There’s a very good recent comment from the political writer Matthew Goodwin about how little the working classes in Britain are represented in the UK Parliament of today.
In an article for Unherd on the 16th February 2023 about the monstering that Tory MP Lee Anderson has got from the middle class Left, Mr Goodwin said:
Just look at our major parties. In recent years, both have been hijacked by this new graduate elite and reshaped around its interests, priorities, tastes, and outlook. As this class has taken control, the share of MPs on the Left and Right who, like Anderson, had a working-class job before entering politics has crashed to just 1%, leaving much of the country without proper representation. Likewise, while roughly 25% of British adults belong to this group (1% of whom are fortunate enough to have gone to Oxbridge), the share of MPs who went to university now stands at 90%, while almost 25% went to Oxbridge.
The transformation of Britain’s political class has been especially visible in the Labour Party, the one institution which through strong trade unions, cooperative societies, working men’s clubs, and mass memberships used to ensure that people from very different backgrounds were given a voice. But today this is no longer true. Back when Neil Kinnock led Labour into battle against Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties, 64 Labour MPs, like Anderson, had previously held working-class jobs. But since then, the number has collapsed. When Tony Blair won his second landslide, in 2001, there were 49. When Ed Miliband was defeated by David Cameron, in 2015, there were 20. When Jeremy Corbyn took over, promising to “restore the voice of the working class”, there were 12. And when Keir Starmer replaced him, after trying to block Brexit, there were just seven. Today, the blue-collar Labour MP is almost extinct. At the last election, in 2019, Labour candidates were the most likely to have postgraduate degrees and were just as likely as Conservatives to have attended Oxbridge.
Mr Goodwin is correct here. It’s utterly shameful that the party that was set up to represent organised labour, the Labour Party, is now dominated by those who have never done one of the jobs that many of their constituents actually do. The Labour Party does not represent me nor my family and certainly not any more, my class.
Such an intersting article, real food for thought as opposed to a quick snack. I’m still attempting digestion. My initial reaction is to be critical of the lack of a historical perspective, i.e. the Labour movement arose in a society very different from ours today.
I believe that the article I quoted from left this out because the author’s readers would have been familiar with the history of the Labour Party. But you are correct society is very different from when the Labour Party formed. However his point stands. Labour have abandoned the working classes and instead become a party of the laptop classes. I’m not sure that after so many decades of being a party of the laptop classes can recover support and trust from the working clases, especially with its recent history being one of crapping on the heads of the working classes with everything from open borders policies, leaders who suck up to Islamic extremist groups, the embrace of types of environmentalism that harm the working classes and the identity politics.
The rot set in the ’30’s when “the party of the working class was replaced by the party of the horny-spectacled”. (Colm Brogan)
Since its early days Labour has had both a ‘Hampstead Left’ side and a ‘Hartlepool Left’ side but in the past there was some sort of balance. That’s not the case now. Labour is nearly all ‘Hampstead Left’ with working class concerns relegated to the bottom of the pile. I would say that the rot started to arise in the fifties with Labour’s encouragement of high density housing and an addiction to top down planning for towns, services and people’s lives. But the rot really set in and the damage really started to get done to the working classes with Crossland’s destruction of Grammar Schools which allowed bright working class youngsters to advance out of their societal position.