Labours long march away from the working class

 How the Labour party found itself in its current predicament is a subject that is regularly discussed in the UK. A party that was created for the working class and had been strongly represented across the whole country now finds itself pushed back into the major cities and uni towns and with a minority of working class support. The electoral map is blue after the Conservatives yomped home at the last election in December 2019. 

Many point a finger at Brexit as the cause, the party had ignored the electorate and was punished for it. That is true but as with anything the actual causes are far more complex and really go back far further than the EU referendum. Labour like most of the left in the West has been electoral trouble for some years. 

Labour as one of the big two was and is a broad based coalition. A melting pot of the working class and middle class intelligentsia - Hartlepool and Hampstead held together via common interests such as the economy and social solidarity. Later on minority groups were added to the mix, attracted to the party over concerns about economic insecurity and personal rights. As a coalition it worked with enough in common to form a united front and with no side too dominant. 

The defining moment where the Labour party’s future began to unravel was on the 8th September 1988 when the Commission president Jacque Delors addressed the Trade Union Congress in the UK and called for them to support the European Union (EU).

After nearly 10 years of the Thatcher economic revolution the left was looking for allies and the EU looked like a reasonable shelter in a wild storm. Looking at what had happened over the preceding decade one can hardly blame them. The Thatcher revolution was neither pleasant or pain free for many as traditional heavy industries were dismantled and a new economy was birthed. Looking at this, many on the Left must have wondered what would happen in the next ten. So they threw in the towel on the traditional economic argument of state vs free markets and embraced the EU.

Embracing the free market was a necessary prerequisite for supporting the EU though many would have denied this then and now. The EU is a capitalist club and the single market was founded on the principle of free markets, limited state control / aid and the free movement of goods, services, people and capital. This meant abandoning the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy that Labour had once embraced. It was illegal within the EU as written into the treaties. 

By the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism in 1991 it felt like there were no further options anyway. The grand ideological battle that had consumed Europe and much of the world for 70 years was over. Francis Fukuyama's declared 'The End of History’ and that hence forward liberal democracy and free markets would be the universal systems that all nations would evolve towards. The right had won the debate leaving the left with what?

By 1997 the country wanted rid of the Conservative government which had been staggering from crisis to crisis for years. So after nearly 20 years in opposition the Labour party won the general election with a massive 179 seat majority. The emotion felt by many was genuine. Many including myself hadn’t known anything but a Conservative government their entire lives. People wanted a fresh start. 

But what to do with such a large majority? 

After all the emotions had died down and the joy of seeing new faces around the cabinet table people were left with a basic fact. The Labour party would not offer radical change as it basically accepted the existing economic structures. That was reflected in the pledge card which the party had produced as part of the election campaign. Smaller classroom sizes, reducing taxes, cutting waiting times in hospitals and getting people off benefits. This was a manifesto that any right wing party would have been proud of, the Labour party was offering a nip tuck to the country not real change.  

In 2001 two events occurred which further corroded the link between Labour and its traditional vote. 

One was the ascension of China into the WTO (World Trade Organisation) which put the de-industrialisation started under Thatcher into overdrive. Barely a week went by without more factories being shifted eastwards. It was the future said the government, the UK would hence forward be a service economy and well if there were some losers they would need to retrain, life long learners were the future. This was not what their traditional voters had expected, wasn’t this supposed to be a left wing government?

The second event which would damage trust in Labour and politics more broadly was the Iraq war. It was seen by many as a war of convenience for blatantly manufactured reasons. David Kelly the weapons inspector died in mysterious circumstances after slapping down the 45 minute weapons of mass destruction claim and within a few years of the invasion no weapons would even be found. Millions marched against it and thousands died including British soldiers who were drawn largely working class families and to achieve what?

With fundamental economic reform off the table the party instead decided to make radical change within the social structure of the country. Driven by an almost religious belief in the emerging globalised liberal world order it made three big changes which would impact the country in the long term..  

Starting in 1998 it passed a series of legislation incorporating rights into law and updating hate speech laws. These included the European Human Rights Act in 1998 followed by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and updates to workplace regulations outlawing certain types of discrimination which culminated with the Equalities act in 2010. These helped mainstream via the legal system a form of identity politics damaging social cohesion. Just as importantly it began to normalise the policing of language which many would react to later on. 

This new legal order helped close the Overton window of what was acceptable to even debate and enforced a conformity around new liberal values which were parroted back by a media which was largely stacked full of like minded people. A new form of liberal censoriousness took root where some subjects could simply not be discussed without being attacked. As Labour’s time in government extended this loop hardened with the emergence of a new political and media elite. Many of this new elite attended the same schools, universities, lived in the same areas and even married each other and so of course they thought the same. But they also rapidly became detached from the rest of the country. Hampstead no longer understood Hartlepool but didn’t really care. 

