Menu Search Britain My account Jun 11th 2020 edition Bagehot Johnson and Starmer !ght for the working-class vote Labour has a chance of recapturing the territory it lost Jun 11th 2020 T he black lives matter movement has convulsed British politics. Large crowds have marched in Whitehall and Bristol. Statues of former slaveowners have been felled and others are in the felling-line. It sometimes looks as if Britain is turning into America—and that the major galvanising force in politics will soon be race rather than class. But race is nothing like as divisive in Britain as it is in the United States. America fought a bloody civil war to abolish slavery in 1861-65, whereas Britain abolished the slave trade by Act of Parliament in 1807. Race has intensi!ed as a dividing line in American politics in recent decades, with the Democratic Party becoming the party of minorities (and white elites) and the Republican Party becoming the party of the white backlash. British politics has, thank God, avoided this. Britain’s !rst black prime minister could well be a Conservative: the party has black high-"yers such as Kwasi Kwarteng and Bim Afolami. The fact that both those rising stars of the Conservative Party were educated at Eton is not a coincidence. Class remains a more powerful force in British society than it is in many other countries, and class identities will continue to matter more than racial identities in determining voting behaviour. The workers matter much more than the wokers. The divisions that education and accent cleave run deep in British society. Nearly three-quarters of Britons say that it is “very” or “fairly” di#cult to move between classes, compared with 65% a decade ago. A majority of Britons still identify as “working-class”. Politicians’ attempts to bury the issue have failed. Sir John Major trumpeted the idea that Britain is a “classless society”. Tony Blair declared that he was building a post-class meritocracy. David Cameron tried to pretend that he and his wife were members of classless Middle England despite the blue blood that runs in their veins. But class struck back: both Brexit and the 2019 election were decided, to a striking degree, by working-class voters in Britain’s equivalent of “"yover country”. The same people will decide the outcome of the next election. Young people and urban ethnic minorities tend to vote Labour. Older people and rural folk are Conservative. The provincial working class are today’s swing voters. are Conservative. The provincial working class are today’s swing voters. They have been moving towards the Tories over the past decade, a shift that turned into a stampede in 2019. But, as Boris Johnson said on the morning after the election, they have not given the Tories their votes—they have merely lent them. Mr Johnson hoped to make the deal permanent by focusing on repairing provincial Britain. But covid-19 has changed all that by derailing Mr Johnson’s agenda and exposing his weaknesses as an administrator. At the same time, the Labour Party is also getting a lot smarter when it comes to winning over the workers. In 2019 Jeremy Corbyn lost the workingclass vote to the Tories not just because he dithered over Brexit but also because, as a privileged fantasist brought up in a manor house in Shropshire, he addressed himself to an imaginary working class of revolutionary proletarians mass-produced in the mines and the factories. By contrast, Sir Keir Starmer, the party’s new leader, is determined to address the real working class. That is why he has been careful not to get carried away with Black Lives Matter: during a radio interview this week he said that Edward Colston’s statue should have been removed by democratic deliberation rather than crowd action. And that is why he has appointed Claire Ainsley as his head of policy. Ms Ainsley’s appointment is one of Sir Keir’s most important decisions as leader so far. As executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and as author of a thoroughly researched book, “The New Working Class”, she spent years studying real workers. She argues that a distinctive new version has grown up beside the old industrial working class. Four in !ve jobs are now in the service sector, many of them (particularly in cleaning, catering, social care and retailing) poorly paid. The new workers toil in a much more fragmented world than the old working class, often in isolation and bound by individual contracts. They are also much more ethnically diverse. But ethnic diversity doesn’t align them with urban progressives. Ms Ainsley identi!es four key values that resonate with the new working class: family, fairness, hard work and decency. Her priorities are bread-and-butter policies such as statutory sick leave for casual workers, tax breaks for companies that emphasise job security and more visible policing in areas of high crime. Recapturing these people will be far from easy for Labour. The new working class lacks the sense of collective class identity that the old one had, and in some areas Labour may !nd itself torn between their interests and values, and those of the young metropolitans whose vote it relies on. Transgender rights, for instance, will be a tricky area. The Conservative Party will not give up its new territory without a !ght. It has been thinking about Britain’s new class structure for longer than Labour has: during Mr Corbyn’s policy Ice Age Ms Ainsley even acted as an adviser to a Conservative-leaning think-tank, Onward. Tory wonks such as Rachel Wolf, one of the co-authors of the last manifesto, and Munira Mirza, the head of the policy unit, have been fashioning policies for the just-about-managing for years, while groups such as Blue Collar Conservatism help ground policymaking in reality. But a !ght for the workers is just what Britain needs. For far too long the British working class has been subjected to two indignities: being sentimentalised by the left and being written out of history by the right. Britain has much repairing to do on many fronts in the next few years, including facing up to its responsibility for the slave trade. But thanks to the new realism that is gripping both the left and the right on the subject of class, millions of people who work in Britain’s casualised service economy have a good chance of being part of this reconstruction. 7 This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Battle for the working class" Reuse this content The Trust Project More from Britain Black Lives Matter protests The Colston statue and Britain’s legacy of slavery BRITAIN Sanitation Lockdown and the toilet problem BRITAIN Britain and Australia Why the Conservative Party adores Australia BRITAIN The best of our journalism, handpicked each day Sign up to our free daily newsletter, The Economist today → Sign up now Subscribe Group subscriptions Help Keep updated Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” Apps & media Other publications The Economist The Economist apps 1843 Magazine About Economist Films The World in Advertise Podcasts The World If Press centre The Economist Group Economist Group The Economist Store Careers Which MBA? 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