Why Labour is no longer the natural party of the working class
Durham Miners Gala (Shutterstock)
For a little under a century, starting at some point around the general election of 1922, the Labour Party could reasonably claim to be the natural home for working-class voters. While other parties, including the Tories, took a chunk of the working-class vote, Labour was assured a plurality. The party formed to promote “legislation in the direct interests of labour” was broadly doing its job, at least in the view of most workers. One of the biggest revolutions in British politics over the past few years, disguised somewhat by the parliamentary drama around Brexit, is that Labour is self-evidently no longer the party of the workers.
Last month the Daily Telegraph published a Savanta ComRes poll indicating that the Conservatives could take a higher proportion of the working-class than the middle-class vote in the upcoming election . In total , 43 per cent of voters from the lower DE social groups, broadly comprising the working class (and those who don’t work), said they would vote Tory, against just 28 per cent for Labour. Yet only 40 per cent of the wealthiest AB social groups were committed to backing Boris Johnson, a fall from 2017.
The figures are of course provisional, and could be a little misleading as pensioners, who are generally Tory leaning, were included within the DE group. But these results are very much in line with a broader trend. 2017 saw one revolution, with the Conservatives taking a higher proportion of the working class vote than Labour (44 per cent versus 42 per cent from the poorer CEDE social bracket, according to YouGov). At the same time the Conservatives only led the wealthier ABC1 bracket by four points, allowing the likes of Kensington and Canterbury to go red, while the Tories seized Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent South. Next week’s election could see a sequel, with a higher proportion of the working class than the middle class voting Conservative for the first time ever.
Of course the supreme irony is all this has happened on the watch of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s most left-wing leader in its history and a man who doesn’t shy away from the language of class struggle. Under the Corbynites, however, Labour’s electoral coalition has become far less working-class than it ever was under Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, often accused by the Left of selling out to neo-liberalism. Since its foundation the Labour Party has been an alliance between the Left-wing intelligentsia and a section of the working-class, but never before has the former has such a firm whip hand over the latter.
As Labour becomes less working-class, so its claims of proletarian representation become both more insistent and more hollow. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their various media outriders enjoy going through the motions. They speak at the Durham Miners Gala and go on May Day marches, coating their speeches with the rhetoric of economic conflict between the many and the few.
But the gap between myth and reality has become impossible to reconcile. Rather than leading the working class , Corbyn and his allies are more like those who gather at weekends to reenact battles from the English Civil War.
The debate isn’t over whether Labour has become less working-class — that’s beyond reasonable doubt — but why. At least in part, it relates to Brexit. While voters from across social classes backed leaving the EU, available polling shows the wealthier classes were the most reluctant. Questions of identity and belonging, often linked to the explosive subject of immigration, have moved up the agenda of many voters. As in America, where a section of the working class willingly voted for a millionaire New York property developer because they share his social conservatism, so in Britain.
But I don’t think that’s the full picture. It is still about the economy, stupid. When you dig below the surface of some of Labour’s flagship policies, what you find are taxpayer-funded subsidies for the middle class. The pledge to abolish university tuition, not just for the poorest students but for all, will disproportionately benefit those who come from wealthy backgrounds. Labour’s plan to nationalise the railways, then cut fares by a third, will help London and the south-east above more deprived areas reliant on roads. Those in the top 20 percent of earners embark on four train journeys a year for each one taken by those in the bottom 40 percent.
Corbyn’s education policy, which includes the scrapping of free schools and the strangulation of academies, is essentially a wish list of the very middle-class teaching unions. Innovative schools, which have worked wonders for working-class children in certain inner city communities, would have their independence revoked. Labour gives every impression of caring far more for the statist sections of the middle class than for working-class self-improvement. It is notable that the party has pledged, in theory at least, that its tax rises will bypass the middle class and focus on the “ super rich ”, the “billionaires” and “huge corporations”.
Labour’s claim to represent the working-class, questionable for some time, now looks ridiculous. If the present trend continues for much longer, it will enter the arena of self-satire. Labour’s electoral coalition has shifted, only partly because of Brexit, providing the Conservatives with an opportunity they have moved quickly to exploit. What this means for the centre-point of the British Right, and whether it moves in an increasingly statist direction, will surely be one of the most fundamental questions for politics in the coming decade.