Another change the Labour government made was to massively increase inward migration into the country. Done for ostensibly economic reasons, the real one was exposed by a former speech writer for Tony Blair and many other senior ministers called Andrew Neather in 2009. He revealed in a newspaper article that:

"Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.”

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

 

Of course the population were never told any of this - in fact quite the reverse. This was both kept hidden and even removed from any official documents that might one day see the light of day. This increase in migration also had the useful side effect of increasing the Labour vote in key areas as they were the party that represented minorities many whom we can assume didn’t forget who allowed them to get there. What it also did though was outrage many traditional voters who were suddenly confronted with rapidly changing neighbourhoods and a competition for resources such as housing and public services. 

The new Conservative party leader William Hague in a conference speech 2001 said: 

“Talk about Europe and they call you extreme. Talk about tax and they call you greedy. Talk about crime and they call you reactionary. Talk about immigration and they call you racist; talk about your nation and they call you Little Englanders.... This Government thinks Britain would be all right if we had a different people. I think Britain would be all right, if only we had a different government.”

He was roundly attacked by both the government and the media for using racist language and soon leant to shut up. The Overton window snapped shut even further. 

The final piece of social engineering the party undertook was to massively increase the percentage of young people entering university. This was the beginning of the digital revolution and many were looking to Finland as an advanced economy which was doing well out of it. The fact that so many of its young people were in university was cited as a reason why. So more would go to university but they would have to pay towards it. This would have a very pernicious impact on their lives and the Labour party. 

Whilst this was occurring UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) led by Nigel Farage started to grow in strength. UKIP was launched in 1993 with the aim of forcing the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. It was for many years a fringe party. Few paid it much attention but at the turn of the millennium it began to eat into the established two in the EU elections. Many wanted to ignore it but the results were staggering and by the 2004 EU election it had taken 16% of the vote. By closing down options for reasoned debate Labour and the media were forcing people to choose the only party willing to even discuss many of the emerging issues. 

In Scotland going back to 1980’s Labour had weaponised identity as a way to shore up support as they lost consecutive elections across the UK as a whole. This involved playing up Scottish uniqueness as being more left-wing that the rest of the country (there is no evidence to support this thesis) whilst vilifying the Conservatives as being in some way un-Scottish. With the help of the poll tax it helped to push Labour’s share of the popular vote up to 45% at its height. 

When Labour came to power it proceeded with a form of asymmetric devolution as a way to ensure their dominance there. These two factors sowed the way for the emergence of the SNP (Scottish National Party) as a major force there. With Labour having moved to the centre dumping their traditional roots it was simple for the SNP to label them red Tories. Labours own indoctrination was used turned on its head and the SNP surged. The Iraq war and the national growing sense of detachment from Westminster did the rest helping to power Alex Salmond into government in 2007. 

In 2010 the coalition government formed and you would have struggled to get a postage stamp between them and Labour. Much as Thatcher's greatest legacy was New Labour so was the Cameron government Blairs. 

But the UKIP storm was ripping inwards. 

UKIPs support was not as many assumed just amongst old Tories from the shires but also from the working class. It was starting to eat into support for the big two in the marginals seats though many political pollsters and scientists couldn’t see it. It was becoming as much a reaction from the heart of the country against the new liberal political order as the EU. A growing anger that the political and media classes didn’t listen or even care about the concerns of whole sections of the country. These people were considered leftovers from the past and their views and concerns weren’t relevant for the future. 

Nothing demonstrated this more than the Rotherham grooming gang scandal where thousands of young white girls were groomed and raped by mostly men of Pakistani heritage. As early as 2001 it was investigated by Adele Weir but buried as inconvenient. This pattern was repeated as authorities backed away from investigating it rather than upset the local communities. Multiculturalism might not be as popular apparently should people realise that there are downsides and the ever closing Overton window meant most didn’t want to talk about it. 

As late as 2012 the local council was still trying to hide the full extent of the horror when they went to court to stop the publication of a leaked copy of the serious case review into the killing of Laura Wilson a 17 year old girl who was stabbed 40 times and thrown in the canal by her “boyfriend”. When the government ordered the release of the report 61 of its 144 pages had been redacted. When Andrew Norfolk from the Times obtained an unredacted version it was found that the council had hidden the men’s ethnicity as well Wilsons mention in a previous enquiry and the full extent of the councils involvement in her care. 

Beyond that one brave journalist none of the major newspapers covered it in detail. A wall of silence had descended when the downsides of multiculturalism were pointed out. All the laws in the land couldn’t protect people whom the establishment had decided were irrelevant. Those who did try and raise awareness of it were regularly attacked. 

