrong to take up a post advising David Cameron on social mobility.

Iain Dale doesn’t get these Labour appointments to the coalition. The implication of them, he writes, “is that there are no Conservatives with the capability or talent to carry out these roles.” But Cameron, having spent a lifetime battling Labour and seeking to deny us power, isn’t now going to cede genuine power to us or acknowledge that we might have had a point after all.   

Cameron has devoted his life to preventing Labour having power because he sees himself as part of a governing class that knows better than the oiks that Labour represents. This governing class has a duty to stop the oiks getting power and wrecking everything for everyone. Noblesse oblige, old boy. There is nothing in the water at Number 10 which is going to cause him to say “I’ve been wrong all my life. What’s Alan Milburn’s number?”

But Dale isn’t the only deluded one. Milburn is too. And reporting on social mobility to this most patrician of PMs is the cruellest delusion. He seems, like Dale, to think that Cameron admires his intellect and wants to give him real power to act upon his ideas. Instead, he’s been set up.

The Liberal Democrats have made themselves a human shield for Cameron’s Thatcherite Blitzkrieg. Milburn is now providing Cameron with additional cover. He will politely accept Milburn’s recommendations and do whatever he was planning to do anyways. He will have surrendered zero power but varnished his subsequent actions with a sense that he is above tribalism.

While Milburn has enabled this sense, the reality is that Cameron is leading a profoundly ideological crusade to shrink the state. As this puts at risk everything the Labour Party has achieved, no Labour person should be doing anything to assist him.