Labour: enemies of the people

If anything, Corbyn’s Labour was even more of an affluent middle-class and graduate-class vehicle than it had been under Tony Blair. The make-up of its greatly enlarged membership suggests as much. As a Labour Sheffield City councillor reported in a Fabian Society article in 2015: ‘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’.

According to reports from 2016, a disproportionate number of Labour members who joined after the 2015 General Election were ‘high-status city dwellers’. This finding was reinforced in 2019 by Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. He concluded that ‘Labour members are definitely more middle class than the average voter’.

The 2017 General Election result flattered to deceive Corbyn’s Labour. Its promise to respect the Brexit vote kept a portion of Leave voters onside, while its ‘progressive’ posturing had secured its support among graduates and affluent middle-class voters. Yet its 40 per cent vote share did not tell the whole story. The populist revolt unleashed by Brexit was now beginning to find expression through the Tory vote. The Conservatives increased their vote share in Brexit-voting, working-class Red Wall Labour seats by an average of 10 per cent – nearly five points above the rise in their national vote share. Remarkably, the Tories also won a higher proportion of the working-class vote than Labour: 44 per cent versus 42 per cent, according to YouGov.

At the subsequent 2019 General Election, the Red Wall did turn blue. It should not have come as a surprise. After 2017, Labour, with Keir Starmer serving as shadow Brexit secretary, had effectively set about trying to thwart Brexit. Its MPs, many of New Labour provenance, frequently joined in the wider media attack on working-class Leave voters. They painted them as fascists-in-waiting and dupes of malevolent actors. In response, those voters switched decisively to the Tories, delivering Boris Johnson’s government an 80-seat majority on 44 per cent of the vote.

Tory gains included Bishop Auckland, Bassetlaw, Wakefield, Leigh and Don Valley, all of which had been Labour-held since before the Second World War. The Conservatives even took Bolsover, former Labour stalwart Dennis Skinner’s old seat, which Labour had never previously lost.

The 2019 election was a watershed. It demonstrated once and for all that any representational link between Labour and the labouring classes had been well and truly broken. New Labour had treated school leavers and the non-graduate class as a problem – an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of globalisation and ‘progress’. The Labour Party of the post-Brexit Corbyn years, brimful with bourgeois identitarians, only reinforced the party’s hostility to working-class communities. And in its opposition to Brexit – in its attempt to thwart the democratically expressed will of the people – Labour became, in the eyes of many, the vehicle of their class enemy.

Five years on, little has changed. We are constantly told by privately educated, middle-class champions of Starmer’s Labour government that this is the most working-class cabinet in history – if you haven’t heard, it is led by a toolmaker’s son. Yet it is also true that many of its leading figures, from Yvette Cooper to David Lammy to Ed Miliband – not to mention the returning king himself, Andy Burnham – are veterans of the New Labour years. More broadly, in terms of MP intake, membership and voter base – not to mention its broad ‘progressive’, globalist outlook – Labour remains as thoroughly estranged from its original class base as ever.

It won the 2024 General Election largely in spite of itself, on a tellingly low turnout of just 59.7 per cent. The extraordinary unpopularity of the Tories was Labour’s only real asset. It did not win back substantial working-class support, the base of the populist revolt. Many of those voters either stayed home or opted for Reform UK. Labour’s success rested, as it has for over a decade, on the affluent, ‘progressive’ middle class. It is now a party so far removed from those it once represented that it can scarcely see them anymore.

Indeed, as a recent British Election study showed, for the first time ever, the proportion of voters in the highest income bracket – earning more than £70,000 – who say they intend to vote Labour is higher than the proportion of those in the lowest income bracket – earning under £30,000 – planning to back the party. It is a party of the posh and ‘progressive’. Of the pro-migrant and anti-Brexit. Of people who think the only thing the great unwashed want is a bit more welfare.

Over the past 20 or so months, Labour has exposed its social and intellectual exhaustion. Technocratic in style, globalist in aspiration, and culturally antagonistic towards the nation’s working-class heartlands, it has demonstrated time and again that it has no answers to the problems Britain now faces. It continues to double down on the green war against industry. It remains incapable, ideologically and logistically, of securing the nation’s borders. And, egged on by Britain’s cultural and media elites, it continues to posit rejoining the EU as the solution to all our woes.

Alongside all this, it continues to libel England’s working classes – just as Brown did Gillian Duffy – as bigoted. Indeed, it continues to paint the largely working-class-backed Reform and the wider populist pushback as ‘far right’, proto-fascist or, in Keir Starmer’s recent words, the trailblazers of a ‘very dark path’.

It is this demonisation of the increasingly assertive populist opposition to Labour and the broader political class that is most revealing. Labour is disdaining people’s demands for national and cultural security. It is ignoring their calls for new industries and decent jobs rather than welfare dependency. It is dismissing their profoundly democratic desire for greater control over their lives and their nation.

If Labour thinks that simply putting a new face at the top of the party will quell the populist, largely working-class anger now stirring across the country, it is deeply mistaken. Starmer’s Labour – or indeed Burnham’s or Streeting’s – is no longer the future. It is the last dying gasp of the party forged by Blair and his allies some 30-odd years ago. It was built in opposition to the interests, values and aspirations of the working classes. And now it is likely to be destroyed by them.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.