The Unmaking of the Working Class

Here in Britain, the Labour Party won a significant electoral victory in July 2024. But within weeks, the leadership cut welfare payments designed to help elderly people pay for energy costs in winter. Reportedly, the decision was made to reassure international money markets that the Labour government was serious about controlling public expenditure. But what then followed was a polling collapse, especially among lower-income voters.

Before the election, huge numbers of workers came together in Britain in a largely successful strike wave covering a wide range of industries. Here was collective action on a significant scale by workers against employers who had driven down the living standards of their employees. Yet Labour leader Keir Starmer’s first reaction was to issue guidance to Labour MP’s to avoid picket lines. Many of us went anyway. When we did, picketing alongside workers on strike, we were welcomed even though there were cynical comments about why our leaders weren’t also with the strikers.

And so a false consensus has arisen among the commentariat. The dealignment between working-class voters and the center-left parties has led to a whole industry of establishment figures, political analysts, think tankers, and others in search for answers. They have begun to carry out attitudinal surveys in a fumbling attempt to realign their parties with the lost millions of voters. Party leaders moved to the right on cultural identity issues thinking this was the way to retain working-class loyalty. But then, in a self-defeating spiral, this provoked a further migration away by progressive sections of working people who in the past would have voted for center-left parties of government.

Working-class people have been treated shamefully by the British economic, cultural, and political establishment in the last few decades.

On the one hand, the leaders of so many social democratic and center-left political parties no longer see their party’s role as redistributive, as representing the interests of working people as against the wealthy and the big corporations. On the other hand, big wealth has accelerated its own growth at the expense of the rest of humanity.

Take the current Labour government’s repeated assertion that its central objective is economic growth. But who will benefit from that growth? The forecasts are clear. Between 2024 and 2028, in spite of any projected economic growth, the number of Britons living in poverty is estimated to remain at about 14.5 million around the end of the current Parliament.

Meanwhile, the number of families in poverty where all adults were working and at least one was working full time has doubled. Over the last four decades, British workers produced more wealth, but their incomes no longer kept up with their output. So productivity increased by 87 percent, but median wages increased by only 61 percent. The additional wealth that had been created simply went to the wealthiest.

The country’s billionaires have never had it so good. The combined wealth of the 165 billionaires in the UK in 2024 is £965 billion. Corporate Britain isn’t doing so badly either. The UK financial sector held around £27 trillion in 2022. This is compared to the country’s gross domestic product of around £3.1 trillion in 2022.

It’s not simply income and wealth inequality that has impacted working-class life. There are several other factors at play here. Deindustrialization and the collapse of manufacturing left huge areas of the country and their working communities without economic purpose. The jobs that were lost were skilled, unionized, and relatively well paid.

Furthermore, the idea of social mobility, which was one of the ideological justifications for inequality, has proved to be nonsense. It was always held that if you had talent and worked hard you would move up the social scale. The Commission into Social Mobility showed that this is far from being the case. The truth is that our class system is frozen solid. If you are born poor today, you will almost certainly die in poverty and so will your children.

Finally, while access to housing is increasingly difficult, it is now quite clear that the impact of these deteriorating material conditions on health has been disastrous. For the first time in decades, poorer people are dying younger than they had been. This has all happened as a result of the draconian austerity forced on public services since 2010.

Whatever their rhetoric, key Labour Party figures increasingly moved away from promising radical material changes to working-class voters’ lives. They had come to the realization that they simply could not deliver it under the economic system they had decided to simply accept and manage. So they made their peace with neoliberalism. Working-class voters in turn increasingly abandoned the party that their grandparents and great-grandparents helped to build.

And now we see the hard right in the ascendant. In Italy, Austria, France, and Germany, for example, we see significant growth of hard-right parties, often with fascist roots. While in the case of Trump and the Republican Party we see an established party being inhabited by hard-right politics, in the UK the Tory party has moved rightward as it seeks to avoid being outflanked by the Reform party.