The deep unease felt within the Labour party over the Rotherham scandal due to the cross over with multiculturalism culminated in August 2017 with two events. On August 17th Sarah Champion the local MP was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet after giving an interview and stating:

"Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls".

Apparently this was too truthful for a party which was reliant on the British Pakistani vote in many seats and had championed multiculturalism and diversity. This was followed barely a week later by Naz Shah an MP of Pakistani descent who retweeted a tweet stating:

"Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity". 

This was untweeted minutes later but many felt it represented not just her views but the Labour party’s as well. Apparently Labour was all for protecting the weak and the poor just not if they were white and being raped by minority gangs. 

In 2015 the Labour party held a leadership contest after the resignation of Ed Milliband after the election. The popularity of a long serving hard left MP called Jeremy Corbyn shocked many. But in many ways it was a logical outcome of the austerity drive imposed by the coalition government post 2010. People were hurting financially and the liberal economic consensus was clearly breaking down. Being pro free trade and markets is easy if you are doing well out of the system but post the GFC many weren’t. To see a hang on from the 1970’s talking about state intervention would have shocked people barely 10 years earlier but with Bernie Sanders in the US it seemed like the political weather was changing. 

Corbyn's brand of economic interventionism and social liberalism attracted the young graduate class which Labour had encouraged with its earlier policy changes. University numbers had surged climbing from roughly 25% of school leavers going into university to over 40%. This had driven many into soft subjects such as parts of the social sciences where they had imbibed identity politics imported lockstock via the academy but also via the internet and social media. All had the same debts which had piled up and many had degrees worth less than that debt. As the Labour party memberships swelled to over 500,000 it changed the internal dynamics of the party. The woke university group outweighed any other group. 

Corbyn won by a wide margin. 

This dynamic created tension within the party as its electoral coalition skewed in favour of the middle class. The working class became a critically endangered species with at least one MP suggesting a sub section for just them. 

The party of the working class barely had any.  

All these tensions exploded into view with the EU referendum where the UK voted by a small but substantial majority to leave. This came to a shock to much of the liberal and educated classes. “How could people be so stupid” became a common refrain. The thin veil that had partially hid the contempt that many in Labour and across the country felt for the working class was violently torn away. Insults such as ‘Gammon’, ‘Racist’ and ‘Little Englanders’ became common. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins summed up what many were thinking when he openly called voters ignorant and racist whilst suggesting that important decisions shouldn’t be put in their hands - apparently not clever enough. 

This rage increased as the parliamentary deadlock continued with unfounded conspiracies about Russian influence circulated amongst a supportive media. It didn’t matter whether multiple academic studies disproved it or that historically most campaigns are settled long before the voting day. Such was the detachment they couldn’t grasp that many weren’t doing well out of the current setup and didn’t agree with the direction of the country. Instead they doubled down on insults and conspiracies rather than analyse their own behaviour. 

By 2019 this culminated in David Lammy the MP for Tottenham in north London comparing the parliamentary Eurosceptic group the European Research Group to Nazis or South African Apartheid. He then doubled down on the Andrew Marr show a week later by declaring that they were not just Nazis but “worse than Nazis”. Much of the country heard and knew who he was really talking about - the working class. 

This rank hatred of the working class was evolving into a condemnation of the whole country as extreme and racist even though most polling and studies had shown the UK to be one of the most tolerant countries in Europe let alone the world. All people had done was vote for withdrawal from a political union and to take back control of the borders. No one was demanding the forced repatriation of anyone in the country and in fact every poll showed mass support for all EU citizens to be allowed to stay. 

In May 2019 the EU elections were held and the Brexit Party the new vehicle for Nigel Farage devastated the main parties across England and Wales taking over 30% of the vote and winning the most seats. Wales which had also been a Labour stronghold for years only returned one Labour MEP out of four. In Scotland the SNP smashed what was left of the Labour party meaning they had no MEPs. At this point you would have thought that the party would have paused to consider its strategy but it was incapable of rational thought. 

Corbyn a lifelong Eurosceptic found himself stuck between a personal wish to exit the EU and his now remainer crazed party. Pushed and pulled on all sides he tried to walk a tightrope hoping the Conservatives would self immolate over exit from the EU but slowly but surely the party position moved to an effective remain one. 

The final straw for many was the failed prorogation of Parliament and the refusal to allow a general election. Stuck with the coalition’s fixed term parliament act and with a Speaker of the House of Commons who clearly felt it was his mission to stop Brexit many saw a slow moving coup in action where parliament was trying to rob many of their democratic rights and Labour was at the centre of the conspiracy. 

When the numbers were finally found to force through an election Labour was in deep trouble. The Tories under Boris Johnson had continued to dump the Thatcherite language and economic policies which had damaged so much of the country. They were stealing Labours economic clothes whilst draping themselves in the British flag. Labour had little to offer except what amounted to a remain position forced through by Keir Starmer and a list of ever more ridiculous free offerings. 

