How Labour lost the working-class

The British working-class is a notoriously slippery concept to define. Coming up with a robust definition that fully embraces the complexities of class in modern Britain is challenging. It needs to be more than if you work in a coal mine, follow association football and own a whippet you’re working-class.

Many easier to define alternatives have been suggested, such as “the precariat” or the social grade C2D2, but despite these efforts most people still divide everyone in Britain into working-class, middle-class and upper-class.

The Labour Party and the working-class

For much of the 20th century the Labour Party was the home of working-class politics, supported by many (but by no means all) of the working-class at the ballot box. This has changed. Across Britain, and the Western world, more middle-class people are voting for left-wing parties and more working-class people are voting for right-wing parties. In Britain for the last ten years or so middle-class people have moved to become more left-wing on issues such as immigration and benefits while working-class people’s views have moved to the right.

There are a variety of explanations as to why this shift has happened, each one tells a story about where that theory’s proponents think that the Labour Party, and the left more broadly, has gone wrong in the last five, 10, 20 or 30 years. These explanations are competing narratives about the Labour Party, its history and its future. Below I will explain a few of the prominent narratives. My list is by no means exhaustive, but it covers the major explanations I found through my research. 

Who are the working-class?

To start we need to ask the question: who is the working-class? We could fall back on the historic definitions used by Karl Marx or Frederick Engels. Marx defined the proletariat as the social class that doesn’t own the means of production and their only means to survive is to sell their labour. This covers more than the working-class of today, a highly paid and highly skilled worker such as a software engineer or architect might fit this definition.

It also doesn’t describe the life of someone who worked in a factory in the 1970s, bought their council flat in the 80s, sold it in the 2000s property boom and now lives in leafy semi, enjoying a generous pension, but still views themselves as working-class. Someone who used to sustain themselves with their labour, but now lives rent free off a generous pension. This person might not have solidarity with younger people who are still working, regardless of what class they are.

A retired person, who considers themselves to be working-class, might be better off or more comfortable than a graduate (even one whose parents went to university) who is now struggling to pay rent from their zero-hours contract job. For the purposes of this essay, I’m limiting my focus to the people who consider themselves to be working-class as opposed to the poorest people in Britain.

“People who consider themselves to be working-class” and the “the poorest people in Britain” are not exactly the same thing (although there is a lot of overlap between the two groups). A 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey found that 60% of the British public identify as working-class and of those people who consider themselves to be working-class 47% had managerial or professional jobs. The survey called this “the working class of the mind”, which chimes with an LSE blog that says that: “Britons tend to identify themselves as working class – even when holding middle class jobs.”

A cultural definition of the working-class

The “working-class of the mind” highlights something that didn’t exist in Marx’s day, a means of defining the working-class by culture instead of economics. The proletariat were a new social group in Marx’s time, which is why he thought they held the key to overthrowing capitalism. A new group wasn’t weighed down with a history and culture that made it conform to the dominant capitalist ideology.

Whether Marx was right or wrong about this is by the by. The cultural definition of the working-class is important to how many working-class people see themselves. Having a certain shared set of values, tastes and attitudes is how many working-class people define themselves. The right attempts to win the voters of the working class by appealing to the attitudes that the average wealthy Tory and working-class voter have in common, such as shared sense of patriotism and dislike of “liberal nonsense”.

The right attempts to appeal to the cultural identity of the working class, but this doesn’t address the needs of the poor, suffering in poor quality housing or with low paid and insecure work. This cultural appeal to the working class is often more successful with older, usually better off, members of the working-class. Although under certain circumstances (such as the 2019 election) this can expand to appeal to more than just the comfortable members of the working-class.

An economic definition of the working class

I’m not here to argue that someone who runs their own business or works in a top profession like medicine or accounting (and maybe earns a 5 or 6 figure income) is not working-class, if they think they are. I’m making the point that this isn’t an essay about poverty. It’s about the political perceptions of the people who consider themselves to be working-class.

