The writer is Labour MP for Wirral South and a member of the Treasury select committee
It’s the question that the Conservatives are delighted to hear us all asking: how did they win those working-class northern votes? A recent promotional video for the party takes inspiration from football clubs who send their star players out to surprise fans: a highway engineer from Bolton gets an unexpected meet-up with Boris Johnson after explaining why he voted Tory in December’s general election. Social media has been sharing it energetically. And worse for those of us on the left is a related question: has my party, Labour, become too middle-class to win?
The truth is, as Tim Bale’s research project has found, all political party memberships are middle-class these days. He calculates that more than a fifth of Labour members are also stately home-visiting supporters of the National Trust.
For some years, there have been tensions on the left between middle-class environmentalists and those working in industries likely to be changed by the country going green. Labour tried to beat a middle path but risked pleasing no one. Brexit, too, was pitched as a battle between middle-class, big-city Labour voters who backed Remain and small-town Labour voters who backed Leave. Again, taking the middle path ensured that Labour’s coalition of support at last year’s election was too small to win — among other problems.
But this is only what it looks like on the surface. Underneath, this is a story about the nature of work changing. What is a working-class job when work that used to be manual is now done by robots? Traditionally working-class jobs such as engineering and manufacturing are no longer at the bottom end of the pay scale. So when the Tories claim to have won the “blue collar vote”, what does that really mean? You might suppose it reflects support from low-income voters but that’s not necessarily the case. More likely, in so far as the Tories’ new voters are united by social class, it is a matter of identity and of where they live, rather than their place in the economy. (In any case, 60 per cent of Brexit voters were over the age of 60. In many deindustrialised towns, the key swing voters are mainly retired.)
This latest Tory video ad mirrors the party’s election campaign — and it demonstrates that Mr Johnson’s party is a long way from understanding the nature of the new working class. Images drawn from traditional male occupations dominated: the classic being the photo opportunity in which the prime minister drove a digger through a “Get Brexit Done” banner stationed in a warehouse. All the messages were clear: if you like your prime ministers chest-beating and masculine, Boris is your guy.
But who works in the sectors with the biggest productivity problems and the worst pay? Women. In care, retail and hospitality, where working-class women are much less likely to have a route to a better income, and women of colour even more likely to have less economic power. I doubt we will see the government addressing this productivity issue in next month’s Budget. The Tory pitch — though not in so many words — is about social conservatism, as much as it is a play for those who crave economic change. Lord Ashcroft’s polling straight after the Brexit vote found that 81 per cent of Brexit voters felt multiculturalism had been a force for ill. Seventy-four per cent thought feminism had been bad for Britain.
There are two lessons from this for the left.
First, honesty about Labour’s own position. We should never claim to own the votes of working-class people. Their support must be worked for and earned (alongside the votes of those who have already left the labour market). And we need to figure out where our new voters are: in new towns and the outskirts of cities, where families have moved in the hope of an affordable home.
And we must understand the nature of inequality much better, given that across the world anger about inequality keeps delivering rightwing, reactionary and sometimes populist governments. We should consider how much worries about our town centres, high streets and the built environment have dominated people’s concerns. Perhaps the answer is to see that the state of the place in which they live is as important to individuals as their own situation.
Second, Labour has a great deal to do to make sure that working-class people genuinely can participate in politics. Working-class people means women too, and it means people of colour. Class must not be used as a cover for a backlash against the fight for a multicultural, diverse and more equal Britain. Class politics is not an excuse to pander to those who wish to live in the past, or a past of their imagining.
