One of my favourite movies when I was a child was a David Niven romp called Paper Tiger from 1975. The Niven character, an affable Walter Mitty-type dreamer and congenital Billy Liar, invents a war hero background for himself. He spins tall stories of phoney heroics to everyone around him, including his charge, a little Japanese boy to whom he teaches English.

At the end of the movie, the Niven character (Major Bradbury) admits that his carefully spun background is just that - a total fiction. Addressing his father, played by Toshiro Mifune, Bradbury says he can be of no more use to the boy now that he has been exposed as a liar. Mifune, aware of the affection his son holds for the old man, responds: "What matters to me is not your past but my son's future."

Hold on to that thought.

I feel the same way, you see, when the UK's Labour government, clearly in its death throes despite a partial revival in the polls, dredges up Conservative leader David Cameron's old Etonian past and tries to unfurl its wearisome red flag again. 

Class warfare used to permeate the Labour ranks. In 1964, former Tory prime minister Alec Douglas-Home was so lampooned as an aristocrat -- more at home on the grouse moors of Scotland than in modern Britain -- that it probably cost him the election. A satirical programme hosted by David Frost mocked him mercilessly, so much so that the poor old codger became a bit of a joke.

Class politics was harder to sustain when Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit and their acolytes appeared on the scene. The new breed of Tory galvanised so-called Essex man to vote conservative, appealing to voters'  aspirations, for better or worse. But class re-emerged at the time of the 1984 miners' strike. Tony Benn, who as a Marxist always had a tendency to romanticise the working class, for example, commented that the miners were like "Greek gods". And, of course, Labour's whole economic policy was designed to claw down the aristocracy, a belief that society had to be levelled down somehow. 

In the 1990s class became less relevant, particularly with such a classless (and colourless) Tory leader like John Major.  Nevertheless, a kind of inverted snobbery, which can be just as pernicious as other forms of snobbery, remained in the Labour ranks, particularly on the far left. Former house of commons speaker Michael Martin, for example, apparently railed against an assistant for speaking too posh. That's classic "Old Labour" prejudice for you. 

Now, on the cusp of 2010, inverted snobbery comes back full throttle. Prime minister Gordon Brown and home secretary Alan Johnson have been playing the class card avidly, perhaps hoping it will consolidate Labour's core vote. I doubt it. You see, the fact that Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne and even jolly "silly arse" London mayor Boris Johnson hail from top public schools matters to me not one iota. It's what they plan to do that interests me, not the colour of their school tie.

So please, Messrs Brown and (Alan) Johnson, stop boring us with your class sideshow. Address the real issues - the huge debt facing the British economy and the overwhelming evidence of social decay in the UK. We know why you try and bring class into it. Sensible voters know why too. You do it because your government has failed. If you continue to attempt to distract UK voters from the real issues then you deserve even more contempt from the electorate come the spring.