Does Labour still despise the working class?

New data shows that the party's election candidates are wholly unrepresentative of the British workforce

In 2020, my book Despised: why the modern Left loathes the working class was published. The book’s thesis, drawn from my own experience of over 25 years of activity in the labour movement, was that the modern political Left had developed a deep-rooted contempt for what you might call Britain’s traditional working class.

The Left’s leaders and foot soldiers never admitted to this publicly, of course. But occasionally the mask would slip (think, for example, of Gordon Brown’s labelling of Rochdale voter Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigoted old woman’ after she raised concerns over immigration, or Emily Thornberry’s apparent curling of the lip after seeing a house adorned by a St George’s flag and with a white van parked outside).

The schism between the Labour party in particular and the working class was always going to happen. In fact, it had been around three decades in the making. During that time, the party had increasingly sought to divest itself of its working-class identity and had morphed into an organisation largely comprised - and serving the interests - of social activists, graduates, and middle-class liberals and progressives living in our fashionable cities and university towns.

Not surprisingly, voters among Labour’s old working-class base - the type of folk who often did the toughest or most grinding jobs in society, held small ‘c’ conservative opinions, had little in the way of personal wealth and usually lived in the grittier parts of the country - gradually began to see that the party no longer particularly liked them. Sure, Labour still wanted their votes at election time. But it regarded them as some sort of embarrassing elderly relative whom it was probably wise to be keep at arm’s length.

It was no coincidence that, as this process was taking hold, fewer and fewer of the party’s representatives - particularly those in parliament - could lay claim to hailing from genuinely working-class backgrounds. More often than not - or so it seemed - the party’s candidates had come through on a conveyor belt that had taken them from a good school (either private or one of the small number of really decent state ones) to university and then to work at a charity or think-tank or quango or not-for-profit organisation, or perhaps as an assistant to a sitting MP.

It was also strikingly apparent to those of us who take an interest in these things that even those candidates from authentically working-class backgrounds who had worked in what might be called ‘real jobs’ seemed almost exclusively to have served in the public sector and had next-to-no knowledge of private industry.

Photo: Scott Lewis

Of course, working in the public sector is no bad thing of itself, but any party that aspires to represent workers must surely seek to adopt candidates who collectively have the widest experience of the world of work. Moreover, an understanding of private industry and the lives of those who work in it is, for any political party, a pre-requisite to a healthy and constructive relationship with business itself and is likely to prove highly valuable when it comes to framing policy on matters such as growth, productivity, competitiveness and so on.

The perception that developed of Labour as a party that did not understand the lives of the many millions of working-class people who laboured in the productive sector - what we term the ‘real economy’ - often in jobs requiring long hours and hard graft was surely attributable in no small measure to the fact that so few of its representatives and spokesmen had - for any length of time, at least - operated in that sphere themselves. Like the trade union movement, it seemed as though the party was content simply to retreat to its public sector redoubt and seek to secure power without having to do too much to win over those toiling in the realm of private industry.

In Despised, I made the argument that a flourishing private sector must be an objective of any party seeking to govern from the Left and that there was a pressing need for those who purported to represent the interests of labour to break out beyond their public sector comfort zone.

I later argued - only half jokingly - that all prospective Labour candidates must be required to show that they had spent at least two years working in the private sector on the average wage or less.

So, three years after Despised’s publication, has the situation improved? Has Sir Keir Starmer’s party managed to ensure a greater number of its candidates can demonstrate experience of - and affection for - the private sector?

Well, the short answer is no. Consultancy firm Apella Advisors has analysed the professional backgrounds of the 100 candidates selected by Labour to fight its most winnable seats at the next general election. Many (perhaps all) of these individuals are almost certain to find themselves in parliament within about a year. Apella found that, of the 100, 66 worked most recently in either the public or not-for-profit sectors and just 37 in the private sector. (The total slightly exceeds 100, as some individuals had multiple roles.)

To put this into context, there are around 33million people in work in Britain today. Of these, 21% work either in the public sector or for a charity or not-for-profit organisation and the remaining 79% in the private sector.

What’s more, of the 37 Labour candidates who worked most recently in the private sector, nine were lawyers, nine worked in public relations, communications or public affairs, two in research and public opinion polling, and two were writers (one for TV; the other a journalist). Not exactly horny-handed sons of toil, then!

All of this demonstrates the gaping disconnect that still exists between, on the one hand, those representing, or seeking to represent, the Labour party at its highest levels and, on the other, ordinary working people.

It simply is not good enough for Labour to continue to ignore this massive imbalance. For a party that likes to preach the gospel of ‘diversity’ at every opportunity, it displays a worrying insouciance about the lack of diversity in the working experience of those it selects as candidates. And for as long as that state of affairs persists, Labour will be hamstrung by the suspicion that it has little empathy with the lives of the working class more generally.

The relationship between Labour and the working class remains fractured. And the party is not doing anything like enough to repair it.

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A few days ago, I took part in a short debate on GB News on the question: ‘Are the Tories toast?’ It can be viewed here (scroll to one hour 16 minutes).

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I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a happy and peaceful Christmas. I’ll be checking in with you again early in the new year.