A modern economic definition of the working-class, as distinct from the middle-class, needs to go beyond what Marx wrote, as many working and middle-class people today are reliant on wage labour for their income. The more robust definition of the working class can be found in their material circumstances. The working-class are the people who cannot fall back on the reserves that the middle-class have, for example a family member who can support you if you fall on hard times.

This is the ideas of class that the left need to appeal to. The idea that the working-class are the people who are struggling with low pay, high costs of living, insecure work and poor-quality housing; the people for whom work doesn’t allow them to provide for themselves and their families. This different view of class takes into account how much our economies have changed since the idea of separate classes came into our minds.

The BBC commissioned The Great British Class survey in 2013, which found that Britain has seven classes, not the usual three. This is probably a more accurate summary of class in modern Britain, but to map seven classes onto my analysis will turn this essay into a book. So, to make this a manageable task I am limiting my definition of the working-class to the people who think they are working-class, as a state of mind or otherwise.

Different stories about the working-class

Some areas of the country thought of as traditionally working-class, such as the former Red Wall seats, are not solely defined as areas with a high density of working-class people living in them. Young people and better educated people have moved away from these areas as the jobs have moved to cities, which means these constituencies are now dominated by a specific subset of working-class people who are older, whiter and are less likely to have gone to university than the median voter.

Contrast this to places such as Haringey, which also has low wages and low levels of University attendance but is considerably younger and less white than Red Wall seats. From my experience, when arguing with someone they tend to change their definition of the working-class to fit the argument they are making, drawing more heavily on one or the other of these two broad icons.

I will try to keep my definition of the working-class in this article as wide as I can, to bring in as many stories and experiences as possible. However, the purpose of this essay is to find out why the working-class voters that Labour needs to win over to be in power are deserting the party, so I will inevitably lean more towards the Northern and Midlands, post-industrial working-class than the Southern or city based working-class who are still reliably voting Labour.

Why stories matter for this debate

In the absence of a reliable definition of the working-class we rely on stories about who the working-class are and why they might not be voting Labour anymore. Stories are not the same as political science, backed up by focus groups and polling, but they offer a way to understand the political shifts that have taken place recently in the UK.

In 2019, former mining town Bolsover elected its first Tory MP in over 100 years. To accurately explain why this happened from a political science perspective I would require hundreds of thousands of words and mountains of data, which I don’t have access to. The stories I am about to explore talk in generalities, but they are useful because they provide a broad vision of how the Labour Party has managed to lose the support of places like Bolsover. It’s up to the current Labour leadership to turn these stories into messaging and policies to win these voters back.

Story 1: It’s all about Brexit

Let’s start with an obvious one: Labour messed up the EU referendum. Working-class people were more likely to support Leave and Labour has been strongly identified with Remain. This was not only during the EU referendum itself, but in the three and a half years between Britain voting to leave and actually leaving the EU.

The story states that it was a mistake for Labour to adopt the same position as the Tories in the referendum, making it look like the establishment was lining up behind Remain and against working-class people’s desire to leave.

Grace Blakeley makes this argument in her article for Tribune titled How Labour Lost the Working-Class. She wrote: “During the [2019] election, I spoke to voters up and down the country who expressed the same sentiment: with the entire British establishment united behind Remain, they finally had a chance to kick back at a political class they felt had cheated their communities over many years.”

Blakeley makes other arguments about how Labour lost the working-class, not just the Party’s stance on Brexit, but her article is part of a story that seeks to use Brexit to explain Labour’s loss of support amongst the working-class.

There are issues with this story, not the least that it relies on a stereotype of working-class voters as Leave voters. Analysis from Lorenza Antonucci, Laszlo Horvath, and André Krouwel at the London School of Economics has shown that Leave voting is not collated with being working-class or having low levels of education (as is often claimed).

In a blog post for LSE they wrote: “rigorous analysis showed that the profile of Brexit voters is more heterogeneous than initially thought, and that it includes voters with high education and ‘middle class’ jobs.”

They go on to argue that Leave voting is more highly collated with a newly emerging “impoverished middle class” i.e. people who have middle-class jobs but have seen their standard of living squeezed.

