Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Call to Freedom
The demonization of the working class is the ridiculing of the conquered by the conqueror. Over the last thirty years, the power of working-class people has been driven out of the workplace, the media, the political establishment, and from society as a whole. Ruling elites once quaked at the threat of working-class boots stomping towards Downing Street, of a resolute mass brandishing red flags and dog-eared copies of The Communist Manifesto. Back in the 1970s, right-wingers routinely complained that the trade unions were the real power in the land. Surreal as it now seems, it was the might of the working class that was once mocked and despised. But, today, with their power smashed into pieces, the working class can be safely insulted as tracksuit-wearing drunken layabouts with a soft spot for Enoch Powell. Feeble, feckless, rude, perhaps—but certainly not dangerous.
When I asked Carl Leishman, the twenty-eight-year-old call centre worker from County Durham, if he felt that working-class people were represented in society, he laughed at the absurdity of the question. ‘No. Not at all!’ Did he feel that they were ridiculed?
Well, yeah, because there’s nobody who will really stand up to it, because—and this is going to sound very clichéd—but working-class people don’t generally have a voice. Do you know what I mean? You can take the mickey out of a working-class person as much as you want, because you know they’re not going to get in the papers particularly, they’re not going to get on the news, because they’re not the people that can influence things, really. So it’s kind of pointless listening to them.
It was a theme that I heard again and again in working-class communities: a crushing sense of powerlessness. ‘They don’t live among us, do they?’ said a Birmingham shop-worker about British politicians. ‘They live in a different world to us. And they’ve lost touch with reality.’ As far as many working-class people are concerned, they no longer have a voice. No wonder a BBC poll in 2008 revealed that nearly six out of ten white working-class people felt that no one spoke for them.
That is not to say class politics is dead and buried. On the contrary, it is flourishing in some quarters. In other words it has become the preserve of the wealthy and their political apologists. It has been at the heart of the demonization of the working class.
The first tenet of this class politics of the wealthy is simple: class does not exist. Class denial is extraordinarily convenient. After all, what better way to deflect attention from the fact that huge sums of money are being shovelled into the bank accounts of the wealthy, while the wages of the average worker stagnate? The expulsion of ‘class’ from the nation’s vocabulary by Thatcherism and New Labour has ensured minimal scrutiny of the manifestly unjust distribution of wealth and power in modern Britain.
Pretending that the working class is no more—‘disappearing’ it, if you like—has proved particularly politically useful. We have seen how the chav caricature has obscured the reality of the working-class majority. As elite class warriors are fully aware, the working class has always been the source of political sustenance for the left. That the left is inextricably tied to the aspirations and needs of working-class people is reflected in the very name of the Labour Party. If there is no longer a working class to champion, the left is devoid of a mission. It no longer has a reason to exist.
If anyone dares to raise the issue of class, their arguments are ignored and they are slapped down as dinosaurs clinging to outdated, irrelevant nostrums—even as their right-wing critics shamelessly promote the sorts of economic theories that flourished in the late nineteenth century. When Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, had the temerity to float the controversial suggestion that someone’s class background might just have an impact on the rest of their lives, the liberal Independent newspaper was outraged. ‘Britain is simply no longer the sort of class-divided country that Ms Harman paints,’ it retorted.
Another fashionable idea among these class warriors is that people at the bottom deserve their lot in life. It was not for the government to redress inequalities, because the conditions of the poor would only improve if they changed their behaviour. As the Independent editorial went on to acknowledge, ethnic minorities and women still faced discrimination, ‘but the country’s biggest social blight today is an entrenched group of families and individuals at the bottom of the social pile who are failing to participate in the economic opportunities available in modern Britain.’1 The conclusion was clear. If these people want to get on, they can—but they are failing to do so. The brutal truth was that those at the bottom only had themselves to blame.
It is not simply about holding people responsible for where they are in the pecking order. Smearing poorer working-class people as idle, bigoted, uncouth and dirty makes it more and more difficult to empathize with them. The people at the very bottom, in particular, have been effectively dehumanized. And why would anyone want to improve the conditions of people that they hate?
We have seen how ‘aspiration’ is presented as the means of individual salvation: that is, everyone’s aim in life should be to become middle class. Both Thatcherism and New Labour have promoted this rugged individualism with almost religious zeal. Rather than the old collective form of aspiration, based on improving the conditions of working-class people as a whole, the new mantra was that able individuals should ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and climb the social ladder. Of course, it is based on a myth: after all, if everyone could become middle class, who would man the supermarket checkouts, empty the bins and answer the phones in call centres? But this glorification of the middle class—by making it the standard everyone should aspire for, however unrealistically—is a useful ideological prop for the class system.
