Now the working classes are no longer feared as a political peril they no longer need respect, and the uppers can revel in their superiority as if this were the eighteenth century.
—Polly Toynbee1
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron cannot be said to lack courage. When he trekked up to Glasgow East to support the Tory candidate in a 2008 by-election, there were a number of suitable observations he could have made given the facts on the ground. Glasgow has twice as many people out of work as the national average. More than half of the city’s children live in poverty. The city tops Scottish league tables for drug addiction, overcrowded housing and pensioner poverty. Life expectancy in Glasgow’s Calton neighbourhood is fifty-four years—well over thirty years less than men in London’s Kensington and Chelsea district, and lower than in the Gaza Strip.
‘I come here to apologize for the destruction of industry under Thatcher’s rule during the 1980s,’ Cameron could have said. ‘Today’s modern Conservatives recognize the effect this has had on jobs, on communities and on people’s hopes and aspirations. It will never happen again.’ Surely admitting the damage wrought by the policies of previous Conservative administrations could only have bolstered the electoral propects of a Tory candidate facing a stiff challenge in hostile territory.
But David Cameron was more interested in reinforcing middle-class prejudice than in boosting the Tory vote in an unwinnable seat. ‘We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things—obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction—are purely external events, like a plague, or bad weather. Of course, circumstances—where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make—have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make.’
With the help of Tory briefings, newspapers left their readers in no doubt as to what Cameron was getting at. ‘David Cameron tells the fat and the poor: take responsibility,’ as The Times put it. ‘Fat or poor? It’s probably your own fault, Cameron declares,’ was how the evidently delighted Daily Mail reacted. Cameron was tapping into sentiments that Thatcherism had made respectable: the idea that, more often than not, less fortunate people had only themselves to blame.
Glasgow’s working class had actually suffered from what David Cameron so breezily dismissed as ‘external events’: the collapse of British industry. The Tory leader was asking people to take responsibility for what happened when these jobs disappeared. The steelworks, which employed 30,000, had been the first to go; then the Templeton carpet factory; and, finally, Arrol’s engineering works. Many smaller industries and suppliers dependent on these industrial hubs had disappeared along with them. But Cameron made no mention of these inconvenient truths; instead he resorted to criticizing the victims.
What made David Cameron’s speech all the more remarkable is his own ultra-privileged background. There is no evidence that he has ever had any real contact with the people he was haranguing. Unlike the average Glaswegian, he owes everything to his family’s wealth, power and connections. ‘My father was a stockbroker, my grandfather was a stockbroker, my great-grandfather was a stockbroker,’ as he once boasted to a gathering of City types.
As a boy, Cameron attended Heatherdown Preparatory School in Berkshire, which counts Princes Andrew and Edward among its former pupils. At the precocious age of eleven he travelled by Concorde to the US with four classmates to celebrate the birthday of Peter Getty, the grandson of oil billionaire John Paul Getty. A former tutor, Rhidian Llewellyn, recalled seeing Cameron and his friends tucking into caviar, salmon and beef bordelaise. Cameron cheerfully raised a glass of Dom Perignon ‘69, toasting: ‘Good health, Sir!’
It is well known that he spent his teenage years at Eton College, the traditional training ground of Britain’s ruling elite. But before Cameron had even started university, he worked as an adolescent parliamentary researcher for his godfather, the Tory MP Tim Rathbone. A few months later, after his father pulled a few strings, Cameron went to Hong Kong to work for a multinational corporation. Following his graduation from Oxford University, where he was a member of the infamous toffs’ drinking society the Bullingdon Club, he was parachuted into a job at Conservative Central Office, which had received a mysterious phone call from Buckingham Palace that can’t have ruined his chances. ‘I understand that you are to see David Cameron,’ a man with a grand voice told a Central Office official. ‘I’ve tried everything I can to dissuade him from wasting his time on politics but I have failed. I am ringing to tell you that you are about to meet a truly remarkable young man.’
When Cameron left Central Office a few years later, his rarefied circle helped yet again to push him up the ladder. Annabel Astor, the mother of his equally privileged fiancée Samantha Sheffield, suggested to her friend Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Television, that he should hire him. ‘She’s a very formidable lady,’ he later recalled. ‘When she says to me, “Do something”, I do it!’2 As Cameron himself put it: ‘I have the most corny CV possible. It goes: Eton, Oxford, Conservative Research Department, Treasury, Home Office, Carlton TV and then Conservative MP.’ For an idea of just how disconnected Cameron is from the way the majority of us live, Dylan Jones’s Cameron on Cameron has him describing his wife’s upbringing as ‘highly unconventional‘—because ‘she went to a day school’.
There is one trait that Cameron shares with working-class people in Glasgow. He, like them, is a prisoner of his background. It was not inevitable that he would become prime minister, but whatever happened, it was pretty certain that he would die as he was born: in the lap of wealth and privilege. For hundreds of thousands of Glaswegians, it is equally likely that they will grow up with the same risks of poverty and unemployment as their parents.
According to one of his old schoolmates, Cameron is an unrepentant social elitist. ‘I think there’s something very unconservative about believing that because of who you are, you are the right person to run the country. It’s the natural establishment which believes in power for power’s sake, the return of people who think they have a right to rule.’ Or as another contemporary from Eton put it: ‘He’s a strange product of my generation … He seems to represent a continuation of, or perhaps regression to, noblesse oblige Toryism. Do we really want to be ruled by Arthurian knights again?’3
But Cameron has indeed surrounded himself with privileged ‘Arthurian knights’, a point forcefully put to me by a rather unexpected source. Rachel Johnson is no firebrand leftist. She is the sister of the better-known Conservative mayor of London, the floppy-haired, bumbling Boris. Her father, Stanley, was a Conservative member of the European Parliament, and her brother, Jo, is a City journalist-turned-Tory MP. She is a success story in her own right as editor of the Lady, a rather frumpy magazine that seems to be largely read by posh women out in the shires. Indeed, the classifieds for nannies and domestic staff are among its big selling points. ‘NANNY REQUIRED for delightful girls in West Byfleet,’ reads one typical advert.
And yet, despite being the sister of a senior Eton-educated Tory politician (although she argues that Boris Johnson’s background is ‘very different’ from that of David Cameron), she expressed her disgust to me before the 2010 general election that ‘the prospect is Old Etonians bankrolled by stockbrokers … It’s back to the days of Macmillan and Eden.’ She has a point. All in all, twenty-three out of twenty-nine ministers in Cameron’s first Cabinet were millionaires; 59 per cent went to private school, and just three attended a comprehensive.
No wonder that, as one poll revealed, 52 per cent of us believe that ‘a Conservative Government would mainly represent the interests of the well-off rather than the ordinary people.’ It is a sentiment you will often hear expressed in working-class communities. As East Londoners Leslie, a home carer, and Mora, a pensioner, put it to me: ‘The Conservatives, they’re all for themselves … They look after the rich people, but not the poor people.’
At the centre of Cameron’s political philosophy is the idea that a person’s life chances are determined by behavioural factors rather than economic background. ‘What matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting,’ Cameron claims. Despite a grudging acceptance of ‘a link between material poverty and poor life chances’, it is clear that he believes the main driving force in an individual’s life is personal behaviour. This is, of course, politically convenient. If you think the solution to poverty is parents being nicer to their kids, then why would it matter if you cut people’s benefits?