This story also ignores the fact that Labour’s support amongst the working-class had been declining before the referendum, before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, or Ed Miliband became Labour leader. For example, in the 2010 election, 37% of people on social grade C2, skilled manual occupations, voted Conservative against 29% who voted Labour.

Labour’s disconnect with its former working-class supporters who voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Tories in 2019 is a symptom of a deeper disconnect rather than the cause itself. It’s not just that Labour made the wrong choice on whether to be pro or anti-Brexit; Labour failed to understand why people wanted Brexit. To get to the bottom of this we need a story that goes deeper and goes back further in time.

Story 2: A decline in representation

This story holds that a decline in the number of Labour MPs from working-class backgrounds has led to the fall in Labour’s support amongst the working-class. During the period where working-class support for Labour has steadily declined, it became more common for middle-class Labour candidates to represent working-class constituencies.

This often happened because these were seen as “safe seats” and a way to get political advisers into parliament, as part of the career path for middle-class Labour apparatchiks; from Oxford, to think tank, to political adviser, to MP. An obvious example is how middle-class Tristram Hunt (born in Cambridge, the son of a life-peer) was parachuted in to represent the heavily working-class seat of Stoke-on-Trent Central.

Ashley Cowburn explores the story of declining working-class representation in Labour in detail in his longread for the New Statesman: how political parties lost the working-class.

In his article, Cowburn said: “Data available from the House of Commons library shows that around 37 per cent of MPs from the party came from a manual occupation background in 1979. Fewer than 7 per cent did in 2015. Oliver Heath, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, claims this harmed the party’s image among its traditional voters.”

The roots of the representation issue go back at least until the 1980s. Cowburn spoke to Heath for this article who says that the decline in working-class support for Labour can be “quite clearly” traced to Neil Kinnock’s leadership "when he tried to distance the party from working-class radicalism". Heath said to Cowburn: “[Kinnock presented] a more middle-class, more sort of professional, social image of the party that then might attract some more middle-class voters. And that continued under Tony Blair.”’

The decline in working-class support for Labour happened over the same period that representation of the working-class decreased amongst Labour MPs. However, there hasn’t been a corresponding rise in support for other parties led by working-class politicians.

UKIP chose Paul Nutall as its leader in November 2016, who wanted to make UKIP the “patriotic voice of the working-class”. Today, this looks daft when we remember how ineffective Nutall was as UKIP leader, however, it was a very real fear for people on the left after the Brexit vote.

In 2017 Cowburn spoke to Nutall for his article and Nutall was keen to emphasize that many Labour MPs “have got absolutely nothing in common" with their constituents. “I mean look, do they have anything in common with a working man’s club in Durham, or a working man’s club in Hull, or Leeds. I doubt it very much indeed," he said to Cowburn.

Despite fear on the left of UKIP becoming the voice of the working-class, some people were skeptical of Nutall’s appeal. Angela Rayner, then shadow education secretary, said to Cowburn: “It’s not enough just to be northern and working-class – we’re not stupid.” She added: “We’ve been hoodwinked… it’s incredibly patronising, it’s not enough to just say we’ll have some northern trinket. You’ve got to have substance behind you.”

Why bring up the debate around an ineffective and largely forgotten UKIP leader? It highlights a flaw in the simple logic of the story that decreased working-class representation amongst Labour MPs is the cause of the loss of working-class support. UKIP were unable to steal Labour votes using working-class representation.

That said, this story is supported by evidence and goes some way to explaining why Labour’s support amongst the working-class has declined. However, I don’t think it offers a complete explanation, so we need to look at some other stories.

Story 3: Labour has chosen to prioritise middle-class values over working-class ones

This story covers a broad spectrum of ideas, such as “choosing Jeremy Corbyn as leader was alienating to the working-class” and “Labour has become too ‘woke’ for the working-class”.

Corbyn’s alienating effect on working-class former Red Wall voters is the largest factor in Labour losing last year’s election. However, like Brexit, choosing a Labour leader so at odds with what a lot of past-Labour voters wanted speaks to a deeper disconnect. The problem is not that Corbyn was Labour leader, but that most party members wanted him to be Labour leader.