At the same time, politicians and journalists have sneakily misrepresented what ‘Middle Britain’ actually is. ‘One of the most successful things that the wealthy have done is to almost persuade the middle class that they’re middle class, too,’ says maverick journalist Nick Cohen. When politicians and journalists have used the term ‘Middle Britain’ (or ‘Middle England’), they have not been talking about people on median incomes—the median being, after all, only around £21,000 a year; they actually mean affluent voters in ‘Upper Britain’. This is how modest tax rises on the wealthy can be presented as attacks on ‘Middle Britain’, even though nine out of ten of us earn less than £44,000 a year. But politicians will argue that it is electorally impossible to introduce progressive policies that upset supposedly crucial, but completely misconstrued, ‘Middle Britain’ swing voters.
It even became fashionable among many politicians and commentators to celebrate inequality. Inequality is good because it promotes competition, goes the theory, and it shows that the people at the top are generating wealth. The corollary of this is the idolization of the rich as ‘wealth creators’ and entrepreneurs, who have achieved success purely through their own hard work and talent.
The class politics of the wealthy has proved extraordinarily effective at demolishing its opponents. It loudly asserts—as Margaret Thatcher famously put it—that ‘There Is No Alternative’. Policies that promote the interests of the wealthiest are presented as necessary for the well-being of society as a whole. And, of course, with the media, think-tanks and much of politics funded by the wealthy and powerful, these ideas have easily achieved domination.
When ‘class politics’ is mentioned, it is normally understood to mean fighting the corner of working-class people, whether with good, bad or naïve intentions. Not any more. Advocates of the class politics of the wealthy largely dominated Tony Blair’s New Labour. It was a pretty stunning turnaround for a party specifically founded to represent the working class. How did it happen?
The legacy of Thatcher’s smashing of the unions is certainly a major factor. For a century the trade union movement had been Labour’s backbone, ensuring that there was always some sort of working-class voice within the party. But the unions’ diminished position within society gave successive Labour leaders a free hand to reduce their internal role. Such is the weakness of the unions that they have ended up repeatedly voting to renounce their own powers within party structures.
Four successive defeats at the hands of the Tories between 1979 and 1992 left Labour demoralized, and willing to accept almost anything to get back into power. Clare Short told me of the despair within Labour’s ranks because it ‘had lost so often, and felt it had let down the very people it existed to represent, and after losing in 1992 when people thought we were going to win—the whole party was desperate to win.’ Tony Blair was elected Labour leader in 1994 with around half of the vote against leadership candidates who, Short believes, simply were not credible.
Then, through their [New Labour’s] ruthlessness, they brought in lots of reforms weakening the power and democracy of the Conference, the democracy of the party, the way the National Executive Committee was elected—all sorts of things. And people went along with it because they didn’t want to make waves early on. And then it was kind of too late, the structures had changed, and the power to resist had gone …
Because of this desperation and demoralization, Blair and his followers were able to impose the Thatcherite settlement on the Labour Party. Part and parcel of this settlement was the idea that everyone should aspire to be middle class. Little wonder that, when asked what her greatest achievement was, Margaret Thatcher answered without hesitation: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.’2
International politics played a part in it, too. After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it seemed as though there was simply no alternative to free-market capitalism. I asked former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell if he thought New Labour adapted to Thatcherism just as, decades ago, the Tories were forced to capitulate to the post-war welfare state settlement left by Clement Attlee’s Labour government. ‘Yeah, I do. The combination of 1979 [Thatcher’s first election victory] and 1989 [the collapse of the Berlin Wall] meant that a little bit of the left’s optimism and confidence about itself died … Somehow, post-1989, a whole bunch of things were defined as, if not insane, then at least as slightly far-fetched, and therefore people on the left had to argue very, very hard to win arguments about overcoming market outcomes or reducing inequality …’
In such an ideological atmosphere, it is no wonder that New Labour got away with abandoning the party’s role as the political voice of working-class people. The calculation of its political strategists was, in the words of New Labour spin-doctor Peter Mandelson, that they ‘would have nowhere else to go’.3 After all, commentators often refer to working-class loyalty to Labour as ‘tribalism’. With all of its implications of primitive, unthinking loyalty, this is a word used pejoratively and almost always towards what is patronizingly described as Labour’s ‘core vote’, rather than being applied, say, to the Tory electoral base in the Home Counties.
