When Conservative focus groups were asked before the last general election to select the picture that best represented Labour, they typically chose one of a lazy slob guzzling a beer while watching daytime TV. Four years later, the image persists. Lord Ashcroft’s new focus groups in Thurrock (Labour’s number two target seat) and Halifax found that this indolent character is still thought to epitomise the party. “Labour encourage that kind of behaviour. They make it too easy for people not to work and earn their money,” said one voter.
It is a charge that stings. The frequency with which shadow cabinet ministers assert that Labour is the “party of work” is testimony to how successful the Tories have been in branding it as the “party of welfare”. Ed Miliband’s own pollster James Morris told a Trades Union Congress meeting last year: “The challenge is very severe . . . if you look at politically salient target groups, those numbers get worse.” For those who celebrate Labour as the party of the Beveridge settlement, it is an unsettling reality. “If you’d said at the beginning of this parliament that the Tories would lead us on welfare, you would have been put in a straitjacket,” Labour’s former social security minister Frank Field told me.
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