No one has endorsed this Cameronian attitude to class inequalities more than former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith. After Cameron became prime minister, he appointed Duncan Smith as secretary of state for work and pensions—effectively the guardian of the British welfare state. Through his think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Duncan Smith has developed the idea that poverty is not about lacking money: it is due to problems like lack of discipline, family break-up, and substance abuse.
As the darling of the Tory grass roots, right-wing Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, put it: ‘It follows that you do not end poverty by giving money to the poor: a theory that British welfarism has amply demonstrated over 60 years.’4 David Cameron himself welcomed one CSJ report with a highly questionable statement: ‘Families matter because almost every social problem that we face comes down to family stability.’ Not lack of jobs, or class division: ‘family stability’ explains all. If you are less well off, then it is your behaviour that has to be changed, according to this Tory vision.
These ideas are the foundation stones of Cameron’s semi-apocalyptic vision of ‘Broken Britain’. Social problems affecting particular poor working-class communities are first exaggerated and then portrayed as representative. Each time a tragic incident hit the headlines, Cameron seized on it as evidence.
For example, the nation was shocked in 2009 by the torture and attempted murder of two little boys, aged nine and eleven, by two other young boys in the former mining village of Edlington in South Yorkshire. The aggressors had themselves endured years of abuse. But for Cameron, the attacks were proof that the country had collapsed into what he described as a ‘social recession’. ‘On each occasion, are we just going to say this is an individual case?’ Cameron thundered. ‘That there aren’t links to what is going on in our wider society, in terms of family breakdown, in terms of drug and alcohol abuse, in terms of violent videos, in terms of many of the things that were going wrong in that particular family?’
Or take the case of thirteen-year-old Alfie Patten. In early 2009, it was claimed that his girlfriend had conceived when he was aged just twelve. Newspapers splashed pictures of this baby-faced, four-foot-tall alleged father across their front pages. Iain Duncan Smith could not resist making political capital out of the episode, claiming it underlined the Tories’ point about ‘Broken Britain’. ‘Too many dysfunctional families in Britain today have children growing up where anything goes,’ he said, warning that the sense of right and wrong was collapsing in some parts of society. The Tories were strangely silent when, in the end, it turned out that Alfie was not the father after all.
But the Tories are quick to cultivate middle-class fears of rampaging hordes of state-subsidized barbarians just outside the gates. Months before the 2010 general election, then-Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling made an astonishing comparison between Moss Side, a working-class district of south Manchester, and the US drama The Wire, which focuses on the war between police and drug gangs in Baltimore. Moss Side, too, was experiencing an ‘urban war’, Grayling claimed. Locals were outraged—and no wonder. In 2007, there were 234 murders in Baltimore, a city of 630,000 people. In Britain as a whole there were 624 violent killings in the same year, while figures for 2010 reveal thirty-one murders in the whole of Greater Manchester. Baltimore had 1 per cent of the UK’s population, but its murder rate was around a third of the UK’s.
In their effort to create caricatures of depraved working-class communities, the Tories were not above citing blatantly false information. In a propaganda leaflet entitled Labour’s Two Nations published in early 2010, they released some astounding figures that suggested a teenage pregnancy pandemic was sweeping through Britain’s poor communities. The document repeatedly affirmed that women under eighteen were ‘three times more likely to be pregnant in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas. In the most deprived areas 54 per cent are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18, compared to just 19 per cent in the least deprived areas.’
It was a real wake-up call: over half of all teenage girls in some areas were falling pregnant! It turned out the Tories had put the decimal points in the wrong place, making figures wrong by a multiple of ten. The real figure for the ten most deprived areas was actually just 5.4 per cent. The document also failed to mention a decline in under-eighteen conceptions of over 10 per cent in these areas—reversing a trend that had been going up under previous Tory governments.5 By 2007, 11.4 per cent of conceptions were to women under the age of twenty—about the same level as that conservative golden age of family values, the 1950s.6 Now, no doubt this howler was an honest mistake. But it says much about the Tories’ view of these communities that they were not sufficiently startled by such outlandish figures to double-check them before press-releasing their document.
Indeed, the Tories have shown even more aggressive ways of tapping into middle-class prejudices against teenage pregnancy, which, undeniably, is far more common in working-class communities. Following in the footsteps of Peter Lilley and his stigmatizing ‘little list’ of teenage mothers, the Tory shadow children’s minister, Tim Loughton, hinted at locking them up. ‘We need a message that actually it is not a very good idea to become a single mum at 14,’ he said. ‘[It is] against the law to get pregnant at 14. How many kids get prosecuted for having underage sex? Virtually none. What are the consequences of breaking the law and having irresponsible underage sex? There aren’t any.’ When asked if they should be prosecuted, he dodged the question. ‘We need to be tougher,’ he insisted.7
What the Tories are doing is placing the chav myth at the heart of British politics, so as to entrench the idea that there are entire communities around Britain crawling with feckless, delinquent, violent and sexually debauched no-hopers. Middle England on the one hand and the chavs on the other. This was taken to its logical conclusion by a report published in 2008 by the Tory leadership’s favourite think-tank, Policy Exchange. The document reckoned that northern cities such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford were ‘beyond revival’, had ‘lost much of their raison d’être’ because of the decline of industry, and their residents should all be moved south. ‘Regeneration, in the sense of convergence, will not happen, because it is not possible.’
The report provoked a firestorm and David Cameron had no choice but to repudiate it. Yet this think-tank is at the heart of the modern Conservative Party: it was founded by the current Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Francis Maude (who described being a co-founder as his proudest political achievement) as well as Nicholas Boles, now an MP and a key figure of Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill set’.
The echoes of this breathtaking plan could be perceived in proposals unveiled by Iain Duncan Smith in the early days of the Conservative led coalition following the 2010 general election. While the government was cutting jobs and help for those without work, Duncan Smith suggested that council tenants could be taken out of unemployment black spots and relocated, hundreds of miles away if necessary. Millions were ’trapped in estates where there is no work,’ he lamented, without suggesting that the government might consider bringing jobs to these areas. The message was clear: these were communities without hope or a future, and nothing could be done to save them. As the pro-Conservative Telegraph newspaper put it, the parallels with Norman Tebbit’s 1981 call for the unemployed to ‘get on your bike’ were uncanny.8
Even before they came to power nationally, the Tories were already undertaking a spot of what you might call ‘social cleansing’. In 2009, Conservative-run Hammersmith and Fulham Council came under fire for apparently planning to remove poor residents from council houses. The council proposed to demolish 3,500 council properties and to build upmarket homes to attract middle-class residents in their place. According to council leader Stephen Greenhalgh, an advisor to David Cameron, council housing was ‘warehousing poverty’ and entrenching welfare dependency. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act described a council estate as a ‘barracks for the poor’ and included plans to increase rents from £85 to £360 a week.9 Hammersmith and Fulham is often mentioned as Cameron’s favourite council. It certainly showcases some of the Tories’ least constructive attitudes to working-class people. Many of the Tories’ ideas about social inequality—such as blaming people for their circumstances—have a firmly Thatcherite pedigree. But they can also be traced back to a right-wing pseudo-political scientist, the American Charles Murray. Murray is perhaps most famous for his controversial (to say the least) 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which suggested that inherent racial differences had an impact on IQ levels. Like today’s Tories, Murray claimed that family breakdown had triggered the rise of an ‘underclass’ in British society. He argued ‘that the family in the dominant economic class—call it the upper middle class—is in better shape than most people think, and is likely to get better. Meanwhile, deterioration is likely to continue in the lower classes.’