It is certainly true that, partly out of fear and hatred of the Tories, huge numbers of working-class people thought of Labour as ‘their’ party, come what may. When campaigning on the doorstep, Labour canvassers often report working-class voters talking about the party as kind of an errant relative who was testing their patience, but, after all, it was family. Yet as the wheels began falling off the New Labour project, growing numbers of disillusioned working-class voters began to disprove the ‘nowhere else to go’ assumptions of Blair and Brown’s strategists.
New Labour’s bright young things did not factor in what in Sweden is called the ‘sofa option’—working-class people sitting on their hands rather than reluctantly dragging themselves out to vote for their traditional party. In the 2010 general election, over three-quarters of voters in the top, disproportionately Tory-voting social category went out to vote. But only around 58 per cent of working-class voters in the social groups C2 and DE turned out. The turnout gap between professionals and skilled or semi-skilled workers was a whopping 18 per cent.4 It is almost as though universal suffrage is being pulled down by stealth. More voters overall identified Labour rather than the Conservatives as their natural political home, but the depth of disillusion was such that this was not reflected in votes.
Refusing to come out and vote was one option: putting an ‘X’ in a different box was another. In Scotland and Wales, huge numbers of working-class voters defected to the welcoming arms of nationalist parties. In the 2008 Glasgow East by-election, Glaswegians turfed Labour out for the first time since the 1920s and voted in the Scottish Nationalist candidate as a protest. In England, as we have seen, the racist BNP picked up the votes of hundreds of thousands of traditionally Labour voters.
The theory that Labour’s prospects for remaining in office were tied to keeping the middle classes onside has decisively been proven to be a myth. According to pollsters Ipsos MORI, the decline in support for Labour between 1997 and 2010 in the top social categories (the ABs) was only five percentage points. Among the bottom two social categories (the C2s and DEs), on the other hand, a fifth of all supporters went AWOL. Indeed, while only half a million AB voters abandoned Labour, 1.6 million voters in each of the C2 and DE social groups evaporated.
Even some of New Labour’s leading lights are waking up to the party’s loss at the hands of working-class disaffection. During his successful campaign for the Labour leadership following the 2010 general election, Ed Miliband described ‘a crisis of working-class representation’—a phrase normally confined to left-wing conferences. ‘Put it at its starkest, if we had enjoyed a 1997 result in 2010 just among DEs, then on a uniform swing we would have won at least forty more seats and would still be the largest party in Parliament,’ he observed.
Maverick Blairite Jon Cruddas calls for a return to what he describes as ‘early New Labour’: that is, the period between 1997 and 2001. But of all the voters that New Labour ended up losing, half vanished in precisely those four years. Of the five million voters that Labour has lost, four million abandoned ship when Tony Blair was at the helm. These voters did not drift to the right. After all, the Tory vote only went up by a million between 1997 and 2010. The rot had set in early, but it was New Labour’s relentless sidelining of working-class Britain that led to its thorough defeat in 2010.
The defeat was not just electoral: it was political on a far more profound level. All the gains New Labour achieved for working-class people—modest as they are compared to previous Labour governments—relied on funding public services and social programmes with the cash flowing from the City. But, following the collapse of financial services and the installation of a Tory prime minister in Downing Street intent on slashing public spending, this model has been swept away forever. In Clare Short’s view, New Labour triumphantly believed that: ‘“We’re a great success because we’re market-friendly, we’re business-friendly, but we’re spending lots of money on poor people, so we’ve cracked it!” And of course it was a boom, and lots of the projections of the cuts that are going to come suggest that most of the increases in public spending under New Labour will be slashed away.’
The retreat from the politics of class is far from unique to the Labour Party. Across the whole of the left—and by that I mean social democracy, democratic socialism and even the remnants of revolutionary socialism—there has been a shift away from class politics towards identity politics over the last thirty years. The pounding suffered by the labour movement under Thatcherism, particularly following the nadir represented by the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, meant that class no longer seemed to be a plausible vehicle of change for many leftists. Identity politics, on the other hand, still felt radical and had achievable aims: history actually seemed to be on the side of those fighting for the emancipation of women, gays and ethnic minorities.
