How Labour abandoned the working class

Now the posh party for London’s middle class and elite, it has turned its back on its core voters – and the numbers prove it

27 September 2025 6:00am BST

Daily Telegraph 

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In the 1990s, when the New Labour project was taking off and its middle-class politicians were coming to prominence, there was a commonly heard joke at political events, which eventually spread to the country at large. Peter Mandelson – then a middle-class poster boy for New Labour – had supposedly visited a northern chippy and asked for guacamole with his fish and chips, not realising that he was in fact pointing at a tray of mushy peas.

This made-up story always got a good laugh because of the clash between Mandelson’s very middle-class background and his working-class party. Mandelson – Labour’s new MP for the historic working-class town of Hartlepool at the time – was still viewed as an anomaly who stood out in a party still entwined with the industrial trade union movement.

A variation of that joke wouldn’t be funny now – not because Labour’s leadership is all posh (they are not at all), but because their activists and voters have become so much more middle-class over time. It’s genuinely hard to imagine today’s Labour activists going to a northern fish and chip shop at all – a vegan café, yes; a chippy, no.

Labour is now so dominated by middle-class activists that it is unrecognisable from the party it was just 20 years ago. Labour is becoming a middle-class movement for mostly middle-class, urban voters – including some of the wealthiest people in Britain.

Recent analysis by The Economist of data collected in the British Election Study revealed that just 18 per cent of voters from households with incomes lower than £30,000 would vote for Labour if a general election were held now. For the first time, the proportion of voters from the highest income bracket (earning £70,000-plus) who say they intend to vote for Labour is higher than the proportion of those in the lowest income bracket (earning sub-£30,000) planning to back the party.

In this case, the question isn’t: “Where did it all go wrong?”, for the modern Labour Party seems to prefer its new middle-class voters and has cultivated them at the expense of its historic base. In fact, the party has actively gone to war with its traditional voters and deliberately driven them away; Labour came to despise the policy priorities and values of working-class voters, and these voters came to recognise it.

Plummeting support

Political scientists have traditionally broken the electorate up into social groups from A to E. AB refers to affluent professional voters, C1 to lower-middle-class voters, C2 to semi-skilled affluent working-class voters, and DE to poorer working-class voters. These groups are arguably now becoming a little old hat, but they still do a good job as a shorthand description of an electorate which largely considers itself either middle class or working class.

The shift in Labour’s core vote from working class to middle class is unmistakable and shocking. In October 1974, Labour secured 57 per cent of votes from DE voters. This tipped 59 per cent in 1997, during Tony Blair’s historic landslide. It then gradually fell over time, to just 40 per cent in 2010, when David Cameron formed a Tory-led coalition government with the Lib Dems. By 2024, just 32 per cent of DE voters supported Labour.

We see the same story with more affluent working-class voters from a C2 background. In October 1974, 49 per cent of C2 voters chose Labour, rising to 50 per cent in 1997. This share fell to 29 per cent in 2010, and has stayed roughly in this place since then: an estimated 32 per cent in the 2019 election and 31 per cent in 2024.

Now, the number of working-class voters overall – the combined C2DE groups – saying they will vote Labour is just 17 per cent (while 38 per cent say they will vote Reform).

At the same time, Labour’s middle-class vote has grown significantly. In October 1974, Labour secured a measly 19 per cent of professional ABC1 voters (a slightly broader group, denoting all “middle-class” voters), rising to 34 per cent in 1997 and 2001. In the Boris Johnson-led Tory wipe-out in 2019, Labour still secured 30 per cent of higher-level professional AB votes and 32 per cent of lower-middle-class C1 votes. In 2024, Labour secured 36 per cent of ABC1 votes.

Now, 23 per cent of general middle class voters – from the ABC1 groups – say they will vote Labour, which is significantly higher than the number of working-class voters with the same political plan.

What is true of Labour’s voters seems true of its members, too. Although Sir Keir Starmer’s party, like the Conservatives, is understandably secretive about its membership profile, research led by the political scientist Prof Tim Bale for the Party Members Project (run out of Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University) suggests that Labour activists are similarly changing. According to this research, members are 72 per cent middle-class ABC1 voters and 18 per cent live in London – disproportionately high relative to London’s position within the UK. Furthermore, 72 per cent are over the age of 50.

This situation was foretold by Jack Scott, a Labour Sheffield City councillor, in an article for the Labour-leaning Fabian Society in 2015. Remarking upon the growth of the party’s middle-class membership, Scott wrote: “Talking to colleagues across the country, it certainly appears that the party across England is becoming more like the party in London. The vast majority of new members come from the middle classes, the public sector and BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] communities, all sharing a distinctly cosmopolitan outlook… As a result, the membership of wards in middle-class areas is growing much faster than wards in working-class areas. Membership is also growing fastest in London and slowest in the North East.”

Voters flocking to Reform

The strange thing is Labour’s evolution to a middle-class party has happened as its senior leadership has become more working class. The current Labour Cabinet has the highest proportion of state-educated members of any since the Second World War. This isn’t a case, therefore, of working-class voters being put off by the different appearance of the party’s leadership.

