tootoo52

Shoe Parts Edward Timpson is the Conservative candidate in the Crewe and Nantwich byelection, charged with taking on

Labour's Tamsin Dunwoody, the daughter of the late Gwyneth. A 34-year-old son of the family behind the famous chain of

British shoe shops, his upbringing was enlivened by the fact his parents fostered more than 80 children - many of whom, he

says, were escaping "very difficult starts in life". On the face of it, he may look like an archetypal member of the moneyed

Cheshire set, but this detail - along with the fact that he says he was inspired by his childhood to forge a career in family

law, specialising in "the welfare of vulnerable children" - suggests something a bit more complicated; a belief, perhaps, in

exactly the Cameroonian "fraternity" that some insightful Labour people are beginning to take very seriously.But never mind

all that. The Labour campaign, under the command of the Birmingham MP Steve McCabe, has rebranded its chief adversary "Tory

Boy Timpson", and is going for him with an eye-popping ferocity. Volunteers have been stalking him dressed in top hat and

tails; now, there comes a very nasty leaflet titled "Tory candidate application form", replete with questions and ticked

boxes. Number one is, "Do you live in a big mansion house?" Question two is - and, really, the sense of humour on display is

quite something - "Do you think that regeneration is adding a new wing to your mansion?" The third reads: "Have you and your

Tory mates on the council been soft on yobs and failed to make our streets safer?" But the best is saved for question four,

at which point pantomimic class hatred is suspended and we get something altogether more sinister. "Do you," it asks, "oppose

making foreign nationals carry an ID card?"Though the Tories seem to be hardly mentioning it, the presence of immigration in

the campaign isn't a surprise. What's unsettling is the language used by Labour, and the implication of a tough measure to be

wrought on uncooperative outsiders. It has to be said: there are deeply unpleasant historical echoes here that would cause

any decent person to blanch, but the people behind the Dunwoody campaign surely know exactly what they're doing.There has

been a Polish community in Crewe since the 1940s, but as many as 6,000 Poles have made their home there during the past four

years. According to the BBC, Cheshire police unofficially estimate that they make up one in 10 of the town's population.

Local schools are inevitably feeling the pressure, and though the social fabric seems to be holding up, things have hardly

been easy. With all that in mind, the essential Labour strategy is clear enough: not to concentrate on anything progressive

or inspiring but to run instead on a mixture of the Dunwoody bloodline, utterly witless class warfare, and the politics of

fear. One wonders what the more shrill aspects of the party's campaign will do for Crewe's community relations - but there

again, it's doubtful that such thoughts are troubling many Labour high-ups. Misanthropic nastiness, after all, seems to be a

central plank of the government's fightback.This stuff has a pedigree dating back well into the Blair years but seems to be

turning ever more ugly. Among the first announcements in the wake of May 1 was a loud Home Office pledge to try to realise

Brown's drive for "British jobs for British workers", by forcing employers to prove no Briton can fill a vacancy before

offering it to anyone from outside the EU. Soon after, there came Jacqui Smith's bizarre plans to "harass" badly behaved

youths using video cameras and a technique hyped as "frame and shame". Going back a few months, one thinks also of James

Purnell's proposed clampdown on the long-term jobless, Caroline Flint's priceless proposal that the workshy should be

threatened with homelessness, and the government's increasingly baffling drive on "Britishness", in which fine words about

inclusion are often overshadowed by the sense of dog-whistles being desperately sounded.Given the absence of any

comprehensible government message, such talk - much of which, as Charles Clarke recently put it, "flatters some of the most

chauvinistic and backward-looking parts of British society" - is now in danger of drowning everything else out. Moreover, as

the voters of Crewe may well have surmised, none of it adds up.While seizing on fears about immigration, Brown has still made

no headway on the issue of agency workers, which underlies so many modern tensions. At the same time as maligning many of the

nation's youth as yobs, Labour also wrings its hands about their "unlocked talent". Apparatchiks are encouraged to wage class

war for the cameras, but the government refuses to talk about compelling the ultra-wealthy to pay their way, or to make any

move on, say, the totemic issue of charitable status for private schools. The impression is of politics at its most dried-up

and disingenuous. The result: activists and once-loyal supporters decide to leave the party well alone, and floating voters

decide that Cameroonian confidence and optimism is much the better option.And so to a question focused 150-odd miles south of

Crewe. As Labour lays waste to what remains of its progressive credentials, one thinks immediately of that handful of young

(ish) Brownites - Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper - who usually go out of their way to talk up the

party's supposed soul, and the parts of the government's record that reflect it. Where are they, and why won't they speak

up?Even if what they had to say was couched in the obligatory political code, we'd know it when we heard it. Behind the

scenes, they must surely alert Brown to a simple choice: cut this stuff out and rediscover that moral compass - or bequeath

them a political husk so robbed of its essential identity that it will take at least a generation to even begin to revive it.

David Cameron's recent pronouncements are not nearly as surreal as they sound: right now, the Tories really are sounding more

progressive than Labour, and that way lies not just electoral defeat, but the prospect of complete wipe-out.