In the 1950s and 1960s, left-wing intellectuals who were both inspired and informed by a powerful labour movement wrote hundreds of books and articles on working-class issues. Such work would help shape the views of politicians at the very top of the Labour Party. Today, progressive intellectuals are far more interested in issues of identity. In his epic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose published the results of a search he did using an online academic resource, the MLA International Bibliography, for the years 1991 to 2000. There were 13,820 results for ‘women’, 4,539 for ‘gender’, 1,862 for ‘race’, 710 for ‘postcolonial’—and just 136 for ‘working class’.5
Of course, the struggles for the emancipation of women, gays and ethnic minorities are exceptionally important causes. New Labour has co-opted them, passing genuinely progressive legislation on gay equality and women’s rights, for example. But it is an agenda that has happily co-existed with the sidelining of the working class in politics, allowing New Labour to protect its radical flank while pressing ahead with Thatcherite policies. Take all-women shortlists, promoted by New Labour to increase the number of women candidates standing as Members of Parliament. This is a laudable goal, but it has largely ended up promoting middle-class women with professional backgrounds rather than candidates sharing the backgrounds of millions of working-class women: in low-paid, part-time, service-sector jobs.
The left continues to champion the most marginalized groups in society—as indeed it should—but all too often this has been in search of something to ‘replace’ the working class with. A classic example is the Respect Party founded by George Galloway as a left-wing, antiwar alternative to Labour. Respect rightly took a stand against the rampant Islamophobia that has gripped Britain in the era of the ‘war on terror’. But Respect’s electoral base was overwhelmingly in Muslim areas, such as East London and parts of Birmingham. It did not pitch to working-class people as a whole; instead, it substituted them for a Muslim community that was understandably particularly angered by the brutal invasion of Iraq. Class politics was abandoned for communalist politics. ‘The left has accepted that it’s still class based, but it’s gone off on single-issue campaigns and not related them back to the class issue,’ says left-wing Labour MP John McDonnell.
One of the ‘safe havens’ that the left has retreated into is international politics, particularly when it comes to taking a stand against wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Now, it would be unfair to portray this simply as the obsession of sandal-wearing middle-class liberals living in Islington. That was certainly the image conjured up by New Labour minister Kim Howells back in 2006, in response to an anti-war question from Labour MP Paul Flynn: ‘It is not enough to assume that if people eat the right kind of muesli, go to first nights of Harold Pinter revivals and read the Independent occasionally, the drug barons of Afghanistan will go away. They will not.’
Howells might be surprised to discover that middle-class people are actually more likely to support the Afghan War than working-class people. One typical poll by Ipsos MORI in 2009 revealed that, while 52 per cent of the top social category backed the war and 41 per cent opposed it, just 31 per cent of the bottom social category backed it while 63 per cent were in the anti-war camp. When I asked Mrs Parry in the former mining village of Ashington whether we should bring the troops home, she summed up the stance of many working-class people: ‘Yes. Definitely. Definitely! It wasn’t our fight in the first place!’ Similarly, the movement against the war in Iraq mobilized hundreds of thousands from a range of backgrounds—the author included—in one of the biggest political struggles of recent times. Working-class antiwar sentiment certainly surprised journalist Nick Cohen, who is a staunch backer of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When I put it to him, he was momentarily lost for words, before conceding: ‘I’m genuinely surprised by that.’
The problem comes with the priority given by the left to international issues. Many working-class people may oppose the war, but that does not mean their opposition trumps concerns like housing or jobs. It is difficult to focus your energies on what is happening thousands of miles away when you are struggling to pay the bills, or your children are desperately searching for secure work or an affordable house. While the BNP are cynically offering hateful solutions to many of these bread-and-butter issues, left-wing activists are more likely to be manning a stall about Gaza outside a university campus. Again, an important issue: but the same energy and commitment that has been shown in opposing unjust foreign wars has not been applied to championing the pressing issues facing working-class people.
Yet as a government of millionaires led by an Old Etonian prepares to further demolish the living standards of millions of working-class people, the time has rarely been so ripe for a new wave of class politics.
After all, the relentless championing of the interests of the wealthy has had disastrous effects for all of us. The destruction of industry that began with Thatcherism left the economy dangerously reliant on the City. The dismantling of council housing helped send house prices soaring, creating a housing bubble that is now imploding, and injecting record levels of debt into the economy. The crushing of the trade unions contributed to the stagnation of wages in the noughties, leading many to top up their income with credit and, in doing so, stoking up a debt-fuelled boom. The credit crunch is, in part, blowback from the class war started by Thatcher over three decades ago.