The Labour Party is still made up of the people who voted for Corbyn to be leader twice. These are the members who want Keir Starmer to be more vocally supportive of the recent Black Lives Matter protest and make stronger commitments to left-wing policies. What these members advocate for has an effect on how Labour is perceived by working-class voters.

These members are at odds with working-class voters (and most other voters) on issues of identity. They are much more likely to be skeptical of patriotism, the military and the police than most voters. They have a more negative view of British history, especially imperial history.

A recent Labour Together report into the 2019 general election highlighted how the three groups (of the 14 they studied) that were most likely to support Labour had radically divergent views from the rest of the country on social issues such as immigration and patriotism. 

I write this as a middle-class Labour Party member who voted for Corbyn to be leader and whose views on immigration and patriotism are divergent for the average voter, as I have become plainly aware from polling and talking to people. I’m writing this essay whilst drinking craft beer, in trendy East London and leafing through the Dishoom cookbook deciding what I’m making for lunch whilst listening to Dream Nails. I am aware that this story says that the Labour Party has prioritised my values over those of working-class voters.

This story is best summed by a recent RT article by Dr Lisa McKenzie that argued that contemporary middle-class left-wing activists are more interested in symbolic victories (such as removing a statue of a slave trader in Bristol) than in improving the lives of working-class people.

McKenzie wrote: “The erection or removal of statues are symbolic decisions made by those with the most power to celebrate or denigrate any point, person, or narrative in history. Rather than argue among ourselves about effigies of dead white men, let’s do something positive and lasting for people who are still alive today.”

This story expects us to believe that Labour spent the last four years only talking about cultural appropriation, trans-rights and Palestine. Corbyn offered an economically radical program aimed at improving the situation of the poorest in society. Many of these policies were individually popular, but the overall perception of Labour and its leader led to defeat.

This story is also based on the assumption that all working-class people are white, Daily Express readers who have an inbuilt hostility to anything socially progressive. Some working-class people are LGBTQ+, or people of colour, or young people, who might have views about immigration or trans-rights more in line with those of Labour activists.

The working-class are not a single monolithic block who share one common set of values. Even a sub-set of the working class (such as Red Wall voters who supported the Tories in 2019) did not all vote the same way for the same reasons. There are groups within groups. Some more inclined to vote Labour than others.

Older, retired members of the working class are the most likely to hold socially conservative views and be at odds with Labour activists. They are also the least likely to be in an economically precarious position as their income (pensions mainly) have been protected by the last ten years of Tory governments, who chipped away at every other form of welfare apart from welfare for the old.

Labour is very unlikely to win back these voters, who might have voted Labour when they were working, but the ring fencing by Tories of their benefits means they are now free to vote for the party that aligns most with their socially conservative values.

Younger working-class people are more likely to vote Labour and have values more similar to the middle-class, metropolitan Labour supporters. There is a middle group between these two groups. People who are working age working-class voters in crucial swing seats, whose material conditions have become much more precarious over the last 11 years of Tory rule, and can be convinced to vote Labour if the party is serious about fixing the issues that blight this group. For example, regional underinvestment, lack of jobs and quality housing.

Research from Labour Together has shown that many working-class, former Red Wall voters have different social attitudes to metropolitan Labour voters; for example, seeing patriotism as something positive. The Tories appeal to the social values of working-class voters. Even those who are economically struggling and likely to benefit from Labour policies. Identity politics is a big issue that can turn these voters away from Labour.

The story of the Labour Party adopting more middle-class values that are alienating the working-class voters does a lot to explain Labour’s problems. However, it doesn’t explain why Labour’s economic policies were popular with both middle-class and working-class voters. To understand why this is, we’ll need to look in more detail at the political forces affecting working-class voters.

Story 4: Labour embraced neoliberalism

This story is based around the idea that it was Labour’s acceptance of the post-Thatcher neoliberal consensus that alienated the party from the working class. When Labour came back into office in 1997 they did little to challenge the low tax, low regulation, “free markets are more efficient” ethos of Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s Tory governments. Labour also did little to rebuild the power of the trade unions that had been decimated.

