Labour’s ‘Class Unit’ is wokeness in proles’ clothing

Class is back in fashion. Having spent the past decade rehabilitating racial differences, praising men in dresses for being real girls, and celebrating fat, disabled and queer ‘communities’, left-wing activists are changing direction. They appear to be talking about problems facing working-class people for the first time in years.

Last week, the UK’s Labour government launched a new ‘Class Unit’ designed to focus attention and resources ‘on improving the lives of low-income families, disadvantaged communities and rooting out child poverty’. After years in which privileging posh trans or brown people for internships and well-paid jobs was all the rage, and even hinting at problems with class inequality prompted accusations of racism, this is a move that should – in theory – be welcomed by critics of woke. So why does it leave me cold?

First, there’s the breakneck speed with which the shift from culture to economics, from identity to class, is playing out in so-called progressive circles. It seems like only yesterday that girls were being taken to task for ‘cultural appropriation’ if they wore hoop earrings or tied their hair in knots. We’ve barely had a chance to catch breath since then Labour leader Keir Starmer was photographed taking the knee for Black Lives Matter alongside then deputy leader Angela Rayner, now the UK housing secretary. And just moments have passed since anyone who questioned whether it was appropriate for drag queens with names like Flow Job to read stories to young children was branded a bigot.

But now, all of this is simply to be laughed off. ‘Woke 1 was crazy!’, giggled the movement’s erstwhile poster girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, last month. Today, she aligns herself with the Democratic Socialists of America, which campaigns under the slogan ‘Workers Deserve More’ and whose goal is ‘a democratic society of the working class’. Her comrade-in-arms, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, wants to control rents, provide free universal childcare and run cost-price grocery stores. In Britain too, we’ve moved from Starmer’s virtue-signalling to Andy Burnham’s capped bus fares and a ‘focus on working-class people’s experiences of public services, health disparities and access to employment’.

‘It’s time to end the squeamishness’, declares the government’s press release marking the launch of the Class Unit: ‘Working-class people will be at the heart of a renewed government drive to tackle entrenched inequality.’ But who, exactly, is ‘squeamish’? Some of us have never had a problem talking about class: only Labour’s woke activists found it politically inconvenient.

On the surface at least, this looks like a shift to what sounds like an old-fashioned left-wing agenda. Yet it has taken place not just in the absence of a reckoning with woke’s legacy but also with many of their bizarre initiatives remaining in place. Just last week we learnt that gender-fluid police officers can carry both male and female identity documents.

Indeed, the new ‘Class Unit’ will sit ‘within the Office for Equality and Opportunity alongside units on race, women, LGBT+ and disability’. This positioning makes clear that in the minds of today’s government ministers and civil servants, the working class is not a political force with its own distinct interests but just another identity group in need of recognition.

Adding ‘working class’ to the list of identity groups deserving of special treatment raises the thorny question of definition. If working class means poor, then how do we label well-paid self-employed plumbers and plasterers? Or the laptop ‘creatives’ who earn very little but know that, when push comes to shove, daddy will lend a hand? If it means lacking degree certificates, what about the autodidacts? And if it means family background, then at what age do we judge people on their own merits, not where they’ve come from?

The problem with seeing ‘working class’ as another identity category goes deeper than the question of definition. It suggests that Labour views the working classes as an entirely passive group: people without political agency, in need of handouts and affirmation. This reinforces the political establishment’s existing tendencies, from its willingness to dole out welfare payments, allowing people to remain out of work and on the sick, to its determination to water down the academic expectations placed on schoolchildren.

This warped and degraded identitarian view of what it is to be working class means that the new Class Unit is unlikely to do anything to improve people’s lives. Labour plans to introduce a ‘socio-economic duty’: ‘a new power in the Equality Act that will legally require public bodies to consider how to improve the lives of lower-income families as part of decisions around issues like transport, services and budgets.’ The existing public-sector equality duty means that public authorities and organisations must ‘have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations’. In practice, it is used to justify highly paid bureaucrats devising internships that exclude white males. Adding a ‘socio-economic’ identity to this mix will mire businesses and institutions in yet more bureaucracy and pave the way for more mad identity celebrations.

We do have a problem with class inequality – and the very same woke activists who now claim to offer solutions have exacerbated it. But the concessions, benefits and bureaucracy they now offer are worse than useless. Change will only come about when the working class is able to pursue its political interests – from Brexit to stopping mass migration to ending economically crippling Net Zero policies. Sadly, these ideas are unlikely to make their way into Labour’s Class Unit any time soon.