Labour is no longer the party of the traditional working class

By BAGEHOT

ON JULY 3RD Jeremy Corbyn told Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, that “Labour is back as the political voice of the working class”. This would be nice if it were true: the Labour Party was after all founded to represent the working class, and the working class has been severely battered, in recent years, by the casualisation of labour and the stagnation of much of the economy. Alas, it’s nonsense. The Labour Party’s links with the working class have been weakening for the past 30 years—and continue to weaken under Mr Corbyn.

The divorce between the Labour Party and the workers has played out in two phases. The first was under Tony Blair. Mr Blair saw the party’s future as being the party of the professional middle class: that is university-educated people who worked with their brains rather than their hands and embraced the double liberalism of free markets and progressive morals. The party’s apparatus was taken over by identikit professional politicians who had been to the same universities (often Harvard as well as Oxford) and worked for the same think-tanks. A striking number of these freeze-dried specimens were women. Just as the rapid expansion of the universities benefited middle-class women far more than working-class men, so the Labour Party’s women-only short-lists speeded up the transformation of the Labour Party from a working-class into a middle-class party.