The story’s strongest evidence is Blair’s statement that his job “was to build on some Thatcher policies” and Thatcher’s statement that New Labour was her greatest achievement. This indicates that there was an ideological consistency between the two governments, which contributed to the prevalence of the alienating view that all politicians are the same.

Again, the process of Labour becoming a neoliberal party did not begin with Blair. It was a slow process that began in the 1980s under Kinnock, who took the party away from its traditional trade union roots and focused it towards winning the votes of the middle-class. In doing this he rejected many of the economic orthodoxies of the Labour Party. This continued wholeheartedly under Blair.

Most people don’t understand economic theory (including those who claim they do) and ideas like “neoliberalism” that might be common parlance in left-wing political circles don’t feature much in the considerations of the average voter.

Most people do have a keen awareness of the effects of economics on their jobs, their wealth and their communities. Many Labour voters have seen the negative effects of economic change in their communities as decent jobs disappeared and were replaced by insecure, low paid, causal work or nothing at all. The damage this has done in some communities (particularly in the former Red Wall) has caused many voters to look for solutions to their problems they would not have considered before, such as voting UKIP or Tory.

New Labour did very little to reverse the trend of deindustrialisation, (that began in the 1970s and was accelerated by the Thatcher government), which hit working-class communities hardest. New Labour creamed some off the top of the rabid financial capitalism of the City and used it to make welfare more generous for the working-class communities who had lost most of their industry, but they did very little in terms of offering hope or a vision of a better future to these communities.

Steve Rayson argues in his book The Fall of the Red Wall that working-class voters’ economic views are more left-wing than the average middle-class voter’s, and that voters in the former Red Wall would prefer higher taxes and more redistribution. This supports the idea that Labour’s move away from these policies in the 80s and 90s has moved them away from the values of working class-voters.

This story does little to explain why certain working-class voters switched from Labour to Tory, the party of Thatcher and synonymous with neoliberalism. The Tories’ support for Brexit partly explains this, but as we have seen, Labour’s declining working-class support predates Brexit. Brexit’s strongest advocates (the Farages and Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world) see Brexit as a neoliberal project. They’re not fighting to bring back heavy industry to Britain, but to free business and the ultra-wealthy from the oversight of the EU.

This story also doesn’t explain why Corbyn (who rejected neoliberalism) lost support amongst the working-class. It also doesn’t explain why Miliband’s Labour, with mild criticism of neoliberalism, performed worse amongst working-class voters than New Labour, who embraced neoliberalism.

The reasons for declining working-class support for Labour are more complicated than just economics. Although Labour’s acceptance of neoliberal economic policies did put them at odds with the values of many working-class voters, the social signals that Labour has been sending since the 1980s are also a factor. For an explanation of this, we’ll need to look elsewhere.

Story 5: Working-class voters are cross-pressured

This story uses the concept of being “cross-pressured” to explain the decline in Labour’s working-class support. This argument is heavily drawn on in Steve Rayson’s book The Fall of the Red Wall. Rayson writes that working-class people (especially those in the former Red Wall constituencies that he studied) typically have economic views that are drastically to the left of the median voter, but social views strongly to the right. This puts cross-pressure on said voters when choosing between a Labour Party that reflects their economic values and a Tory Party that reflects their social values.

This concept of being cross-pressured is interesting as it shows how working-class politics are different to middle-class politics. Middle-class people’s political views are likely to be more moderate than working-class people on both economic and social issues. For a long time (again probably since Kinnock in the 1980s) Labour has been chasing middle-class voters and has thus moved to the centre, alienating working-class voters on economic and social issues.

This story explains the difference between middle-class and working-class politics and also explains why the Tories were able to appeal to working-class voters, despite their economic policies being opposed to the self-interest of working-class voters.

(For those who are interested, the argument about working-class voters being cross pressured is explored in more detail in Steve Rayson’s book The Fall of the Red Wall. Shameless plug time: you can also read my article about his book that explores this topic as well.)