This amounted to an electoral death wish. 

Hartlepool and Hampstead had different demands and the coalition collapsed just as many on the left had warned. Only there were far more leave supporting constituencies than remain. The country turned blue as the working class punished Labour for treating them with contempt for 25 years. 

This year after a limited review the party held a new leadership contest which generated little public interest with most barely aware it was going on. Most only became aware of it when the party descended into acrimony over a pledge card relating to trans rights. It was a sign of what was to come. In the end Keir Starmer was elected with barely 60% of members bothering to vote. A lawyer, QC (Queen's Counsel), former head of the Crown Prosecution Service and man most responsible for the party’s disastrous remain position. The party was clearly interested in learning lessons and reaching out. 

This internal disconnect from the broader public has been on display since the launch of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the UK. After barely a week earlier complaining about Dominic Cummings an advisor to the Prime Minister travelling to his parents when ill the party including MPs and even the mayor of London Sadiq Khan came out and roundly supported thousands of protestors as they flooded into central London and other cities. The hypocrisy was noted by millions.  

This turned to disgust as protests turned violent. 

Most were appalled as they watched the events in Bristol where a statue was torn down and thrown in the harbour by rampaging protestors whilst the police stood by and did nothing. BLM became a cause celebre for the political and media classes though few actually seemed to ask what the group was demanding. When they finally bothered to logon and read their website many tried to back away including Keir Starmer when confronted with BLM’s demand to abolish the police. The Labour leader said it would be "nonsense" in the UK, adding "The Black Lives Matter movement, or moment if you like [is] broader". He was soon roundly attacked by his own party and days later released pictures of him and his deputy ‘taking the knee’ to show support. 

This has continued as celebrities and politicians supported by much of the media have continued to push a critical view of the UK as a deeply racist country. Starmer after being excoriated by his own party has learnt his lesson and has since called for more diversity via black only shortlists to get more minorities into parliament. What the party never suggests is more working class voices though this is who the party was set up to represent. This no longer chimes with the new membership who largely hate them. 

 

This leaves the Labour party in a fine mess for the future. 

It has largely lost Scotland and shows no signs of recovering even after 10 years of an SNP government. It is unlikely that Starmer will cut through being both pro EU and hence uncaring of Scottish fishermen and weak on the Union after his recent comments on a federal UK. It is struggling to even spark a decent comeback in its traditional heartlands in Glasgow etc with the red Tory moniker firmly attached to the party. 

In Wales the party has led the National Assembly since it started but it is not popular and is largely seen to be incompetent and corrupt. Though support for the assembly has grown there is still an equal sized section of the population who would like to see it abolished and a return to direct governance from Westminster. Whatever happens the only party likely to gain from Labours declining support will be the Conservatives. 

Whilst in England it finds itself pushed back into the major cities and uni towns where grads and minority votes help to maintain support but this means an ever increasing demand for action on identity based issues which are kryptonite for much of the rest of the country especially when most studies show that the white working class is the group which is underperforming the most. In the north where memories of Rotherham are still fresh and trust is low the constant pandering to minority rights takes on a darker tone. 

It is possible that the party may make a recovery.

In Scotland there is a new Alliance for Unity led by the charismatic George Galloway who is aiming to beat the SNP at the forthcoming Scottish elections in 2021. A traditional left wing politician Galloway will be hard to label a red Tory and the coalition may provide a space where people on the left and right can converge and defeat the SNP. This could create space for a Labour resurgence in the future.  

More broadly the ongoing Covid19 crisis has not shown the UK government in a good light. Driven by events and at time a dysfunctional decision making system it has vacillated on how to respond to the virus, economy and the BLM protests that exploded after the death of George Floyld. This is breeding a level of disenchantment amongst many but we are still only nine months into a five year parliament. Certainly the polls are not showing any movement towards Labour with the Conservatives polling 5 - 10% leads. 

What could drive this either way would be the launch of an anti woke party on the right. This has been rumoured to be in formulation for several months as the government has wobbled on social issues. It would look to replicate the strategy of both UKIP and the Brexit Party, whereby neither came close to winning a general election but both did enough damage to force a realignment of the major parties. 

This would be a game changer and would probably force the Conservatives into a more socially conservative and anti woke position. This is what many of the new MPs sitting in seats won from Labour in the north want and when combined with a more interventionist economic policy could bind working class votes to the party for a generation. Time will tell if this will happen but I am reliably informed that it is becoming an ever increasing likelihood. 

Overall the country is in a state of flux and the cards are stacked against Labour. It finds itself stuck as the political pendulum swings away and the system realigns. Brexit may well end up being just the opening battle of a longer political war within the UK and Labour is in a bad place to fight it.