What just happened? Part One: There is no working class anymore

In the light of its historic defeat last week it’s worth asking “what is the Labour Party for?” The answer is not obvious. Historically the Labour Party has been the party of the working class, the clue is after all in the name. Labour was there to defend the interests of the working class against big business, the rich and powerful. Leftist radicals have always yearned for the Labour Party to be more, to be a political force for radically changing the country fundamentally, perhaps permanently, and shifting the balance of power to put the working class in charge.

So last week’s election came as a terrible shock for many supporters of the Corbyn Labour Party, the party had at last put forward a really radical and very ambitious reform programme and it had harnessed the campaigning energy of hundreds of thousands of young activists to fight its cause only to see the voters desert it en masse in it’s old northern heartlands.

Its only been a few days but already you can see some really inadequate explanations being proffered: it was Brexit, it was perfidious media bias, it was Corbyn’s lack of charisma, it was racism, or most absurdly ‘it was the Russians/Facebook’, etc. A strong emerging line is that there was nothing wrong with the project, we just need to get past Brexit, polish the presentation and elect a shiny new leader and all those voters that deserted us will come flooding back. I am not so sure, last week felt seismic, and I think that the shock of the tectonic plates shifting has permanently reshaped the political landscape which makes winning a Labour majority in Parliament seem a very distant prospect especially if the party embraces an inadequate analysis of what went wrong.

So if the sort of explanations immediately popular on the Left for explaining the defeat are wrong, or at least seriously inadequate, what are the deeper structural and tectonic forces driving political change in the UK which underly the decline of the Labour Party?

Labour was built as a the party representing a relatively cohesive working class. A block of voters with a shared culture and with a raft of institutions that bound it together and gave it a collective identity. Now there is no working class like that, instead there are lots of employees working for employers but the old industrial system that generated a shared identity has gone and instead there are lots of people with very different lives and very different cultures. Capitalism built the industrial working class and capitalism has deconstructed the industrial working class. It’s not at all clear what role the Labour Party has in all this, who it represents or what it expects to achieve.

There is a big chunk of the radical left that still thinks that there is a working class that is defined by it’s subordinate position as exploited wage labourers in the capitalist production system, that the working class has a set of objective interests that oppose capital, and that it is the job of the party of the left to express those objective class interests. If the workers rejects the party of the working class it’s not because its message or principals are wrong, it’s because somehow the workers have become confused by the machinations of their class enemy and have made a mistake. Part of the problem is that the ideologies and thinkers of the party still imagine that there is a working class out there waiting for the right leadership to galvanise them. One just has to keep pushing the correct position until the workers listen.

In fact there is no working class in the UK, or in most of the advanced capitalist states, anymore. For a few decades in the 20th century big geographically concentrated, and long term, industrial production did create a large block of workers who developed a shared culture such as a shared way of life and collective interests, shared ways of speaking and a shared common sense, which was expressed in a shared set of institutions such as a rich civil society and a raft of political institutions such as cooperative societies, educational bodies, trade unions, and a political party to represent their interests.

However now the big Fordist manufacturing system that created the British working class and the Labour Party has almost all gone along with most of the cultural and social structures that were the foundation of the British working class and the Labour movement. In its place capitalism in Britain (like elsewhere) evolved into a wide range of not particularly connected blocks of employees in different sectors with wildly different cultures and life experiences. On the one hand with the eclipse of the huge production lines of Fordism (which bound unskilled and skilled workers together in often tight knit communities) a large chunk of workers has been pushed down and out into the precariat of low pay, low security and transient working, a way of life that does not engender any sort of collective communal civil society or even culture. At the other end, in the most vibrant dynamic and important parts of the national economy, are the new knowledge workers, mostly graduate educated, concentrated in the big cities and better paid, who live almost equally transient lives but who expect to do so as part of an ever changing dynamic career and life path.

In between these two blocks are lots of people trying to get by, aspiring to move up into the knowledge economy and avoid being pushed down into the precariat. There is no common culture or set of common social institutions that binds all these workers together. There is no working class.

The knowledge workers are much less likely to remain tied to their place of birth, they move in a world of what might be termed globalised middle class culture, they are used to working and living in richly diverse communities, with people from all backgrounds. For them issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual equality are highly resonant, they care about the planet but possibly never think about the people who clean their toilets because their progressive liberal politics are mostly expressed (in practice) as being overwhelmingly concerned with horizontal equality rather than vertical equality. It is the young people from the knowledge economy that have flooded into the Labour Party. These young people believe strongly but abstractly about the ‘many and not the few’ (just as the older committed leftists which have also rejoined the Labour Party in droves also dream about leading an abstract working class) but they have almost no social or cultural connection to the peoples of post Fordist towns and regions, or with the precariat. In fact leftists from the knowledge economy mostly find the lives and cultures of post Fordist Britain to be troublesome and unattractive.