Rising illegitimacy in ‘the lower classes’ had produced what Murray called the ‘New Rabble’, marked by growing crime, ‘dropout from work’, child neglect and so on. One of the solutions, Murray argued, was for childbearing to entail ‘economic penalties for a single woman. It is all horribly sexist, I know. It also happens to be true.’10
Rather than financial sanctions for childbearing single women, the Tories promoted a £150 tax break for married couples in the 2010 general election campaign. Their first Budget scrapped Labour’s health-in-pregnancy grant, made it compulsory for single parents to seek work when their child reached the age of five (down from ten), froze child benefit, and introduced tough welfare cuts and penalties that would disproportionately affect single mothers. Nonetheless, Murray and the Cameron Conservatives share a basic underlying philosophy. Social problems in working-class communities are magnified and then blamed on the personal characteristics and lifestyles of the inhabitants. The logical next step is to withdraw state financial support from such communities and, instead, focus on changing individual behaviour.
To get a better idea of the Tory approach to social division in British society, I had a chat with senior MP David Davis. Davis is often feted as a rare working-class Tory, but he prefers to play down his roots. ‘People seem to think my background was underprivileged,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t. It was just normal.’ Indeed, after graduating from Warwick University, Davis spent seventeen years working for Tate & Lyle, ending up as a senior director. When I asked Davis if the privileged backgrounds of Tory frontbench ministers made it difficult for them to connect with the electorate as a whole, he was refreshingly honest. ‘Truthfully, it’s partly true of me too! You know, it’s a long time since I lived on a council estate, and the only thing that you have that pulls you back to earth, really, is the constituency surgery, where you’re dealing with people on a Friday night and Saturday morning with their problems.’
Davis is certainly no more sympathetic towards the plight of working-class people than other Tories. ‘There have been a couple of TV programmes recently. One in which they went down to what in the old days would have been called a dole queue … and said: “Would you like a job?” Chap said yes, and was told: “It’s picking squash on a farm.” They won’t do that, you know. And something similar happened a week or two ago showing the work rate of a British worker against some Polish workers—and the Polish workers were working twice as fast. This is a surmise, I don’t know this to be true, but my instant reaction to that sort of thing would be: we are probably facing a work ethic problem, which is worse than welfare dependency.’
Davis is quite keen to contrast what he depicts as the unmotivated British worker with ‘the large number of immigrants who’ve probably got a stronger work ethic … And so from the point of view of the employer, they’re relatively cheap and work quite hard, so if you want to be hard-nosed about it, why employ a not so hard-working Brit who’s demanding a higher salary?’
What struck me was his willingness to make an intellectual argument in defence of inequality. ‘I wouldn’t try and do anything about correcting the inequalities,’ he explained, ‘because the inequalities are widened by people getting richer, not by the poor getting poor—but by the rich getting richer. And frankly, so long as they generate wealth for the economy, so long as they generate tax income and so on, then I’m comfortable with it.’
I pointed out the recent groundbreaking research by academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level. They used irrefutable statistics to show that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it has—like crime and poor health, for example. In other words, more equal societies were happier societies. David Davis gave the book short shrift. ‘It’s bullshit,’ he said. ‘It’s bullshit ... I think it’s one of these fashionable, stupid ideas. It’s easy to sell a book, but I don’t think it stands up.’
In political historian Ross McKibbin’s opinion, the Tories are ‘there to defend inequality, always have been. It’s like all conservative parties anywhere—they’re designed to defend inequality and social privilege.’ Davis’s comments vindicate Ross’s analysis; if anything, perhaps, it doesn’t go far enough. Davis is, in effect, celebrating inequality as a good thing. The Tory demonization of working-class communities must be seen in this light. It is difficult to justify a grossly uneven distribution of wealth on grounds of fairness. But what if the people at the top are entitled to be there because of their entrepreneurial flair, while those at the bottom are deeply flawed and so deserve what they get? Davis’s attitude towards British working-class people is shaped by the idea that people’s lot in life is determined by their personal characteristics. The crux of his argument is that they just don’t work as hard as workers from other countries—which, he says, partly explains issues like unemployment.
Criticizing working-class people is politically useful for a Conservative-led government determined to drive through cuts that will disproportionately hurt the same group. Some of the first programmes to face the axe after the 2010 general election included free school meals and help for the young unemployed. The first Budget unleashed the biggest cuts to public services in a century and—just like the Tory government of the early 1980s—upped the rate of VAT, a tax that hits those on low incomes the hardest. Despite ministers’ claims that they were serving in a ‘progressive government’, economists estimated the poorest would be hit six times harder than the richest.11 When Tory minister Bob Neill was asked why northern cities were losing millions of pounds compared to southern cities, his shameless response was: ‘Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt.’12
So much for the Tories: after all, most of their leading lights were born into privilege and are ideologically committed to defending grossly uneven distributions of wealth and power. What about Labour’s record? Even a politician as New Labour through-and-through as former Cabinet minister Hazel Blears is clear that Labour’s purpose was ‘to ensure that, first of all, working-class people have a voice in Parliament. That’s why it was set up, because before then, you didn’t.’ Labour governments introduced all of the major reforms of the post-war period that have improved the lot of the working class, from the NHS to workers’ rights. The tragedy is that New Labour bears much of the responsibility for the negative light in which the working class is now seen.
History will remember two TV moments from the 2010 general election. The first was the novelty of televised debates between the party leaders, which led to a surge in Liberal Democrat support that had dissipated by the time the electorate cast their ballots. But just as memorable, and far more revealing, was when Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown bumped into Gillian Duffy, a sixty-five-year-old pensioner, in the streets of Rochdale.
If you were looking for a representative Labour voter, Mrs Duffy would surely fit the bill. Before retirement she had spent thirty years working with disabled kids for Rochdale Council. Her late father used to sing Labour’s anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, when he was a teenager. Mrs Duffy shared his commitment and had voted Labour all her life.
When Mrs Duffy spotted Gordon Brown on a walkabout around her home town, she demanded answers to the sorts of concerns shared by millions of working-class people. She told Brown that the three main things ‘I had drummed in when I was a child was education, health service and looking after people who were vulnerable’. She was worried that her two grandchildren would struggle to afford to go to university when they were older. Finally, she expressed fairly mild concerns about the levels of immigration. The conversation ended amicably as Brown told Mrs Duffy: ‘You’re a very good woman, you’ve served your community all your life.’
And that might have been all there was to it. But Brown had forgotten to remove his TV microphone. As soon as he stepped into the waiting car, he let his annoyance rip. ‘That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman… whose idea was that?’ When an aide asked what she had said, Brown uttered words that, for many, represented the last nail in his political coffin. ‘Ugh, everything—she’s just a sort of bigoted woman, said she used to be Labour. It’s just ridiculous.’
