Labour is no friend of the working classes

 The PM may be the son of a toolmaker, but he’s wedded to the worst ideas of our woke, green elites.

Source - Spiked - 16/07/24

Link

‘My dad was a toolmaker.’ So frequently did Keir Starmer repeat this line in the run-up to the UK General Election that, by the time of the Sky News debate in mid-June, mention of his dad’s job prompted laughter from the audience. Now that he’s prime minister, the phrase lives on as an oft-repeated social-media joke.

Despite some having questioned whether Starmer Sr really was a horny-handed son of toil, Keir stuck with this man-of-the people backstory because it supposedly revealed his working-class credentials. He is not the only Labour bigwig getting in on this act. Everyone knows by now that deputy PM Angela Rayner grew up in a council house and worked in a care home. Likewise, health secretary Wes Streeting says he was raised in a working-class family and had ‘retail jobs’ throughout his youth. Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds describes himself as coming from a ‘loving working-class family’.

The assumption seems to be that, unlike Bullingdon Club Tories, having a dad who worked as a croupier (like Jonathan Ashworth) or growing up in Tottenham (like foreign secretary David Lammy) puts you on the side of the angels. ‘Could the UK soon have the most working-class cabinet of all time?’, salivated the Guardian at the prospect of a majority of ministers being state educated.

But just how working class is the Labour government really? Whatever school they attended, 40 per cent of Labour’s cabinet members are Oxbridge graduates. His dad may have been a toolmaker, but Keir is an Oxford-educated barrister who went on to become director of public prosecutions. Chancellor Rachel Reeves went to a comprehensive school, but this was followed by studying PPE at Oxford and bagging a job at the Bank of England. Ed Miliband also flags up his time at a comprehensive school, but his dad, Ralph Miliband, was a leading intellectual who was profoundly influential in shaping postwar left-wing politics in the UK.

Strikingly, few Labour MPs have held down ‘working class’ jobs – or, indeed, any job outside of politics. Many have arrived in parliament following a stint as local councillors. Others have had careers in Westminster or the European Parliament. Three were special advisers to former prime minister Gordon Brown. A surprising number are political nepo babies, including Liam Conlon, son of Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray; Hamish Falconer, whose father served in Tony Blair’s government from 2003 to 2007; and Georgia Gould, daughter of the late Baron Gould, who led Labour’s strategy and polling for more than two decades.

It seems that, with a handful of notable exceptions, Labour MPs see being working class as an identity rather than a socio-economic reality. It’s a label they can wear, along with a pricey Me+Em dress. It’s a soundbite backstory that substitutes for both personality and political vision.

There’s something deeply dishonest about this proletarian cosplaying. And it’s got nothing to do with any individual MP’s postcode or school-catchment area. The problem is that Labour is bigging itself up as ‘working class’ at a time when real working-class people – that is, non-graduates working manual jobs and struggling to get by – have emphatically rejected the party.

A YouGov survey of how people actually voted in the election shows that Labour is the party of university graduates. Forty-two per cent of those with a degree voted Labour, compared with only 18 per cent who backed the Conservatives. When it comes to those who have no education beyond GCSEs, things are very different. Only 28 per cent backed Labour, compared with 31 per cent who voted for the Conservatives and 23 per cent who opted for Reform UK.

In fact, one of the main stories of this election was that working-class voters were more likely than any other socio-economic group to back Reform. No doubt some Labour cabinet ministers are coming out as working class in a bid to counter Reform’s populism. But this is destined to fail. Many working-class people have not forgiven Labour for doing everything in its power to overturn their vote for Brexit back in 2016. And they know that today’s Labourites might posture as working class, but will do them few favours.

For all Labour’s posing, whenever working-class interests clash with elite ideology, it’s clear where the party stands. Just take Labour’s attitude to coal mining. In a manifesto that pledged remarkably little, Labour promised an inquiry into a brutal clash between miners and police that took place at Orgreave Colliery during the Miners’ Strike in 1984. This idea was first mooted by one Ed Miliband, then party leader, a decade ago. As Mick Hume wrote on spiked back then, this allowed Miliband to show off his ‘non-existent workerist credentials’ at a time when the working class itself had been defeated as a political force. That Labour is banging the same drum 10 years later is desperate indeed.

Miliband himself now has a new focus – Net Zero. Last week, it was announced that a new coal mine planned for Cumbria by the previous Conservative government will now likely be thwarted before it ever even opens. Labour has ruled that plans did not take into account carbon emissions and so ‘should be quashed’. The new mine would have employed over 500 people directly and a further 1,500 indirectly. These well-paid jobs would have met a real need, in an area suffering from high levels of deprivation. But now it’s likely they won’t ever be created. It seems Labour is far more committed to serving the green dogmas of the elites than it is in seeking material gains for workers.

Labour MPs want to pass themselves off as being on the side of the working class. But don’t be fooled. They love a good backstory, but have no desire to defend the political will or interests of working-class people. Keir’s dad might have been a toolmaker, but the Labour Party will do nothing to improve the lives of working people today.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at MCC Budapest.

Close