Disillusionment with the free market has not been stronger or more widespread since the launch of what Tony Benn calls Thatcher’s ‘counter-revolution’ in 1979. Polls consistently show overwhelming support for higher taxes on the wealthy. To add to the brew, Labour is out of office because it lost working-class support, and millions of disenfranchised working-class people have abandoned the ballot box altogether. This is why the biggest issue in British politics today is the crisis of working-class representation: those same people so often caricatured and dismissed as ‘chavs’. ‘Tony Blair tried to bury it, but class politics looks set to return,’ was the headline of one Guardian column by Polly Toynbee, in which she observed: ‘Over the years denying them-and-us class feeling may have alienated more voters than it won.’6
But what would a new class-based politics look like in twenty-first-century Britain? It is clear that only a movement rooted in the left can meet the challenge. The politics of the soggy centre have demonstrably failed to meet the needs and aspirations of working-class people, driving millions either to apathy or into the clutches of the far right. As the left’s numerous disastrous experiments in bolting its agenda on to those of other groups has shown, its own future as a political force depends on re-establishing a base in working-class Britain.
At the centre of a political agenda must be a total redefinition of aspiration. ‘I think you start from the basic notion of aspiration,’ says Jon Cruddas, ‘because this was the real cynical element within the worst elements of New Labour post-2001—the way they stripped out from the notion of aspiration any communitarian element. Any sense of duty, obligation, any sense of something that unites people, rather than this dominant atomized, consuming, acquisitive self.’ The new aspiration must be about improving people’s communities and bettering the conditions of the working class as a whole, rather than simply lifting able individuals up the ladder.
A return to class politics as it was practised and preached in, say, the 1970s, would not be appropriate. After all, the working class on which it was based has changed fundamentally. The old smokestack factory skyline has gone. With it has disappeared (or is rapidly disappearing) the largely male, industrial working class, with jobs-for-life passed on from generation to generation, and whole communities based around the workplace. A new movement has to speak to a more fragmented, largely non-unionized workforce marked by job insecurity and growing numbers of part-time and temporary workers. The jobs they are doing are generally cleaner and involve less physical exertion, but they come without the same sense of pride and fulfilment that many of the old industrial jobs had. Skilled jobs with prestige have, in many cases, given way to shelf-stacking.
Class-based movements of the past looked solely to the workplace. This is still important: after all, it is what defines the working class and, on a day-to-day basis, it is what shapes working-class life. But, with people so much more likely to jump from job to job—which, in some cases, can happen more than once a year—progressive movements today have to establish roots in communities as well. In their own perverse way, that is exactly what the BNP have been doing: throwing themselves into community politics. From local fêtes to dealing with anti-social behaviour, litter picking to campaigning for affordable housing, the BNP has, with varying levels of success, striven to establish a presence.
We have seen how working-class people are increasingly less likely to vote. Barack Obama owed his election as US president in 2008 to the mobilization of hitherto disenchanted, poorer voters, regardless of how this movement was then squandered: in other words, the extension of the electorate was key to victory. One of the priorities in this country must surely be to similarly mobilize those working-class people who, because of the increasing irrelevance of politics to their lives, have become effectively disenfranchised.
It will also mean straddling the internal divisions within the working class that widened under Thatcherism. These should not be overstated. As John McDonnell puts it, ‘There have always been different elements within the working class. The difference between skilled workers and unskilled workers; the difference between temporary workers, and all the rest of it.’ But Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former head of strategy, argues convincingly that ‘the conditions of employed, home-owning working-class people are so different to the conditions of people in social housing’, with what he calls ‘worklessness’ being more concentrated in the latter, for example. I have certainly encountered heartfelt—and understandable—working-class resentment against those who, it is believed, are falsely claiming benefits.
Part of the problem is that unemployment has become depoliticized. The fight against it used to be one of the left’s great crusades, as epitomized by the iconic Jarrow March in 1936. Fewer people were out of work in the 1970s than today, but back then it was seen as the definitive political issue of the day. Margaret Thatcher’s Tories savaged James Callaghan’s government with the notorious ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster, when a million were out of work.
Because successive governments have manipulated unemployment figures using incapacity benefits, the terms of the debate have been changed. Unemployment becomes recast as a public health issue—and specifically about whether a sizeable chunk of claimants are really ill enough not to work. The argument used by both New Labour and Tory politicians to drive claimants off benefits is essentially correct: individuals and their families are, generally speaking, better off with work. But they completely neglect to answer the question: ‘Where are the jobs to put unemployed people into?’ Even where there are jobs available, they are often low-paid, temporary and of poor quality.