The scandal (inevitably christened ‘Bigotgate’) summed up the contempt many felt New Labour had towards working-class people. ‘Working-class people are sort of seen as a problem. They drink too much, they smoke too much, they don’t look after their kids properly, they’re feckless, they’re work-shy. Racist. Essentially, that’s how they’re seen,’ says Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott, who contends that one of the big reasons Labour lost the 2010 election was because it lost touch with its working-class base. ‘They didn’t really like these people very much,’ he argues. ‘They thought they didn’t have the right sort of raspberry-wine vinegar to put on their radicchio and so on. There was a growing contempt for the working class, not just among the parties of the right, but also among the parties of the left. And I think that’s a really big part of what’s changed in Britain in the last thirty years.’
Bigotgate was an accidental bubbling to the surface of New Labour’s private contempt for Labour’s working-class electoral base. Yet it appeared in the form of intentional policy announcements, too. There are four million overwhelmingly working-class social housing tenants in Britain. While 30 per cent of voters overall opted for Labour and 37 per cent voted Tory in the 2010 general election, it was 47 and 24 per cent respectively among people living in social housing. New Labour did not reciprocate their loyalty. In early 2008, the then housing minister Caroline Flint sneered at the levels of unemployment among council-house tenants. Referring to the culture of ‘no one works around here’, Flint suggested that those who did not get a job could lose their home. New tenants would sign ‘commitment contracts’ before moving into a property, and it was hinted that the measure could eventually also apply to those already living in council homes.
The housing charity Shelter expressed dismay, claiming that Flint would send Britain back to the Victorian era. ‘The Government wants to return Britain’s unemployed to the workhouse by throwing them on the streets,’ said Adam Sampson, Shelter’s chief executive. ‘What is being proposed would destroy families and communities and add to the thousands who are already homeless.’13
’You’ve got to ask: what would happen to those people told that they had to leave their current properties?’ adds Shelter’s Mark Thomas. ‘Where would they actually end up? And what would be the cost to the taxpayer associated with that? And the government really didn’t seem to have answers to that sort of question.’
Caroline Flint’s proposals could never have been implemented, because they were illegal under existing laws: councils were not permitted to make people homeless. But she had fuelled the now widespread political sentiments that council tenants were freeloaders.
Flint expressed surprise at how social mixing in council housing had declined and levels of unemployment had shot up on estates over the last thirty years. Unless she was grossly incompetent at her job, she would have known that this was the legacy of right-to-buy. The least disadvantaged tenants had bought their homes, while the Tories—followed by New Labour—had refused to build any more. That meant that the remaining, ever-diminishing stock was prioritized for those most in need.
According to the late Alan Walter, a lifelong council tenant and former chairman of Defend Council Housing, this demonization also has political purposes. ‘They promote this idea that anyone who wants to get on aspires to be a homeowner, and only those who can’t do any better will live in council housing.’ Walter saw a two-fold purpose: ‘One, to make people who live on council estates feel inadequate; and two, to force those who can afford or might afford it to think they have to get out.’ It was all part of New Labour’s strategy of encouraging those working-class people who had resisted the Thatcherite property-owning dream to surrender.
The Flint episode illustrates a real change in the attitudes of what could be called ‘Old Labour’ and ‘New Labour’ towards working-class people. Yes, ‘Old Labour’ is a problematic term. As the avowedly New Labour former Cabinet minister James Purnell told me: ‘Old Labour was one of those terms which was clearly a construct, and insofar as it meant anything really, it was the sort of things that “you the voters” happen not to like about us now, and because of the things that we’ve done in your memory.’
But what was known as the ‘Old Labour Right’, the old social democratic leadership of the party, was remarkably different from New Labour as represented by figures like Purnell. (Indeed, one right-wing Conservative MP privately expressed to me the Tories’ deep regrets at Purnell’s decision to stand down as an MP at the 2010 general election. There was a bit of an overlap in political views between them and Purnell, I suggested. ‘Oh, massive overlap. Massive. I would have loved for him to have become Labour leader.’)
Former prime minister James Callaghan was a classic example of Old Labour: a working-class politician whose power base was the trade unions. Old Labour still celebrated, or at least paid tribute to, working-class identity. Although Callaghan was on what was then the right of the party, he still felt obliged to couch policies in class terms. As chancellor in the late 1960s, for example, he confronted the devaluation camp head-on by accusing: ‘Those who advocate devaluation are calling for a reduction in the wage levels and the real wage standards of every member of the working class.’
That is not to deny Old Labour’s flaws. It was top-down and bureaucratic, and its celebration of working-class identity did not adapt to the entry of women and ethnic minorities into the workforce. ‘Basically, what the London left was doing [in the 1970s and 1980s] was rebelling against that Old Labour culture because it was quite sexist and racist,’ recalls former London Labour mayor Ken Livingstone. ‘It had huge weaknesses, and in a sense so much of what we were doing in the 1970s and 1980s was forcing the labour movement in London to recognize that it had to organize women and ethnic minorities.’ Yet Old Labour remained committed to the idea of raising the conditions of the working class as a class, even if this sometimes amounted to mere lip service.
In contrast, New Labour’s philosophy is not rooted in improving the lot of the working class; it is about escaping the working class. New Labour was very open about this project. For example, Gordon Brown fought the 2010 general election on creating ‘a bigger middle class than ever before’.
According to Matthew Taylor, Blair’s former head of strategy, New Labour made a distinction between the ‘aspirational working class … who felt that Labour was anti-aspiration’ and a ‘non-aspirational working class’. The ‘non-aspirational working class’ had no place in New Labour. They were ignored on the grounds that they had nowhere else to go and, in any case, were less likely to vote. ‘So,’ says Taylor,
I think Labour’s strategy was: ‘How do we appeal to the aspirational working class?’ Does that mean that they took for granted whatever it is we mean by the ‘non-aspirational working class’? Well, maybe partly took for granted, maybe partly those people are in constituencies that Labour are going to win anyway. So, whether you might consider that to be callous, but in a first-past-the-post [electoral] system you don’t focus your energies on people who are in constituencies where they don’t make a huge difference. And partly those people are also less likely, or least likely, to turn out.
But what did New Labour mean by aspiration? ‘If you look at the discourse around aspiration, it’s a very restricted notion of what it is,’ says influential Labour backbencher and former advisor to Tony Blair, Jon Cruddas. ‘If you … compare and contrast the Middle England of Blair and Brown, located somewhere in the South East, everyone’s relatively prosperous, growth is guaranteed—it’s a very atomized notion of aspiration. You aspire to own more material things.’
To Cruddas, aspiration has a very different meaning. He refers to Everytown, a book written by philosopher Julian Baggini in which he searches for the real ‘Middle England’: that is, a community containing all the characteristics of the country as a whole. He ends up in the predominantly working-class, Northern English town of Rotherham. ‘It was more fraternal, it was more solidaristic, it was more neighbourly,’ says Cruddas. ‘And in that lies, I think, a tale about how we can completely misconstrue this notion of aspiration …’ In other words, real aspiration means much more than simple self-enrichment. ‘As Alan Milburn [New Labour minister and one of Blair’s key allies] used to say, when he was asked what was the essence of the Labour project, he said: “It is to help people to earn and own.” Well, was it? Was it? It never was for me.’
In New Labour’s eyes, being aspirational working class meant embracing individualism and selfishness. It meant fighting to be a part of Brown’s ‘bigger middle class than ever’. As Stephen Pound, a loyalist Labour MP, argues: ‘I think part of the problem is that people in the working classes have been sold the line that they shouldn’t be there, and you can somehow drag yourself up … The old socialist motto is “rise with your class, not above it”. The reality of this country is that to rise, you rise above your class.’
