John Prescott's Labour no longer exists

The party today looks upon working-class people as embarrassing elderly relatives

Photo: Steve Punter / Wikimedia Commons

I joined the Labour party on 9 June 1994. A little over a month later, Tony Blair ascended to the leadership, with John Prescott, whose death was announced on Thursday, as his deputy. Prescott had run for the leadership himself, coming second in a three-horse race.

Although it was obvious to me as a new member that Labour had by that point initiated the process of transformation that would see it eventually shed its image as an avowedly working-class party and focus more heavily on the interests of the professional and managerial classes, it wasn’t in any sense unusual in those days for someone of Prescott’s humble background – father a railway signalman, mother from a Welsh mining family – to scale the internal heights.

Back then, the coalition that was the bedrock of Labour’s historical success – its traditional working-class base fused with a sufficient layer of the ‘educated’ middle-class – still held together. Prescott and many like him were products of a party that was proud of its working-class roots and didn’t regard those from such stock as if they were embarrassing elderly relatives.

Once upon a time, in fact, the Labour benches in parliament were replete with individuals from working-class backgrounds who - like the former seaman Prescott - had found their way into politics after doing what you might call ‘ordinary’ jobs. Often they had a backstory of activism or leadership in the trade union movement. Few had been to university. Think of Ernie Bevin: fatherless, barely educated and sent out to work as a labourer aged 11, he rose to become foreign secretary. Or his near-namesake Nye Bevan, a miner from the South Wales valleys who, as minister for health, was instrumental in the creation of the National Health Service. Or Jim Callaghan. Or Dennis Skinner. Or Eric Heffer.

But as, throughout the 1990s and onwards, the working-class element of the party was slowly hollowed out, the old coalition started to fracture. The party’s representatives were increasingly drawn from a cohort whose members had arrived through the same pipeline of university and then on to work as a political researcher or at a think-tank or charity or suchlike. Prescott said of them: ‘To us old hands from trade union backgrounds, they were a new sort of Labour politician. I called them the “Beautiful People” … I was firmly old Labour, and they were a new breed.’

As this new reality took hold, an ever-decreasing number of Labour MPs could lay claim to ever having worked in normal jobs or – especially – for any length of time in private industry. (I once suggested, only half-jokingly, that all prospective Labour candidates should be required to demonstrate that they had worked for two years in a non-managerial role in the private sector.) The prominence given today to those who still hail from the more traditional Labour background – Angela Rayner, for example – shouldn’t blind us to the reality of the trajectory over the past three decades or so.

Before the recent general election, a political consultancy firm analysed the working backgrounds of the candidates selected by Labour to fight its 100 most winnable seats. The data was striking.