One piece of good news for Labour is the issue that has created the greatest cross pressure, immigration, is decreasing in its political salience. The socially liberal values of many Labour activists and the economic model based on the easy movement of workers, which the last Labour government was committed to, put Labour at odds with many working-class voters who were hostile to the rise in immigration that happened under New Labour.

Since voting to Leave the EU, immigration is seen as a less critical issue by many voters. This could be because voters feel Britain now has more control over its borders after leaving the EU. Some voters are, supposedly, not opposed to immigration, just to immigration that parliament doesn’t approve. It might also be because voters feel that immigration has declined since we left the EU.

Immigration may be less of a hot button issue, but Labour still needs to do more to make sure that the Tories cannot use the cross-pressured nature of working-class voters to lure them away from Labour. This involves Labour putting forward a program of radical economic change, one which both its working-class and middle-class supporters will like and benefit from. It also involves making sure that the party appears sufficiently aligned with working-class voters on social issues. This later part is easier said than done and bears looking at in more detail.

Appealing to the working class

There is no one clear story that explains where Labour has gone wrong in the last 40 years in holding the support of the working class and there is no single solution to the situation the party is in now. It is important to not think of the working class a single group. Younger members of the working-class are more likely to have values that align with younger people in the middle-class, who form the bulk of Labour’s activists. Winning over older working-class voters, many whom are materially well off, will be a lot harder.

Social issues, such as patriotism or Britain’s Imperial history, and identity politics will remain divisive issues that are likely to increase the cross-pressure on voters who can be won over by a Labour. To alleviate this cross-pressure Labour will have to appear more patriotic, or at least find a way to avoid accusations of being ashamed of or embarrassed by patriotism.

I’m not a patriotic person and I do think that political patriotism has many problems. I would like to explore the effects of patriotism, good and bad, on our politics in a separate essay. There are risks for Labour if the party attempts to appear more patriotic (not the least it being seen as insincere) but to win back the working-class Labour will need to appear more patriotic.

This doesn’t mean excessive or comic amounts of patriotism. Many voters require reassurance that Labour shares their values and isn’t sneering at them. For Labour to be seen as patriotic, it isn’t a case of “go UKIP or go home”, light touch patriotism is all that is needed.

Many people across the country are struggling with low pay, insecure work or unemployment, poor quality, housing, long waits at their GPs, a shortage of school places, their local school/hospital/any public building falling down, poor transport infrastructure and a general break down in the fabric of society that is supposed to hold everyone together. Meanwhile the wealthy’s interests are protected by the government. Covid-19 has made this problem much worse. This is the foundation that Labour can build a winning electoral coalition on.

The problems above affect both the working and middle-classes. Many people were struggling before a deadly disease ripped through society. There is an opportunity to win lots of votes with a message of change for the better and then, maybe, the chance in government to actually make people’s lives better.

Patriotism can be appealed to whilst also arguing for radical economic change. Over time many people whose views appear intransient can be convinced to be more open minded. The route to winning over the working-class is telling a story that offers a solution to their material problems, instead of fighting over issues of identity that divide the voters that Labour needs to win over.

The common thread of these stories

Each of these stories tells us something about where Labour has gone wrong in trying to win the support of the British working-class. Almost all of these stories trace the blame for this back many decades. Although, Corbyn carries the blame for not acting to reverse this trend and in many places accelerating it.

Corbyn has gone and his chosen successor is no longer in the shadow cabinet. The soft-left is in charge of the Labour Party and Labour’s polling has improved, but they still lag behind in the seats the Tories took from Labour in the 2019 general election. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader is a symptom of the larger disconnect between Labour’s middle-class activists and its working-class constituencies, which stories 2 and 3 argue.

Each of these stories helps us to understand where Labour has gone wrong. None offer a complete prescription for fixing the problem and the current Labour leadership would do well to bear all in mind when forming a strategy for winning back Labour support from the Tories.

Although each of these stories has useful information and all are good explanations, Labour cannot tell five different stories to win back the working-class or they all drown each other out in a cacophony of confusion. Labour needs to find the common threads of these stories to create a narrative that will win over the working-class and middle-class votes that Labour needs to get into power.

Polling station image taken by Rachel H and used under creative commons.