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.”
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