What does ‘non-aspirational working class’ mean, then? ‘I think everyone’s aspirational,’ says Ken Livingstone. ‘I think that what the Blairites have patronizingly called non-aspirational, I suppose, is those people who still had a sense of community and still recognized that the whole community does better together or they all do badly together.’ The non-aspirational working class are, as their label suggests, frowned upon: because they have failed to jump on the Thatcherite, property-owning, endlessly acquisitive bandwagon. According to the New Labour lexicon, only self-enrichment counts as aspiration. Unless you’re determined to climb up the class ladder, you are devoid of aspiration.
There are few more devout Blairites than former New Labour Cabinet minister Hazel Blears. But she is affronted by the notion of a ‘non-aspirational working class’. ‘It’s not an analysis that I would ever subscribe to,’ she says. ‘I have yet to meet a young person who isn’t aspirational, irrespective of their background, and I think in some ways that writes people off. And I object to that, I object to that really quite significantly. It’s a bit like the Tory division between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor—and that takes us back to Victorian times … I don’t think the Labour Party has time for people who can work but won’t. But, neither do you write off their children and their whole families on that basis.’
It is not just adults who are lumped into the non-aspirational category. New Labour politicians frequently diagnose a ‘poverty of aspiration’ in working-class kids to explain things like poor school results or why poverty is transmitted from generation to generation. For example, former New Labour education secretary Alan Johnson once railed against ‘a corrosive poverty of aspiration which is becoming particularly prevalent amongst today’s generation of working-class boys’. It is not the lack of jobs and apprenticeships following the collapse of industry that is to blame, but rather the attitudes of working-class children.
In this spirit, a government report published in December 2008 highlighted the alleged ‘under-ambition’ of working-class people living in the old industrial heartlands. The question of what these kids are supposed to aspire to in areas lacking well-paid jobs is never addressed. But this approach was fully in the Thatcherite mould: that responsibility for the social problems facing working-class people should be placed squarely on their shoulders.
The notion of ‘aspirational’ versus ‘non-aspirational’ was just one way that New Labour attempted to exploit fissures in the working class that had emerged under Thatcherism. Another was to win the support of what New Labour politicians called ‘hard-working families’ (a term Blears also resisted, because ‘there was always the presumption that if you didn’t somehow fit in that, then the devil take you, and you were left to your own devices’) as opposed to millions of supposedly idle people dishonestly claiming benefits. It is true that bashing ‘welfare scroungers’ may be more likely to attract the support of a low-paid worker than a millionaire. After all, if you work hard for a pittance, why wouldn’t you resent the idea of people living a life of luxury at your expense?
The reality is that attacks on welfare have been directed at the working-class communities most devastated by the collapse of industry. The old industrial heartlands contain the highest levels of people without work and dependent on benefits. The root cause is a lack of secure jobs to replace the ones that disappeared. As Iain Duncan Smith has admitted, rather than creating new jobs, successive governments encouraged unemployed people to claim disability benefits, in order to massage the employment figures.
Yet New Labour’s approach was to stigmatize and demonize these vulnerable working-class people. The then-government’s welfare advisor David Freud—who, appropriately enough, later defected to the Tories—claimed in 2008 that two million people should be pushed off benefits and into work. And yet the government claimed at the time that there were only half a million job vacancies, and this was before the full force of the recession had hit. ‘I mean, that was a figure that David Freud just kind of plucked out of the air,’ admits his former boss, James Purnell.
Until an abortive attempt to overthrow Gordon Brown in 2009, James Purnell had overall charge of New Labour’s so-called welfare reform programme. He had promised to create ‘a system where virtually everyone has to do something in return for their benefits’. It was right to ‘penalize’ people who, he claimed, were not trying to get work. ‘If there is work there for people, we believe they should do it. We can’t afford to waste taxpayers’ money on people who are playing the system.’14 That £16 billion worth of benefits were in fact going unclaimed each year—around two and half times the amount of money the government was trying to save—went unmentioned. So did the fact that the majority of people in poverty were in work. Purnell was presenting work as an automatic gateway out of poverty but, in low-pay Britain, that’s hardly the case.
One of Purnell’s proposals was that people could be made to work in exchange for benefits. Given that Jobseeker’s Allowance at the time was worth only £60.50, if you were made to work a forty-hour week, for example, you would end up being paid just £1.50 an hour. Those unlucky enough to find themselves in the most devastated communities were not only accused of ‘playing the system’. They faced being made to work for a fraction of the minimum wage.
When speaking to me, Purnell markedly softened his rhetoric. ‘All of the conditionality in the system was there to make sure that people helped themselves,’ he argued. It was consistent with long-established Labour traditions, he reassured me. But what about the fact that there were more people on benefits in certain communities because all the old industrial jobs had vanished, leaving only scarce, low-paid, insecure service sector jobs? ‘I wouldn’t buy the argument that it’s better to be on IB [Incapacity Benefit] than to be in a supermarket job or in a call centre job,’ he responded, referring to evidence that prolonged joblessness is unhealthy both for the individual and their family. ‘I totally recognize that going from a job which was a highly skilled industrial job into something which people not necessarily would have wanted is a step down, but it’s certainly less of a step down than ending up on Incapacity Benefit.’
It is safe to say that Mark Serwotka is not a fan of Purnell. Serwotka is the leader of the 300,000-strong civil service union, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union. Agitated to even hear his name, he described Purnell as ‘the worst social security secretary in the history of this country’ and ‘a shameful man who professes to be a Labour politician’. He was particularly angered by Purnell’s attitude to places like Merthyr, where Serwotka grew up. Recently, Hoover closed its factory there after sixty-one years of providing work for the community. ‘There’s no mines, there’s no pits, there’s real deprivation—and Purnell essentially says: “You’re not trying hard enough to get work, and therefore we need sanctions to force people into work.” ’
Serwotka repeatedly clashed with Purnell when he was in office. The minister demanded to know how he was stigmatizing people, so Serwotka quoted back at him a New Statesman article in which Purnell speaks of people on benefits ‘having miserable lives where their universe consists of a trip from the bedroom to the living room’.15 Serwotka says that Purnell claimed he was ‘only quoting someone else’, although there is no evidence of this in the article. ‘If we think about that for a moment,’ says Serwotka, ‘it is absolutely blaming the victims of all this, when they’re the victims, not the problems.’
As Serwotka says, the ‘absurdity’ of the whole policy is that it was ‘the same for the whole country, as if the labour market in the South East was the same as the labour market in the South Wales Valley, and clearly it’s not. But if you introduce the same policy, what you do is stigmatize the areas where there’s no work.’ The ‘welfare reform’ programme fuelled still further the demonization of the poorest working-class communities. It magnified the problems it purported to address and failed to explain the real reasons behind them. It also cleared the ground for the Tories—who went out of their way to praise James Purnell and his welfare policies—to go even further after they formed a government in May 2010.