Another core demand must surely be for decent, skilled, secure, well-paid jobs. It would not just be for the sake of the unemployed. It would also provide a possible alternative for many low-paid service sector workers. ‘The thing we talk about is trying to have an industrial policy,’ says Eilís Lawlor from the New Economics Foundation. ‘That means actually deciding that you’re going to support and promote industries that would fill the “missing middle” of skilled jobs, and you would tilt them spatially towards poor areas and areas that have been affected by recessions, but also policies to target particular industries.’ The fag end of the last Labour government began toying with an industrial policy—but after thirteen years of collapsing manufacturing, it was nowhere near bold enough. But now, with even the Tories talking about ‘rebalancing the economy’ and ‘Britain making things again’, there is ample political space to make the case for a new industrial strategy.
The campaign for good jobs could be the catalyst for far-reaching social change. Jobs could be created to help solve the deep-seated problems affecting working-class communities. Housing is one of the biggest crises facing many working-class families: a national programme to build socially owned housing would need an army of skilled labour, as well as stimulating the construction industry and in turn creating yet more good jobs. As Defend Council Housing’s Alan Walter put it in the dying days of New Labour, now that the market had failed to provide for people’s needs it was time to ‘invest in building a third generation of first-class council homes that are well built and designed to the highest environmental standards, with good community facilities and transport links, and we can finally get away from housing being something you speculate on and concentrate on providing homes for the twenty-first century.’
A jobs movement could also meet the challenge posed by environmental crisis. A ‘Green New Deal’ that builds a thriving renewable energy sector and launches a national crusade to insulate homes and businesses could employ hundreds of thousands of people. ‘I think there’s a role for government there in actually marrying its economic policy with environmental policy,’ says Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott.
There are large numbers of people who are not unskilled, but semi-skilled people working in construction or the building trade, for whom the government can make a very, very big difference. It could do good things like insulating homes, and at the same time creating a new green sector. The products that they’d actually be fitting in the homes could help the manufacturing base. You’d get some kind of multiplier effect through this government action that creates jobs and new industries.
As well as providing an array of new jobs, it would give working-class people a stake in the environment by transforming it into a bread-and-butter issue. This is class politics with a green tinge.
Clearly, these new jobs would not replace the old ones, and nor should they. Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So, to begin with, workers need to reclaim a sense of pride and social worth. Doing so would be a big step forward in making the case that the wages and conditions of low-paid jobs must be improved in order to reflect the importance they have in all of our lives.
We have seen how work in modern Britain is much more insecure than it used to be. British employers have more freedom to dispose of their workers than practically anywhere else in the Western world. There is an army of temporary agency workers, lacking even basic rights, who can be dismissed at a moment’s notice. As well as the feeling of insecurity that hire-and-fire conditions breed, it is thoroughly dehumanizing to be treated like chattel or a mere economic resource that can be thrown away as soon as it is no longer needed. There have been recent cases of workers being sacked by text message or even by megaphone. Job security must be at the heart of a new progressive movement.
But it must be about much more than wages and conditions. A new politics with class at its heart needs to address the deep-seated alienation many workers feel, particularly in the service sector: the sheer tedium and boredom that often accompanies routine, repetitive work. It is not just about skilling up jobs and providing variation in workers’ daily tasks, though that is part of it. It is also about giving workers genuine control and power in the workplace.
One of the ideas floated by the Tories before the 2010 general election was to create supposed workers’ co-operatives in the public sector, offering a ‘power-shift to public sector workers’ and ‘as big a transfer of power to working people since the sale of council house homes in the 1980s,’ as then-Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne put it. In reality, he was audaciously raiding traditional Labour language as a ruse to cover up the privatization of large pieces of the public sector. But this rhetoric could be taken at face value, upping the ante with the response: ‘Why not apply the same principle to the private sector?’
Such a call would be about bringing genuine democracy to the economy. With so many disillusioned with the ravages of the market, it would surely strike a popular chord. Instead of economic despots ruling over the British economy with nothing to keep them in check, key businesses could be taken into social ownership and democratically managed by workers—and consumers, for that matter. It would be a real alternative to the old-style, top-down, bureaucratic form of nationalization introduced after World War II by Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, Herbert Morrison. Working-class people would be given genuine power, instead of being mere cogs in the machine.
Inevitably, solutions must be sought to working-class concerns that hitherto have been cynically manipulated by the right. For example, rather than dismissing the anti-immigration backlash as ignorance and racism, a modern class-based politics has to understand it as the misdirected frustrations of working-class people at unanswered grievances. If anti-immigrant sentiment is to be defused, it means recognizing and tackling the issues that are really to blame and affect working-class people of all colours, like the lack of affordable housing and secure, well-paid jobs.