Listen to the People

I have worked and lived among working communities my whole life and have represented former mining communities for the last twenty-nine years. It has not been my experience that there have been marked attitudinal shifts in the direction that some are suggesting. Something more profound has happened. There have been shifts in attitudes. But these relate to dissatisfaction with how we are governed, insecurity at work, worries about the futures of children and grandchildren, and a system that is increasingly seen as directed by a remote elite who work in their own interests, not in the interests of the working class.

In the Red Wall areas, the material conditions of life have deteriorated for working communities. Take just a few examples: In the second half of the 2010s, the portion of children in poverty increased from 29.8 to 34.6 percent. From 2012 to 2021, the proportion of students in Red Wall areas eligible for free school meals increased from 19.5 to 24 percent. Men in parts of Blackpool are expected to live for 68.3 years, compared to 95.3 in one area within London’s Kensington and Chelsea. Indeed, 80 percent of the Red Wall area has suffered a decline in healthy life expectancy for men and women alike.

At the same time, total expenditure on social care fell in Red Wall areas in real terms by 23.8% between 2011 and 2019.

When we listen to voters facing these conditions, we find large majorities in favor of actions that most political leaders choose not to pursue or to even discuss. Equally interesting are polls such as the one carried out by the University of Northumbria that do before-and-after questions, where the initial questions simply ask for views and then a second question is prefaced by salient evidence. In these cases, the majorities for progressive solutions become even larger.

Recent polling proves the fact that working-class voters have radical and progressive views on transforming the material conditions of contemporary life. Public ownership of essential services is popular, as is a tax on the wealthiest to pay for things like the National Health Service (NHS). In addition, fairness is a key factor in many people’s minds. The poorest two-thirds of people, for example, believe the level of wealth inequality in Britain is unfair. Polls show that most have lost trust in the capacity of the political system to deliver the changes that our country needs.

The Sutton Trust opinion survey reveals great clarity of mind about inequality among the British: 83 percent of respondents think there is a big class gap in Britain today, with almost two-thirds believing that the gap is bigger or the same as it was fifty years ago. And big majorities exist for government action on inequality — with 81 percent for action to give fair access to education and 69 percent for access to job opportunities.

The gap between these sentiments and the policies proposed by the British establishment shows how out of touch it is with the views of voters. There is an insurgent mood in the country. This mood was reflected in high rates of abstention at election time, the referendum results on Brexit and Scottish independence, and the decreasing propensity of voters to cast votes for the two major parties.

In 1929, a Labour government was elected, and its prime minister and chancellor decided to follow the path of fiscal orthodoxy. This led to cuts that would impact their own voters’ lives. It took a labor academic, R. H. Tawney, to remind the party that it “can either be a political agent, pressing in Parliament the claims of different groups of wage-earners; or it can be an instrument for the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth.”

Although it is true that the new Labour government increased the statutory minimum wage and settled a number of pay disputes when it first arrived in office, as well as promising to refinance the NHS, it has not met either of Tawney’s alternatives. Unless it changes direction, it will pay a price at the next set of elections.

In order to really transform the material living conditions affecting so many working people, Labour will need to organize a rupture with the prevailing economic structures as well as undo the straitjacket into which fiscal orthodoxy has placed it.

The first task is to carefully analyze and understand the material conditions in which people live. This work will undoubtedly lead to uncomfortable conclusions for those political leaders who wanted middle- and lower-income earners to vote for them, but who hesitate to take on the power of big money.

There is an embryonic majority for transformational change throughout the country. Whether you have a degree and are employed in the new economic sectors, or are a part of one of the different ethnic groups, or part of the working class, or from the North or South, you may have different cultural identities or values, but the material conditions you experience require drastic change.

As the government moves closer to the spring review of public expenditure, it must, at all costs, avoid hiding behind fiscal orthodoxy. It will likely further worsen the lives of the very groups the Labour Party seeks to represent, some of which already seem to be taking a look at the hard-right Reform party.

What is clear is that democratic socialism is the only course to deliver for working people and the country as a whole. But where is the Left in the UK? We have been dispersed among many different groups and parties since the Jeremy Corbyn leadership. In the Labour Party itself, the Left has been silenced and sidelined. But this cannot continue.

It’s time to make our voices heard.