Looking at the whole welfare debate, Jon Cruddas thinks that ‘even if it’s unacknowledged, it still is premised on the notion of “the mob” that we have to control.’ Cruddas saw the promotion of what he calls ‘the mob at the gates’ being ‘reproduced culturally through forms of representation on TV—you know, the whole language around “chav” ’. This is an absolutely fundamental point. New Labour, through programmes like its welfare reform, has propagated the chav caricature by spreading the idea that people are poor because they lack moral fibre. Surveys show that attitudes towards poverty are currently harder than they were under Thatcher. If people observe that even Labour holds the less fortunate to be personally responsible for their fate, why should they think any different? No wonder the image of communities teeming with feckless chavs has become so ingrained in recent years.
This spectre of the ‘the mob at the gates’ conjured up by Cruddas has heavily featured in the government’s crackdown on anti-social behaviour. Again, huge numbers of working-class people support action to combat anti-social behaviour. It is, after all, more likely to affect someone living on a council estate than a professional out in the suburbs, and has a real impact on the quality of people’s lives. But the government’s response has been to stigmatize working-class youth rather than address the root causes.
Take Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), introduced under New Labour but now facing abolition under the Conservative-led government. They could be imposed for minor incidents and restrict the individual’s behaviour in various ways: like banning them from a street, or forbidding them from swearing. If the ASBO was violated, the culprit could be sent to prison for up to five years. Originally, New Labour promised that under-eighteens would only have ASBOs served under exceptional circumstances but, as it turned out, year on year around half were imposed on the young. Overwhelmingly, those on the receiving end were both poor and working class—and, according to a survey in 2005, nearly four out of every ten ASBOs went to young people with mental health problems such as Asperger’s Syndrome. In one case, a child with Tourette’s was given an ASBO for his compulsive swearing.
Whether or not you agree with ASBOs, it is difficult to deny that they have increased the bad reputation of young working-class kids and popularized the chav caricature. After all, members of the Bullingdon Club—whose great tradition is to smash up pubs and restaurants—were never likely to be awarded an ASBO. Even New Labour’s own youth justice ‘tsar’, Professor Rod Morgan, criticized the measures for ‘demonizing’ a whole section of British youth and criminalizing them for offences that once would have been regarded as ‘high jinks’. It is difficult to disagree with author Anthony Horowitz when he says that ASBOs ‘add up to create a cumulative vision of a Britain full of yobs, with crack houses on every inner-city estate; drunken youths running amok in provincial towns, and so on’.16
Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional, and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereotypes and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour’s underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working class are on the wrong side of history—and must be made to join ‘Middle England’ like the rest of us.
‘The new Britain is a meritocracy,’ declared Tony Blair upon assuming office in 1997. If New Labour had an official religion, it would surely be meritocracy. But there is a dark irony in how celebrated this concept became. ‘Meritocracy’ was not originally intended to describe a desirable society—far from it. It was meant to raise the alarm at what Britain could become.
Michael Young, who penned Labour’s 1945 Manifesto, coined the phrase in his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. As he later explained, this was ‘a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2003.’ He warned that its consequences would mean ‘that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been … It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none.’17
In a meritocracy, those who possess the most ‘talent’ will rise naturally to the top. Social hierarchy will therefore be arranged according to ‘merit’. Society would remain unequal, but those inequalities would reflect differences of ability. Matthew Taylor understands the dangers, but believes this is the best cause on offer. ‘I think that meritocracy is not a bad rallying call because we’re so far away from it, you know what I mean? To have a genuine meritocracy we’d have to abolish inherited wealth, we’d have to abolish private schools ... So when people say to me: “Well, meritocracy, isn’t that kind of a reactionary concept and shouldn’t we argue for more than that?”, I can say: “Well, yeah, fine, but we’re so far away from even having that.” ’
Of course, New Labour never had any intention of abolishing inherited wealth or private education. It argued for ‘meritocracy’ within a society rigged in favour of the middle class. Meritocracy ends up becoming a rubber stamp for existing inequalities, re-branding them as deserved. When I interviewed Simon Heffer, the right-wing Telegraph columnist, he argued: ‘I think we are still largely a meritocracy, despite the destruction of the grammar schools, and I think class is a state of mind in that sense.’ Meritocracy can end up being used to argue that those at the top are there because they deserve to be, while those at the bottom are simply not talented enough and likewise deserve their place. It is used in education to belittle vocational subjects in favour of the academic. All this before even examining the criteria for what counts as ‘merit’: for example, does a multi-millionaire advertising consultant deserve to be above a hospital cleaner in the pecking order of things?
The natural companion of meritocracy is ‘social mobility’, which New Labour put at the heart of its 2010 general election campaign. A few years before, Alan Milburn, one of Tony Blair’s closest allies, had spoken of Labour’s crusade to ensure ‘that more people get the opportunity to join the middle class’. Rather than improve the conditions of the working class as a whole, social mobility is offered as a means of creaming off a minority of working-class individuals and parachuting them into the middle class. It underlines the notion that being working class is something to get away from.
It does not mean abolishing or even eroding classes, but just making it easier for individuals to move between them. It would not have any impact on the conditions of the majority of working-class people. Social mobility can mean offering an escape route from poverty, rather than attempting to abolish poverty. Sociologist John Goldthorpe disputes the consensus that there has been a decline in social mobility but, in any case, regards it as a red herring: ‘The reason why there’s been all this emphasis on social mobility is that all the political parties prefer to talk about social mobility and equality of opportunity rather than equality of conditions.’
Surprisingly, Blairite Hazel Blears is equally critical. ‘I’ve never really understood the term “social mobility” because that implies you want to get out of somewhere and go somewhere else because you’re mobile! And I think that there is a great deal to be said for making who you are something to be proud of. And if you’re working class, not to wear that as a kind of chip on your shoulder, or even a burden that you carry around with you, but actually something that is of value, for its own sake, that says something about who you are, what your values are, where you come from.’
If the officially sanctioned route to improving your lot in life is to become middle class, what about the people left behind? Clearly not everyone can become a middle-class professional or a businessperson: the majority of people still have to do the working-class jobs in offices and shops that society needs to keep ticking. By putting the emphasis on escaping these jobs rather than improving their conditions, we end up disqualifying those who remain in them. We frown upon the supermarket checkout staff, the cleaners, the factory workers—slackers who failed to climb the ladder offered by social mobility.
Another way that New Labour skirted the issue of inequality was by following in Thatcher’s footsteps and pretending that class no longer existed. At the end of the 1990s, the government appointed a committee to revisit the official social classifications used for national statistics—then known as ‘Social Class based on Occupation’. John Goldthorpe was delighted that it would be based on his own research, but was intrigued to discover that it had been renamed the ‘National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification’. When he asked a member of the committee, he was told that New Labour had vetoed any reference to class. It illustrated New Labour’s dogged determination to scrub class from the country’s vocabulary.
Hazel Blears traces the disavowal of class to Labour’s experience in the 1980s and early 1990s when, she says, the party ‘had been identified with quite an adversarial class politics’. In part, she believes this was because Labour’s reputation had been tarred by the memory of once-mighty trade unions abusing their power. That, she claims, gave Thatcher legitimacy to say ‘something must be done’ to curb them. ‘I think as a reaction to that, the Labour Party then both in economic terms and class terms was absolutely determined to prove its credentials, that it wasn’t an extreme, adversarial party that was simply divisive.’ In her own way, Blears has accepted that the retreat from class was the product of the repeated defeats suffered at the hands of Thatcherism triumphant.