We can debate how working-class Sir Keir is (he doesn’t come across so, despite repeatedly emphasising his credentials as the son of a toolmaker), but there are others who grew up in poorer, working-class families. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, grew up in a single-parent household on a council estate; Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, grew up in a council flat in London. And there was, of course, Angela Rayner, who left the Cabinet a few weeks ago.

Compare this Cabinet to Labour cabinets of the post-war period, when Labour completely dominated working-class politics. While the party always had senior working-class politicians such as Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, it had its share of toffs too.

Clement Attlee, Labour’s legendary post-Second World War leader, who launched the NHS, was born into an upper-middle-class family; his father was a solicitor and his mother worked for the Art Union of London. To modern ears listening to interviews on YouTube, his accent sounds comically, anachronistically posh.

Tony Benn, Labour’s firebrand Left-wing orator of the 1970s, who came to embody radical Left-wing politics in that era, was at least as posh as Attlee. Michael Foot, Labour’s leader into the disastrous 1983 election, when Thatcher wiped Labour out, was from an affluent professional background. Blair was a London lawyer who had been educated at prestigious private schools before Oxford.

You would expect the modern Labour Party, with these state-educated politicians at the top of the party, to have a fingertip feeling for the priorities and values of British working-class voters and to fight for the same things. On the contrary, today’s Labour Party isn’t just failing to resonate with working-class voters; it has driven vast numbers of them to Reform, via Johnson’s Conservative Party.

It clearly isn’t this Government’s class background that has caused this massive shift in the party’s support base. For the explanation, we need to look elsewhere.

Dash to irrelevance

Above all – and this is so often true in politics – we need to look at how Labour’s policy priorities changed over time. Simply put, Labour’s politicians and activists stopped talking about issues working-class people cared about, and then they went to war with their historic base on what working-class people actually hold dear.

Starmer’s recognition of a Palestinian state last Sunday is a perfect case in point. Here was a British prime minister making a set-piece statement, which had been trailed in advance to great excitement among Labour MPs and activists, and which led the news in every single media outlet, but which was completely and totally irrelevant to the English working class.

The Prime Minister talked about the Middle East as if it was as familiar to English voters as the Costa del Sol, but most working-class voters couldn’t place either Israel or Palestine on a map and consider them to be two arbitrary foreign places with no historic links with Britain.

In a YouGov poll last week, people were asked which side they sympathised with more in the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. Despite massive news coverage on the issue in the last few years (and beyond), an extraordinary 39 per cent of working-class C2DE voters said they didn’t know. Nearly half of these people (45 per cent) said they didn’t know whether the Government should recognise Palestine as an independent state. Such high “don’t knows” are very unusual and reflect a complete lack of either understanding or interest.

Labour has been running away from mainstream politics ever since Gordon Brown’s failed 2010 general election campaign. While Brown was a shockingly poor prime minister, he at least kept Labour focused on issues ordinary people cared about – above all, the state of the economy, jobs and welfare.

The dash to irrelevance came when Ed Miliband took over in 2010. His obsession with the environment simply left working-class voters behind. These voters weren’t opposed to his environmental policies – quite the reverse, working-class voters began to care much more about the environment over time – but they simply weren’t tier-one issues for them.

From Miliband’s leadership onwards, Labour’s politicians and activists started to talk much more about the environment and foreign policy, but then also gender identity, trans rights, “hate speech”, female representation on the boards of large companies, misogyny and sexism, and many other issues of differing levels of importance but far removed from the daily lives of ordinary working-class people.

Even Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, who is now touted as a sensible, tough-on-crime, old-school politician, thought it normal to join a protest at a Birmingham Sainsbury’s in 2014, as a sitting MP, to demand that the supermarket stop selling goods produced in disputed Israeli settlements. The shop was forced to close for the afternoon. Mahmood reportedly said at the time: “We managed to close down that store at peak time on a Saturday. This is how we can make a difference.” Most working-class voters would not have had a clue what she was talking about.

For a time, much of this passed working-class voters by; most voters think politicians and activists always talk about abstract policies in excessively complicated ways; that’s no big deal. However, a serious problem emerged when Labour’s policy priorities and their language seemed definitively to prioritise other groups above English working-class voters – and when their politicians and activists tore into their values.

Big immigration party

This began in earnest after the 2016 Brexit referendum. While affluent professional AB voters chose Remain by 59 per cent to 41 per cent, poorer working-class DE voters chose Leave by 64 per cent to 36 per cent. C2, more affluent working-class voters, chose Leave by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. However, in the aftermath of the referendum, many of Labour’s senior politicians and its activists not only seemed to be trying to usurp the will of the people, they justified it by essentially saying working-class voters were driven by racism and were ultimately too thick to make independent decisions and were duped by “liars”.

This had a catastrophic effect. It was the period in which vast numbers of working-class voters turned to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in the 2019 European elections (the party secured more than 30 per of the vote), and then to Johnson’s super-charged, Leave-minded Conservative Party, in the general election of the same year.

