17 July 2024

Starmer’s people are returning class to the centre of politics

The Prime Minister’s class-conscious and interventionist government owes more to Harold Wilson than to Tony Blair.

Illustration by Mark Harris

John Prescott never said that “we’re all middle-class now”. The former Labour deputy prime minister described himself as a “working-class man” living a “middle-class style of life”, but it was his prime minister, Tony Blair, who declared: “I want to make you all middle class” in a 1999 speech. New Labour championed a politics in which class withered away as a distinguishing feature. Or that was the idea.

Keir Starmer may have revived one Blairite tradition – winning elections – but he has abandoned another. In his first speech as Prime Minister outside Downing Street, he spoke not of “hard-working families” – as Blair often did – but of “working-class families like mine”. In her introductory statement to Treasury civil servants, Rachel Reeves remarked: “I will judge my time in office as a success if I know that at the end of it there are working-class kids from ordinary backgrounds who are living richer lives.”

The most recent British Social Attitudes survey found that 46 per cent of Britons now describe themselves as working class – up from 32 per cent in 1983. At the first meeting of his cabinet on 6 July, Starmer spoke of his pride that a number of those present “didn’t have the easiest of starts in life”. The Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson all endured childhood poverty and fraught family circumstances.

Collectively, they represent one of the most working-class cabinets in UK history. Only 4 per cent of their number were privately educated, compared to 23 per cent of MPs and 30 per cent-plus of previous postwar cabinets. Harold Macmillan may have drawled that there were few Old Etonians in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, but 91 per cent were privately educated. Two members of Starmer’s cabinet – Lisa Nandy and Lucy Powell – attended the same school, but the institution in question is Parrs Wood High School in Manchester.

In 2003 the then Conservative leader, Michael Howard, deployed class rhetoric against Blair: “This grammar-school boy isn’t going to take any lessons from a public-school boy on the importance of children from less privileged backgrounds gaining access to university.” No such jibe could be levelled at Starmer’s people.

Class is fundamental to the Prime Minister’s politics. Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former policy director and author of The New Working Class, told me that during the pandemic, the Labour leader would view decisions through this socio-economic lens: “If we think schools should close again, what does this mean for a worker who’s got to go on shift on Monday?”

In his address outside No 10 on 5 July, Starmer invoked the essential workers briefly celebrated during the Covid lockdowns: “For too long now we have turned a blind eye as millions slid into greater insecurity. Nurses, builders, drivers, carers.”

The King’s Speech on 17 July duly included legislation to enact the New Deal for Working People, the biggest programme of workers’ rights for decades. This agenda – the abolition of most zero-hour contracts, a ban on fire and rehire, full employment rights from day one – enjoys notable public support. Sixty-one per cent of all voters and 72 per cent of Labour’s 2024 supporters believe “the rights of ordinary workers need to be strengthened” according to polling by IPPR and Persuasion UK.

Understanding the place of class in Starmer’s Labour requires an excavation of the party’s pre-Blair history. In his recent interview with the New Statesman, David Lammy recalled attending Trooping the Colour ceremonies this year with Tory politicians such as Boris Johnson and James Cleverly: “There was a sort of demob happiness about them, a sort of casual frippery, a certain kind of public-school smallness,” he said. “They are not the class of people that Britain needs to run it now, and that’s what my own life story tells me.” The implication is that Starmer’s people are the right class for these times.

Lammy’s comments recalled those of Starmer’s favourite Labour leader: Harold Wilson. In his 1964 “New Britain” speech, the future prime minister remarked: “We are living in the jet age but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality. Over the British people lies the chill frost of Tory leadership.” In an acidic reference to his Conservative opponent, the tweedy Old Etonian Alec Douglas-Home, Wilson heralded “a chance to sweep away the grouse-moor conception of Tory leadership and refit Britain with a new image, a new confidence”.

Sixty years after the first of his four election victories, Wilson’s spirit has been felt this summer. “England have not missed a penalty under a Labour government in 2024,” quipped Starmer on the plane to the Nato summit in Washington DC, adapting Wilson’s famous observation on the 1966 World Cup. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the author of a well-received biography (Harold Wilson: The Winner), is now Minister for the Constitution and European Union Relations, with an office in 9 Downing Street adjoining Starmer’s. For the first time since 1964, new MPs have been immediately appointed to the front bench: Alistair Carns, Georgia Gould, Kirsty McNeill, Miatta Fahnbulleh, Sarah Sackman. Wilson, who became a minister at the age of 29 in 1945, would approve of the deployment of technocratic expertise.

Rachel Reeves, another admirer of Wilson, has declared that “this Treasury will play its full part in a new era of industrial strategy”. Rather than creating a new department – recall the Department of Economic Affairs (1964-69) – she is reshaping Whitehall’s mightiest from within. Her new council of economic advisers includes Anna Valero and John Van Reenen, two economists who have argued that green industrial strategy must be “embedded” within the UK’s growth model. (Meanwhile, IPPR executive director Carys Roberts is joining the No 10 Policy Unit with a focus on energy and the environment.)

The Chancellor’s emphasis on the active state echoes Wilson’s 1965 National Plan. He set a target of increasing GDP by 4 per cent every year; Reeves aspires to the highest per-capita growth in the G7. Interventionist government is celebrated as a means to this end rather than an obstacle to it.

Wilson’s growth plan soon foundered. Faced with a dismal economic inheritance (“sorry old cock, to leave it in this shape”, the outgoing Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling told Jim Callaghan), he was pushed into spending cuts and a belated devaluation of the pound that eroded both political and economic credibility. Reeves, her allies say, has learned from this experience by giving herself the space to take “difficult decisions” early on.

But should Labour achieve growth, how will it ensure it reaps the political benefits? That is the question now preoccupying party strategists who have absorbed the lessons of the Democrats’ electoral angst. In private, Starmer likes to speak of workers having more money in their “front pocket” – a decent wage – rather than merely more in their “back pocket” (through tax credits and other benefits). Yet delivery alone is not enough and No 10 aides discuss the need for an “emotional connection” with voters.

How will Labour achieve this? One lesson from the party’s previous spells in office is that voters feel greater attachment to institutions – the NHS, Wilson’s Open University, Sure Start – than they do to transactions. Mindful of this, Labour plans to introduce signs that read “made with GB Energy investment” – akin to those used for EU funding – for relevant projects.

Here there is a final lesson from Wilson. In 1974, as Labour prepared for a second general election, the prime minister sent a list to his cabinet of “little things that mean a lot”. His class-conscious choices included “the preservation of local breweries”, “May Day as a bank holiday” (introduced in 1978), “concessionary fares for the elderly” and “protection for caravan dwellers”. These, he noted, “arouse strong feelings in the country and among our supporters”.

What would an equivalent list look like today? To advance beyond “deliverism”, Labour must answer this question.