With ‘class’ no longer an option to describe inequality and disadvantage in society, New Labour invented new terms. ‘Social exclusion’ and the ‘socially excluded’ was the code for ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’. New Labour launched a Social Exclusion Unit after it first came to power. It even had a minister for social exclusion. The term strips away the more unpleasant connotations of poverty, like poor housing, low pay and so on. In essence it was a less pejorative way of saying ‘underclass’, with the same implications of a group of people who have been cut off from society. It was the New Labour take on the chav phenomenon: a dysfunctional, excluded group at the bottom, and then the happy rest of us.
‘You never knew how these people were being defined,’ says John Goldthorpe, ‘or what numbers you could put on it, what proportion they were. But then you said, “What exactly are they socially excluded from?” And you were told, “The mainstream of British society.” But that’s ridiculous! In a society that’s as stratified and unequal as ours, there is no mainstream … Again, it was this New Labour thing, they wanted to do something about the very bottom, and then pretend that apart from that, there wasn’t a problem. But that’s wrong! … As I see it, the socially excluded is largely made up of people who are the most dis-advantaged within the working class.’
‘Exclusion’ did not have to mean being excluded by society—but rather being excluded by your own actions. When I asked Matthew Taylor whether one of the legacies of Thatcherism was that politicians now regarded social problems as the result of individual behaviour, he thought it was complex but, overall, felt that was the case.
There has been a general view which is—and it is in the move from ‘class’ to ‘exclusion’ as conceptions—that exclusion is something which kind of suggests that ‘I am excluding myself’, that there is a process, that my own behaviour is replicated in my social status. Class is something which is given to me. Exclusion is something which happens to me and in which I am somehow an agent. And so I think, yeah, absolutely, there was a sense not that you should blame the poor for being poor, although there was a bit of that as well, but that poverty was a process in which people were active in one way or another … not simply the result of great impersonal social forces.
As one of Tony Blair’s most senior advisors, and a very perceptive and astute political commentator, Matthew Taylor’s honest inside look at some of the philosophies that shaped New Labour is revealing. Rather than simply being the result of social forces, your place in society was partly determined by your behaviour.
Jon Cruddas is in no doubt that politicians of all colours have a vested interest in denying the existence of class. It has proved an effective way of avoiding having to address working-class concerns in favour of a small, privileged layer of the middle classes. ‘They devise ever more scientific methods of camping out on a very small slice of the electorate … those who are constituted as marginal voters in marginal seats.’ Working-class voters were taken for granted as the ‘core vote’ who had nowhere else to go, allowing New Labour politicians to tailor their policies to privileged voters.
No New Labour politician personified this attitude more than Tony Blair. Matthew Taylor offers an interesting insight into Blair’s political approach. ‘I worked for Tony Blair, and the point about Tony is that Tony would always say when I would say to him, or other people would say to him: “What about a bit more kind of leftism in all of this? What about a bit more about poverty and justice and blah blah blah? ...” ’ Blair’s response was blunt, to say the least:
Tony would always say: ‘Fine, but I don’t need to worry about that, because that’s what everybody else in the Labour Party wants, and that’s what everybody else in the Cabinet wants, and that’s what Gordon [Brown] wants, and that’s kind of fine. And I’ll leave them to do that, because I know that’s how they’ll spend all their time. They don’t want to do public service reform, they don’t want to do wealth creation, they’re not interested in any of that, they’ll just kind of hammer away at that agenda. My job is to appeal to the great mass of people on issues that the Labour Party generally speaking is just not interested in.
The near-obsession with ignoring working-class voters meant inflating the importance of a very small tranche of wealthy voters who were misleadingly construed as Middle England. After all, an individual in the very middle of the nation’s income scale only earns around £21,000. ‘You’re probably right that we did misportray Middle England,’ admits Matthew Taylor, ‘but that again, I’m afraid, is not just a Labour characteristic. It’s characteristic of the middle classes as a whole.’
This distortion sometimes reached absurd levels. Stephen Byers is a former New Labour Cabinet minister and one of Blair’s closest allies. In 2006 he floated the idea of abolishing inheritance tax in order to win back ‘Middle England’, despite the fact that only the wealthiest families in Britain were liable to pay it.
‘There’s a particular strand of uber-Blairism which basically is kind of just fucking mad,’ says Matthew Taylor, ‘and I’m afraid Stephen—who I like personally, I haven’t seen him for years—he, I’m afraid, was probably more guilty than anybody else of occasionally floating these kind of mad Blairite ideas.’ New Labour never did adopt Byers’s grovellingly pro-wealthy inheritance tax proposal. Nonetheless, his thinking represented a deeply influential strain of Blairism that sidelined working-class people in favour of the concerns of a tiny but gilded section of the population.
It is not just the fetishizing of the demands of the wealthy and powerful that has rendered the working class invisible. The promotion of multiculturalism in an era when the concept of class was being abandoned meant that inequality became almost exclusively understood through the prism of race and ethnic identity. Dr Gillian Evans, a leading anthropologist and expert on social class, argues that while ‘the struggle for class equality was said to have either been squashed or won, depending on your perspective’, the battle for racial equality continued through multiculturalism. ‘This saw black and Asian people struggling for greater ethnic and cultural respect and this has been, relatively speaking, a fantastic resistance movement that is to be celebrated.’
But because multiculturalism became the only recognized platform in the struggle for equality, Dr Evans argues that, on the one hand, we fail to acknowledge ‘the existence of a multi-racial working class’, and on the other, the white working class is ‘forced to think of themselves as a new ethnic group with their own distinctive culture’. Most dangerously of all, middle-class people have ended up ‘refusing to acknowledge anything about white working class as legitimately cultural, which leads to a composite loss of respect on all fronts: economic, political and social.’
We are rightly encouraged to embrace and celebrate ethnic minority identity, not least as a counterweight to continued entrenched racism. But a racialized ‘white’ working class is not seen as having a place in this classless multiculturalism. There are, after all, no prominent, respected champions for the working class in the way that there are for many minority groups. The interests of working-class ethnic minority people end up being ignored too, because the focus is on building up the ethnic minority middle class by ensuring diversity within the leading professions.
Yet, as New Labour lurched from crisis to crisis under Gordon Brown, it became increasingly difficult simply to pretend the working class did not exist. The racist BNP was growing in working-class communities in, for example, East London and North-West England. But New Labour politicians took the rising working-class backlash against immigration at face value, instead of examining underlying causes such as lack of affordable housing or secure, well-paid jobs. Rather than focusing on the economic ills shared by the working class of all creeds and colours, New Labour redefined them as cultural problems affecting the white working class. The white working class became one marginalized ethnic minority among others.
For example, back in 2009 New Labour launched a £12 million project specifically designed to help white working-class communities. Of course it is true that there are many working-class—and yes, largely white—communities that have been neglected or even abandoned by New Labour, and are in urgent need of help. But this approach takes us further down the road of linking the problems of working-class communities to their ethnic identity, rather than to their class. More dangerously, it encourages the idea that working-class people belonging to different ethnic groups are in competition with each other for attention and resources.
The thoughtless comments by New Labour minister Margaret Hodge in 2007 epitomized this view. Her cack-handed response to the rise of the BNP in her constituency was to complain that migrant families were being given priority for homes over people with a ‘legitimate sense of entitlement’. Instead of demanding her government do something about its shoddy record on social housing, she made the interests of white working-class people and of immigrants seem pitted against each other.
