The next Labour leader should remember the ‘politics of envy’ never work

Andy Burnham may be the trade unions’ favourite candidate for Labour leader but he is already distancing himself from some of Ed Miliband’s worst populist nonsense. This is what he said in today’s Observer: ‘We have got to get away from things that look like symbolism. I am going to put the mansion tax in that category. I am not saying it was necessarily completely the wrong thing to do, but in its name I think it spoke to something that the public don’t particularly like, which is the politics of envy.’

In a 1911 article entitled An Unenvious People, The Spectator paid tribute to the nature of Englishmen.

The festivities of the Coronation would have set an edge upon envy in England if anything could. It was a time when two persons were ” beheld in glory” and exalted above all others; when, below those two persons, the whole ennobled class enjoyed the privilege of being present in Westminster Abbey to the exclusion of countless persons who could probably be proved to possess more merit; and when rich people generally illustrated in their own persons how money means comfort and poverty discomfort.