If Labour’s position on Europe angered them, it was the party’s position on immigration that sent working-class voters flocking to Right-leaning alternatives. As the Tories pledged big cuts in immigration (which turned out to be empty promises), Labour politicians and activists seemed endlessly to oppose such curbs and to question the motives of those who supported them. In the late 2010s, Labour became a big immigration party. Starmer briefly reassured working-class voters this wasn’t the case ahead of the 2024 election, but lost them again as soon as he took office.

Even now, when he purported to admit on Friday that Labour “did shy away” from concerns on illegal migration, the Prime Minister was overlooking the fact that his own approach falls well short of the radical measures that many working-class voters want to see.

For the past several years, YouGov has been asking voters whether immigration over the past decade has been good for Britain or not. From 2019 onwards, its polls consistently recorded more working-class people saying immigration was bad than good. The most recent result showed 49 per cent of working-class people thought it was bad for the country, compared with 14 per cent who thought it was good.

Consistent with Labour’s position at the time, until April 2023 more middle-class people said immigration was good than bad, but now even this group has shifted their views, with 41 per cent of ABC1s saying it has been bad, compared with 22 per cent saying it has been good.

Obsession with the Middle East

Worse than this, Labour came to be seen as being on the side of anti-English and anti-British movements. While Jeremy Corbyn initially piqued the interest of a working-class furious with the status quo of British politics, they turned on him furiously ahead of the 2019 election, when further inspection of his views on Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Russia and elsewhere appeared to place him permanently on the side of Britain’s enemies. Labour’s obsession with the Middle East, and the Left’s apparent love of the Palestinian flag over the Union flag, has underlined this perception of a reverence for all things foreign over all things English.

In his mostly superb 1941 essay on the English, The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell talked about the anti-British Left intellectuals who prefer every country over their own. Left-wing hostility to England is a very old sentiment. And yet there is something about the views of the modern Left which make it very peculiarly, aggressively antipathetic to the English working-class. (The old Left were at least obsessed with the USSR which theoretically, although not in practice, put the interests of working-class people first.)

A whole generation of British activists are coming through who have imbibed radical American Left-wing political philosophy which, above all, stresses the importance of helping perceived victims of injustice. Crucially, the American Left have successfully argued (to other activists in the West) that one person’s suffering is everyone’s suffering – and therefore that nobody on the Left can prioritise one cause or set of victims over another. This explains why Greta Thunberg, previously a hardline environmental champion, has pivoted to become one of the leading pro-Gaza activists. And it explains why pro-Palestine marches tend to be flooded with placards saying things like “Gays for Gaza”; it is pointless for outsiders to point out the obvious contradiction in this statement.

The Labour Party doesn’t profess this extreme American political philosophy. However, the fact that so many of its activists demand action along these lines obviously affects the actions of MPs. More than that, many senior party activists and MPs have grown up with this Americanised vision of politics, and therefore think that a milder version of it must be normal and mainstream.

When it comes to quantifying the extent to which Labour activists have abandoned working-class concerns, the numbers are stark. A massive 84 per cent of Labour members were Remain supporters, according to academic research led by Prof Bale in 2024. By 53 per cent to 47 per cent they disagreed with the statement “I am proud of my country’s history”. Some 39 per cent said that immigration levels of the past 10 years had been “about right”, compared with 34 per cent who said they had been too high and 17 per cent who said too low. Nearly all (96 per cent) supported the Government’s plan to meet net zero emissions by 2025.

Need to accept reality

At the moment, Labour is losing votes to parties on the Right and the Left; it is also facing the prospect of a surge in single-issue independent candidates driven by a range of issues (Palestine, most obviously). This is leading to a mixture of finger-pointing internally and endless navel-gazing. They look like the Tories did in the last few months in power: internal chaos is paralysing the governing party and further detaching them from an angry electorate which seems to be itching to kick them out after a little more than a year.

While they’ve had a bad year and a shocking last couple of months, their dire poll ratings aren’t a reflection of brilliant political alternatives, nor poor judgments on high-stakes issues. They wouldn’t be riding high even if they hadn’t suffered the political scandals of Angela Rayner’s tax affairs and Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile. They are sinking in the polls because the working-class voters that put them in power have turned on them. Until they accept this basic reality, they have no chance of bouncing back.

Can they ever bounce back though? Under Starmer, the answer is a hard no. He fundamentally can’t understand provincial England – the daily lives of people who live there, their values and their policy priorities. He certainly can’t understand their patriotism, which, despite his reassurances of similar sentiments, looks alien to him. His apparent desire to “reclaim” the flag from the “far-Right” ignores the fact that the English working class never surrendered it to anyone in the first place – it was the Left that ran away from it.

Whether his similarly minded Labour colleagues could achieve the necessary pivot is very much an open question. When you look beyond Andy Burnham’s egotistical rhetoric, he at least talks about a range of policy priorities on tax and spending that would appeal to many working-class voters. But you have to doubt whether he’d have the toughness to talk about England like the patriotic Labour politicians that went before him.

It seems likely Labour are destined to be the posh party for some time yet.