Outside the metropolitan centres of the knowledge economy, in the old gutted industrial areas that until last week had always voted Labour, are lots of people who feel intensely forgotten and ignored. With their precarious lives they cling onto what tradition and belonging that still exists, they don’t like change because change for them has almost always been to something worse. These communities were the hardest hit by post crash austerity because they are most dependent on public services. It is into these communities that from around the time of the election of New Labour huge waves of migration arrived, the scale was enormous, easily the biggest migration into Britain in modern history. The incomers didn’t share the language or culture of the new host communities and were thus experienced as yet another wave of social disintegration, another erosion of what might be called a sense of home. This negative experience of migration is very different to the experience of the urban knowledge economy workers where incoming migrants are often experienced as strengthening and enriching the very diverse culture that everyone in the successful urban centres more or less happily enjoys, where the incomers to the knowledge economy itself are most likely to speak English and share a sort of globalised middle class culture, and where the unskilled incomers are easily and unobtrusively inserted into the subordinated local service economy.

All of this meant that political stresses were building up. The left behind post Fordist communities want order, stability and an end to mass immigration, they want someone to invest time and money in making their lives and communities better, and they want to belong somewhere, to something. In terms of a bigger sense of belonging they have a strong sense of their nationality which is now less and less British and increasingly more likely to be English or Scottish or Welsh. Until last week a lot of them still voted Labour but the connection was growing ever weaker. The progressives of the Labour Party, reflecting their roots in the knowledge economy, are suspicious of patriotism, especially English patriotism, and read all worries or unhappiness at immigration as being an expression of racism and respond with sometimes well meaning and sometimes quite hostile lectures intended to convince people that large scale immigration is a good thing (because for them it is).

The Referendum exploded into these stressed fissures between the cosmopolitan knowledge economy centres, where support for the EU seems a no brainer, and the left behind post Fordist communities where the EU is just another even more remote tier of unresponsive government and one deeply associated with incoming migrants (a reasonable connection when the immigrants are Polish and Romanian). Until the referendum their voting choice was the mostly pro-EU Tories (still not a likely choice in old Labour areas back then), or a mostly pro-EU Labour Party (which seemed to be a party that took it’s lead and style from elsewhere, mostly from London), or eventually voting for the perfect protest vehicle of UKIP. The staggering rise in votes for UKIP, particularly in EU elections, was barely discussed in the Labour Party or on the Left and when it was discussed it was in terms of being a reprehensible expressions of xenophobia. The rise of UKIP however rattled the Tories enough for the ill-thought through concession of a referendum. The referendum itself allowed lots of old Labour voters who still couldn’t conceive of voting Tory to vote against the whole project, the whole modern ways things were done, and against the almost entire urban educated elite that were urging them to vote Remain.

The referendum result then set off a prolonged period of deep political crisis, the disintegration of party loyalties and enormous political tension. It was the worst possible terrain for the Corbynite Labour Party to operate on, its residual heritage link to the leave voters in the north was already deeply frayed. At some point the elastic snapped. As usual the Tory Party moved much faster than Labour to adapt to new political terrain.

Back in February 2018 I wrote ‘Labour and the new terrain of politics’ and in that piece I said this:

“So the story of UK politics from the late 1970s to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2015 was of the right quietly abandoning the culture war and the left doing something similar with the economic war.

All of which meant that politics began to drift away from some working class voters. Voters who were socially liberal or economically on the right got at least some of that they wanted – those strongly to the left on economic policy and strongly socially conservative, were quietly ignored.”

There is still a lot of unoccupied ground on the new political terrain. It won’t stay unoccupied forever.”

It now seems that it was indeed the Tory party that has stepped into to occupy all that empty political space. The Tory party itself was experiencing its own form of long slow crisis as the evolution of capitalism in Britain meant that there was less and less national capitalism for the party to represent and to recruit party leaders from. As the link to national capital faded, as national capital itself faded and was replaced global capital, so the sections of the Tories hostile to the EU grew even though this meant chasing policies which big business actually opposed, something which would have been much less likely in the past. As the Tory vote in the vibrant urban centres shrank and the old links to big business became weaker so the party became free to shift its power and electoral base. The Tories have always been both more ruthless and just plain better than the Labour Party at political maneuvering simply because they have always been more pragmatic and less ideologically driven than Labour. As Brexit tore at the old political fabric it was the Tories that came up with a winning formulae: Get Brexit Done, promises of more spending, especially in the left behind regions and towns, unashamedly patriotic in way Corbyn never could be, don’t wreck the economy, spend on the NHS and control immigration.

Now the Tory Party is sitting on top of a vast new terrain. This week nearly a hundred new Tory MPs, most from those old Labour areas, will be coming to Westminster and they will be a permanent representation of these areas inside the Tory Party and government. There is nothing to stop the Tories becoming an English version of the very successful polish Law and Justice party. Until the new government gets going it will be really hard for Labour to respond because of the novelty of what they will be opposing. There will be a strong inclination to believe and insist that this is still the old Thatcherite Tory Party, that the tiger hasn’t really changed its spots. I feel that would be a mistake.