The tragedy, of course, is that the scapegoating of immigration has meant that the elites who are really responsible have been let off the hook. If working-class frustrations could be redirected towards those really responsible, there would be a genuine opportunity to unite working-class people, regardless of their background. ‘Something like £70 billion is stolen from the Exchequer every year through tax evasion. That is never couched as ripping off the white working class,’ says journalist Johann Hari. ‘But some poor Somali person running for their lives: they’re ripping you off, rather than those ripping billions of pounds off. A much healthier and more productive way to think about the divisions in our society is for white working-class people and immigrants to think of themselves as on the same side, against the corporations and very rich people who really are ripping them off.’
Anti-social behaviour is another good example of a working-class concern that could be reclaimed from the right. Although overblown as an issue, it disproportionately affects people in working-class communities and is a genuine blight on some people’s lives. On the one hand, a new class politics has to attack the root causes, like youth unemployment, poverty and a lack of facilities for young people; on the other, it has to defend people from being terrorized in their own communities but without falling into New Labour’s trap of stigmatizing young working-class kids. ‘New Labour’s emphasis on anti-social behaviour and attacks on civil liberties was about encouraging people to attack one another and blame one another for what was going in their communities, rather than the system itself,’ says John McDonnell. ‘And that doesn’t absolve individual responsibility or anything like that—but it’s trying to get it into context. In every working-class community, you’ve always had rogues, you’ve always had people who behaved badly—and what you try and do is overcome that—but people do that by controlling their own communities.’
It should go without saying that a challenge to the grotesque redistribution of wealth and power to the very richest over the last thirty years is long overdue. Some might call this class war; but surely that phrase applies more appropriately to the fact that, while recession was ravaging workers’ living standards and throwing thousands out of work, the wealth of the top 1,000 richest people shot up by 30 per cent between 2009 and 2010—the biggest hike ever recorded. Or the fact that, while the Conservative-led government is reducing corporation tax to 24 per cent—one of the lowest rates in the developed world—VAT, a tax that disproportionately hits the poor, was increased to 20 per cent. This is class war, and a new class politics must answer it.
While the financial crimes of the poor, such as benefit fraud, are frequently in the crosshairs of politicians and journalists, the far greater financial crimes of the rich are largely ignored. That is why fire must be redirected from welfare fraud to tax evasion which, as we have seen, costs the taxpayer seventy times more. And, of course, the whole tax system has to be rebalanced so that the burden falls properly on the wealthy. After all, during the boom times, the profits of the wealthy increased by unparalleled amounts: there is certainly no lack of money at the top.
The objection is always: ‘Won’t the rich just flee abroad to escape the taxman?’ Chartered accountant and former company director Richard Murphy points out that this was the argument used against the new 50 per cent tax rate that was introduced in the dying days of New Labour for those earning £150,000 and above. ‘It was said that they’re all going to be fleeing to Switzerland—but the number of applications to work in Swiss finance from the UK in 2009 was 7 per cent down on 2008. And the total number of questions was just over a thousand, and most of them were from the backroom—the technical people, IT and administration—not from the dealing room.’ The six major corporations that left were not even paying tax in Britain in the first place. Indeed, despite all the controversy, the tax receipts flowing into Treasury coffers were actually higher than estimated.
It will take a lot more than changing the tax system to stop the nation’s wealth being sucked into the bank accounts of the rich elites. There is little real pressure to stop them amassing huge riches while their employees’ wages stagnate or even decline. At the heart of this scandal is the destruction of the power of workers as an organized force—that is, the trade unions. ‘There are studies that show that one of the features of more equal societies is stronger trade union movements,’ says Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of seminal book The Spirit Level.
I think the ability of people at the top, the bankers and chief executives and so on, to give themselves these huge bonuses reflects the fact they’re in a situation where there are no constraints on them. If there were strong trade unions and perhaps a union or employee representative on the company’s board, it would become more embarrassing for CEOs to award themselves huge pay increases and bonuses while holding down wage demands from employees.
The decline of the trade unions lies at the heart of many of the problems of the working class: the fact that they don’t have a voice; their stagnating wages; their lack of rights in the workplace, and so on. As Tony Blair once boasted, even with New Labour’s changes, the law remains ‘the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world’. Indeed, Britain is actually in violation of its obligations as a signatory to various International Labour Organization conventions. ‘Although workers look for representation in the workplace, the anti-trade union laws have undermined the ability of trade unions to represent people,’ says John McDonnell. ‘The unions do their best in a difficult, very cold climate.’
