52 Britain The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020
“A
working-class herois something to be,” sang John Len-
non. That certainly seems to be the view of the candidates for
the Labour Party leadership, for they never miss an opportunity to
boast about their proletarian credentials. Sir Keir Starmer’s father
was a toolmaker who named his son after the Labour Party’s first
mp, Keir Hardie. “I actually never had been in any workplace other
than a factory until I left home for university,” he told the bbc. “I’d
never been in an office.” Emily Thornberry was so poor when she
was growing up—on a council estate, naturally—that her family
had to have their cat put down to save money. Rebecca Long Bailey
is the daughter of a dock-worker and trade-union activist; she in-
sists that the next Labour leader should be “as comfortable on the
picket line as at the dispatch box”.
The Labour Party can be forgiven some of its obsession with
class given the shock of its defeat in the general election. It went
into the election offering the biggest transfer of power to the work-
ers in history only to see more workers vote for an Old Etonian with
the middle name of de Pfeffel than for Comrade Corbyn. It lost
working-class seats in the Midlands and the north that are not just
bits of land but parts of its soul. This year’s Durham Miners’
Gala—a celebration of working-class culture and Labour Party
muscle—will take place surrounded by Conservative-held seats. A
period of mourning is in order.
But mourning should not permanently cloud thinking, and a
celebration of working-class identity should not degenerate into a
replay of the Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. The La-
bour Party’s naive Lennonism is blinding it to radical changes in
Britain’s class structure. Its leadership candidates still talk as
though Big Capital faced Big Labour across a battlefield of picket
lines, ignoring the transformation of the economy brought about
by globalisation and technology. In 1987—the last time the Tories
saw a victory comparable to Mr Johnson’s—62% of Britain’s elec-
torate was working-class (defined by people whose heads of
household held or had held a manual job). Today the figure is 43%,
according to Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov, a pollster.
Companies have embraced flexible production and contracting
out. Trade unions have shrunk and migrated to the public sector. A
rise in general affluence has gone hand-in-hand with an increaseinthe number of people who are homeless or using food banks.
The biographies of the leadership candidates reflect these
changes. Sir Keir and Ms Long Bailey may have been born working-
class, but they rocketed up the social hierarchy: Sir Keir spent five
years as director of public prosecutions; Ms Long Bailey, a solicitor,
lives in a fancy Manchester suburb. Ms Thornberry, aka Lady Nu-
gee, knew poverty as a child because of divorce rather than depriv-
ation: her father was a United Nations official who dumped his
family. She became a successful barrister and married an even
more successful one. Lisa Nandy, an outsider on whom the odds
are shortening, is a red princess whose immigrant father became a
professor and helped to found the Equal Opportunities Commis-
sion, and whose grandfather was a distinguished Liberal mp.
The party’s membership has undergone a similar transforma-
tion. Almost 80% of members are now middle-class. Activists in
Crouch End in London are so worried about the middle-class take-
over that they have suggested creating separate working-class sec-
tions in constituency parties to ensure that the voice of the prole-
tariat is not drowned out; the branch secretary is an emeritus
professor at London Metropolitan University. If Jeremy Corbyn re-
versed Blairism ideologically, he intensified it sociologically, mak-
ing the party even more middle-class and southern. The big differ-
ence is that Mr Corbyn’s middle-class tribunes are under the
illusion that they’re working-class heroes sticking it to The Man.
Lennonism is also blinding the party to the emergence of a new
form of class struggle from the ashes of the old. These days social
class is defined less by relationship to the means of production
than by educational qualifications. And class struggle is driven by
quarrels about identity and values rather than about remuneration
and working conditions. In his new book “The New Class War: Sav-
ing Democracy from the Managerial Elite”, Michael Lind, of the
New America Foundation, a think-tank, argues that the clash be-
tween the credentialled and the non-credentialled is shaping poli-
tics across the world. This is particularly true of Britain, which en-
thusiastically embraced policies favoured strongly by the
credentialled elites (globalisation, free markets, social liberalism),
only to summon up a mighty backlash in the form of Brexit.
In this new class war the Labour Party is on the side of the
“haves” rather than the “have nots”. The majority of the party’s
members have university degrees. Party activists pride themselves
on their cosmopolitan values: they associate nationalism with xe-
nophobia, strongly oppose Brexit and wage ceaseless war on all
forms of bigotry. Harold Wilson once said that the Labour Party is
“a moral crusade or it is nothing”. These days the moral crusade
frequently takes the form of members of the cognitive elite ticking
off non-members for being insufficiently enlightened. That is
good for mobilising the votes of the educated but not for much
else: in December the Labour Party beat the Tories among degree
holders by 43% to 29% but lost among people who have only gcses
(or lower) by 25% to 58%.
In many ways Boris Johnson’s majority is built on sand. The
Tory dream of a property-owning democracy is dying: new figures
from the Office of National Statistics show that people in their
mid-30s to mid-40s are three times more likely to rent than they
were 20 years ago. The shock of Brexit is yet to hit: Michael Gove,
the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, this week warned compa-
nies that they will have to prepare for border checks on goods flow-
ing into and out of Europe from next January. But the Labour Party
has no chance of winning power until it abandons Lennonism and
works out what it is for in a post-industrial society. 7Bagehot The perils of Lennonism
Labour will not return to power until it changes its ideas about class