‘White working-class people living on estates sometimes just don’t feel anyone is listening or speaking up for them,’ was how Hazel Blears put it in 2009, when she was New Labour’s communities secretary. Blears was absolutely correct: millions of white working-class people did feel unrepresented and voiceless. But for Blears, their concerns were almost entirely defined by immigration. ‘Whilst they might not be experiencing the direct impact of migration, their fear of it is acute … Changes in communities can generate unease and uncertainty.’18
Only when the BNP was breathing down its neck did New Labour start talking about the working class again—and even then it was in a racialized form, and restricted to the immigration issue. Above all, it was an exception to New Labour’s repudiation of working-class values, and its emphasis on everyone joining the middle class.
If you want to explode the myth that class is dead in modern Britain, and that anyone can rise to the top through their own efforts, the Palace of Westminster is a good place to start. MPs swan in and out of meetings with lobbyists and constituents, occasionally popping to the Chamber to speak or vote when called by the piercing division bell. Overwhelmingly from middle-class, professional backgrounds, the combined salary and expenses of the average backbencher comfortably puts them in the top 4 per cent of the population.
Scurrying around after them, or gossiping over lattes in Portcullis House, is an army of fresh-faced, ambitious parliamentary researchers. With unpaid internships (often, quite unlike their bosses, without even expenses provided) almost always a prerequisite for making it on to an MP’s staff rolls, Parliament is a middle-class closed shop. Only those able to live off the financial generosity of their parents can get their foot in the door.
At the service of MPs and hacks alike are the cleaners and catering staff. Many of them trek across London on night buses to arrive in the House at the crack of dawn. Their wages place them easily in the bottom 10 per cent of the population. Until a fight for a living wage was successful in 2006, the cleaners of the ‘Mother of All Parliaments’ were subsisting on the minimum wage in one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Watching middle-aged women trundling around trolleys containing the leftovers of roast chicken and chocolate gateaux, you can be forgiven for feeling as though you had walked into a Victorian aristocrat’s manor.
It would be easy, but lazy, to portray Parliament as a microcosm of the British class system. It isn’t, but it certainly showcases the gaping divides of modern society. When I interviewed James Purnell just before the May 2010 election that brought the Tories and their Lib Dem allies to 10 Downing Street, I put to him how unrepresentative Parliament was: two-thirds of MPs came from a professional background and were four times more likely to have attended a private school than the rest of the population. When I referred to the fact that only one in twenty MPs came from a blue-collar background, he was genuinely shocked. ‘One in twenty?’
When I asked him if this had made it more difficult for politicians to understand the problems of working-class people, he could hardly disagree. ‘Yes, indeed. I think it’s become very much a closed shop …’ For Purnell, this middle-class power grab was the result of a political system that has become closed to ordinary people.
In the build-up to the 2010 general election, a number of excited headlines claimed that trade unions were parachuting candidates into safe seats. ‘Unions put their candidates in place to push Labour to the left,’ bellowed The Times. And yet, in the end, only 3 per cent of new MPs were former trade union officials. There was no similar outrage about the number of prospective candidates with careers in the City—the sector that, after all, was responsible for the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. One in ten new MPs had a background in financial services, twice as many as in the 1997 landslide that brought Labour to power. Politics has also increasingly been turned into a career rather than a service: a stunning one in five new MPs already worked in politics before taking the Parliamentary oath.
When you look back at the 1945 Labour Cabinet that constructed the welfare state after the ravages of World War II, the contrast is almost obscene. The giants of Clement Attlee’s government were Ernest Bevin, Britain’s representative on the global stage; Nye Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service; and Herbert Morrison, Attlee’s number two. All were from working-class backgrounds, starting life as a farm boy, miner, and grocer’s assistant, respectively. It was the trade unions and local government that had provided them with the ladders to climb, enabling them to end up as towering political figures and respected statesmen.
But take a look at today’s treatment of John Prescott, one of the few working-class members of New Labour. You don’t have to agree with his politics to flinch at the class-based ridicule heaped on him. The son of a railway signalman, Prescott went on to fail his eleven-plus and became a waiter in the Merchant Navy. His impressive rise from such roots to the post of deputy prime minister was rarely applauded, however. Tory MP Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Winston Churchill, used to shout drinks orders at him in the House of Commons whenever he rose to speak. Tory MPs and journalists who have benefited from hugely expensive private educations mocked his occasionally garbled English.
When he entered the House of Lords, that retirement home for the ruling elite, the Telegraph’s chief leader writer scoffed: ‘I’m not sure ermine suits John Prescott.’ The comments left by Telegraph readers on the newspaper’s website were a class war free-for-all. One passed on a friend’s hilarious description of him as ‘the builder’s bum-crack of the Labour Party’. ‘Baron Pie & Chips’ and ‘Prescott is a fat peasant’ were other witticisms, as was ‘John “here’s a little tip” Prescott’. ‘Someone has to serve the drinks between debates!’ guffawed another. Prescott was ridiculed because some felt that by being from lowly working-class stock, he sullied the office of deputy prime minister and then the House of Lords.
Working-class people once rose in politics through the mighty institutions of trade unions and local government. But today the trade unions are on their knees and local government has been stripped of many of its powers. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone regrets the
abolition of the traditional council structure where working-class people got elected, learned via committees how things are run, and then went to Parliament. That’s gone … There’s a lot of people that used to be on Lambeth Council or Camden Council who weren’t terribly good in terms of literacy and numeracy, but loved representing their area, and could work the machine and the council. They didn’t have to have bloody A-levels or degrees to do it. In that sense the barriers against the working class are stronger now, not because an aristocratic elite is keeping them out, but because a sort of middle-class layer has introduced too many qualifications, rules, and regulations.
You are more likely to make it to Parliament if you are a middle-class, Oxbridge-educated former special advisor these days.
When I spoke to Peter, a leisure centre worker in East London, he summed up the scepticism many working-class people feel towards the political establishment. ‘I think they’re on a different wavelength. I think most of the politicians are very rich and don’t understand the normal problems of people, because they come from a different background. And, you know, you see them all on television, most of them are very wealthy, so they wouldn’t understand our problems, you know.’
It was his firm belief that ‘they would never know what normal people go through.’ This is a fundamental point in understanding politicians’ demonization of working-class communities. It is, of course, largely down to the legacy of Thatcher’s assault on working-class Britain, and the establishment of a consensus that individual salvation can only be achieved through joining the middle class. But this consensus has established itself so easily in Westminster because our increasingly privileged political elites were—and are—fertile ground for these kinds of ideas. They are largely disconnected from working-class communities, and cannot imagine anyone not sharing their middle-class values and aspirations. They find it easy to explain working-class problems as the consequences of personal behaviour, not the social structure of the country. Above all, stereotypes about the working class have found a sympathetic hearing from overwhelmingly middle-class politicians who have rarely mixed with people with less privileged backgrounds.
The shadow of Thatcher’s class war and the demonizing of working-class communities by both the Tories and New Labour have had drastic consequences. Political trends always exert a profound influence on the culture. The repercussions of the attack on working-class values and institutions have fanned out through society. Like Westminster, our media and entertainment are dominated by the most privileged sectors. They have been all too ready to put working-class people down in the crudest possible ways.