Despite all the hammering that unions have suffered, they remain by far the biggest democratic civil society organizations in the country, with over seven million members. At the heart of the unions’ weakness is the fact that they have more or less been evicted from the private sector. While over half of public sector workers are union members, it is only the case for 15 per cent of their private sector counterparts. The restrictive laws are partly to blame—as Ken Livingstone says, ‘the intervention of the state to guarantee fairness in employment could change it overnight’—but the nature of the hire-and-fire, fragmented service sector with its high numbers of temporary and part-time workers makes it difficult to organize. At the turn of the twentieth century, the mission of trade unions was expanding from their relatively privileged skilled base to recruit largely non-unionized unskilled workers. It was called ‘New Unionism’. If the trade union movement has a future, it needs a New Unionism that focuses specifically on organizing the new service-sector working class.
In an era of cuts and austerity, it also means that the unions have to reach out far and wide. ‘They need to form coalitions with user groups so that powerful enough alliances can be formed to defeat the cuts agenda of the government through extra-parliamentary action,’ says industrial relations expert Professor Gregor Gall. ‘Unions need to do this as a union movement, not just as individual unions. The rationale here is that defending jobs and pay is synonymous with defending the quality and quantity of public services.’ For example, the argument has to be made not just about public sector workers facing the sack, but also about the loss of services for users, and the economic knock-on effects imperilling the jobs of private sector workers too.
Above all, the unions have to adapt to the working class as it is today. ‘You have to recognize that the labour movement is different, and it’s never going to be what it was thirty years ago,’ says trade union leader Billy Hayes. ‘It can regain its strength, but it’s looking for that next generation of leaders who will come up with ideas and initiatives that people like me aren’t capable of developing.’
It will be said that a movement with class at its heart will alienate the middle class. But there is no automatic rule that it has to. One politician put it to me that it was ‘the politics of despair’ to stand on the most conservative of programmes, merely ‘because you’ll never convince those people in Surbiton’. That was Hazel Blears, a stalwart defender of New Labour, and I happen to agree with her.
Most middle-class people cannot afford to go private, and want good, properly funded local schools and hospitals. Polls show that middle-class people support higher taxes on the rich—and indeed there is no reason why they would be any less happy to see the wealthy pay their fair share than a working-class person. It is in the interest of middle-class people to live in a society with less crime, and reducing the social causes is a major way of achieving that. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s groundbreaking study of inequality, The Spirit Level, has shown, all groups in society benefit from greater equality—including the middle class.
But a new class politics cannot simply be a British phenomenon. As the ultra-rich business elite has globalized, so too must working-class people. With multinational corporations able to hold elected governments to ransom, only the power of a strong, international labour force can meet the challenge. Only by making common cause with the burgeoning workforces of India and China can British workers hope to stem the consequences of a global ‘race to the bottom’ in pay and conditions.
It would be tempting to make all sorts of doom-laden, apocalyptic predictions about what will happen if such a movement fails to get off the ground, and warn darkly of riots and revolutions. The reality is just downright depressing. The working class will remain weak and voiceless. They will still be the butt of jokes at middle-class dinner parties, detested in angry right-wing newspaper columns, and ridiculed in TV sitcoms. Entire communities will remain without secure, well-paid work, and the people that comprise them will continue to be demonized for it. Living standards will go on stagnating and declining, even while the richest rake it in like never before. Ever fewer working-class people will bother to vote. Right-wing populism will tap into growing disillusionment and fury at the manner in which working-class people have become so despised. Mainstream politicians will continue to focus their energies on satisfying the demands of a small, wealthy elite, while growing ever more indifferent to the needs of an increasingly apathetic working class. Politics will revert to what it was in the nineteenth century: essentially, a family argument between competing wealthy factions.
At its heart, the demonization of the working class is the flagrant triumphalism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them. As this Conservative-led government pushes ahead with a programme of cuts that makes the working class pay for the crimes of the elite, they have much to laugh at.
But it does not have to be this way. The folly of a society organized around the interests of plutocrats has been exposed by an economic crisis sparked by the greed of the bankers. The new class politics would be a start, to at least build a counterweight to the hegemonic, unchallenged class politics of the wealthy. Perhaps then a new society based around people’s needs, rather than private profit, would be feasible once again. Working-class people have, in the past, organized to defend their interests; they have demanded to be listened to, and forced concessions from the hands of the rich and the powerful. Ridiculed or ignored though they may be, they will do so again.