I’d like to think that during my day to day life, I come across a wide variety of people from different – there is no other way of putting this – social backgrounds and social classes. The vast majority of people with whom I live my life, both personally and professionally, are working class. This is not to suggest that if you are working class, you are necessarily poor. In many instances, the opposite can be true.
If you were working class, you were Labour. If you were upper class, you were Tory. Generalisations, I know, but I swear that’s how it was and how it felt. I recall nothing when growing up by way of a new middle class. Some working class people aspired to be better, more people accepted their lot. The class structure, and the advent of the middle class, a vast catch-all and largely undefined mass, has changed a lot of things.
The Labour Party was formed in order to provide parliamentary representation for working class people and did so in traditional style. Labour had close links to the trade unions, it strived to bring greater fairness and equality. It was a Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who changed the political game.
Although Thatcher came from the right of politics and, more than any other politician, brought about the destruction of our manufacturing base, as well as dramatically weakening the trade unions, she nonetheless attracted huge support from the social class of voters she despised: the working class. The burgeoning middle classes, in large numbers, bought into Thatcherism, bought into the ‘me first’ politics that has, to a large extent, survived to this day. Labour’s natural working class base disappeared. As Thatcherism ingrained itself into the British psyche, Labour looked inward and by early to mid 1980s it was at war with itself. The hard left, led by the likes of Tony Benn and supported by the likes of Militant, a Trotskyist sect, try to drive Labour away from the centre ground. Voters noted what was going on and Labour stayed out of office for 18 long years.
In 1997, Labour now led by arch moderniser Tony Blair swept to power with two landslide wins and later a comfortable majority. Blair embraced Labour’s traditional voters and reached out to the growing middle classes. “Things can only get better” was the song played at Labour rallies and they did, for everyone. Poverty declined, NHS waiting lists were ended, as was homelessness. Set aside Iraq – a conflict that sadly defined Blair more because of its timing than anything else – and the Labour years were good for the country.
Having lost elections in 2010 and 2015, Labour again turned inwards and rather than looking to the future, it looked to the past. Labour, which by now had become a mass membership party, tilted at a “new kind of politics”. In reality, it was nothing of the sort. The dinosaurs of the 1980s Labour civil war came back with a vengeance. The new leaders – Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott, Lansman, Milne – represented exactly the same slogans and rhetoric as Tony Benn. Benn was a dreamer and he was not the only one. But he dreamed about simplistic solutions to incredibly complex issues. Although Benn is long gone, his disciples, who to be fair are not fit to clean his boots, have resurrected everything he stood for. Labour has returned to old Labour in the worst possible way.
Next, full disclosure from me. I joined the Labour Party in the late 1970s when it was in the doldrums. I stuck with it through the dark years of Thatcher, I celebrated when, in 1997, Labour won the first general election in which I was able to vote. I left Labour in 2004 after the Iraq invasion and remained on the fringes of Labour until 2015. In retrospect, I should have stayed, but it doesn’t matter now. New Labour was, I believed, the only way Labour could win. Labour needed to embrace the centre ground in order to be a left of centre government. Tony Blair did that.
When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015, I immediately left the party. His long record of disloyalty, his public support for the terrorists of the IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah, Stop the West (or sorry, War) and his consistent anti-Israel, anti Jew agenda were just some of the reasons. His simple unsuitability for the leadership role was rather important too. Like his fellow comrade Dennis Skinner, Corbyn had always avoided responsibility by never seeking office or even shadow cabinet positions because, presumably, he adored the adoration he got from attending rallies where everyone attending agreed with everything he said. Put simply, Jeremy Corbyn has nothing in the way of leadership qualities. And yet, among a certain demographic, Corbyn is hugely popular. Many people regard him as some kind of hero, cheering and singing his name whenever he arrives somewhere. After a lifetime of protest and sloganising, he has become a significant cult figure. To me, it is literally incredible.
The opinion polls are also incredible in so many ways. In one sense, they are incredible because, despite Theresa May being the worst prime minister in living memory, the titular head of a political party that is tearing itself to bits over the EU, the Tories still have a small lead. Surely, Labour with a strong, credible leader would be miles ahead? I certainly believe that to be true, yet Labour, with a leader whose polling figures are terrible, are still in the race for Number 10. How can this be?
I know few genuinely working class people who support Corbyn and Corbyn’s Labour. The people I speak to where I live, those I meet when I go out for a beer, who I just happen to speak to about politics, almost all say they won’t vote for a party led by Corbyn. What they heard at the annual conference in Liverpool this week does not appeal to them. I have concluded that Corbyn’s Labour is anything but the people’s party.
It is true that the Labour vote was considerably up at the last election. The party racked up huge numbers of votes in cities, less so in the deindustrialised towns and cities in the north. Labour majorities in large middle class constituencies, like Bristol West, grew dramatically. It was almost as if the affluent left leaning middle classes within the electorate saw something appealing about the affluent left leadership represented by Corbyn and his top team, many of whom were privately educated, just like the evil Tories they hated so much. I don’t see working class folk buying into Corbynism, whatever that is.
Labour today is a political party which tolerates, and even encourages, hate. Even it’s leaders acknowledge that the party has a problem with anti-Semitism. How could it not given Corbyn’s grim track record on the subject? Luciana Berger needed police protection when attending conference. It has MPs like Laura Jones who call for a general strike to bring down the government. A school teacher called Sion Rickard announced at conference that “If we (gave our children) a proper education we’ll probably not have any Tories because we will have brought up our kids properly”. These are not isolated views. Jones received a standing ovation for her rant, Rickard was warmly applauded.
I can only conclude that it’s the chattering classes who support Labour, along with those who would vote Labour even if it was represented by a donkey with a red rosette, or Jeremy Corbyn as we know him. It certainly isn’t people like me who lent Labour my vote last time but won’t be lending it next time.
I see the Corbyn era as representing a defining moment for Labour. It was a time when a political party collectively lost its marbles and looked forward in the 21st century with the failed policies of the 20th century.
Within Labour is a party within a party called Momentum, which exists to support Jeremy Corbyn. Its millionaire owner Jon Lansman, a fossil from the Benn era, said that Labour would never again return to the policies of New Labour and that anyway Tony Blair was in the wrong party. Now here’s something to think about: the Labour government of 1997 was the most left wing of my lifetime. It was not hard left by any stretch of the imagination but it was certainly left of centre. But in a sense the left/right thing in this context barely matters. New Labour was successful, it worked. If Lansman is right and Labour focuses purely on its core voters, it can never win. And if Tony Blair was in the wrong party, then so was I, except that I wasn’t. It is Lansman who is in the wrong party. The same applies to Corbyn who has voted more often against Labour than David Cameron.
I repeat: Labour was set up to enable parliamentary representation to working people. I am far from convinced that its current custodians have ambitions beyond personal ambition and creating a social movement.
It is not just that the comrades have the wrong kind of left wing politics, they are just no good. Who on earth would take seriously a government led by Corbyn, with a cabinet including Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon, Dawn Butler, Rebecca Long Bailey and the other nonentities who aspire to power?
It is possible, on current projections, that Corbyn could become prime minister. My view is that this would be a disaster for the country and indeed Labour itself, which I suspect would make such a terrible mess of government that Labour might be out of office for a generation or even fragment into a million pieces. More likely, I suggest, is that when we leave the EU, the Tories will quickly axe Theresa May and install a new leader, blame the chaos and upheaval on those who have left the stage and return the Tories with a landslide majority in 2022. And in such a scenario, who would suffer most? Why, the working classes who were abandoned by the comrades. What a terrible irony that would be.
