Goodbye to the Working Class

Reg Race

Description

After 1979, Labour lost eight of the next eleven general elections. Working-class voters deserted, starting in 1970 when widespread abstention began, and the Conservatives won a majority of the working-class vote in 2019. Brexit was a consequence, and not the cause, of these massive changes.The number of manual workers, Labour's heartland vote, has collapsed and Britain is now a nation where the biggest occupational groups are shopworkers, education and NHS staff. Demographics have challenged Labour's ability to win.But that's not all. Labour's Parliamentary Party is now overwhelmingly middle class, and Labour has left the working class as the working class has left Labour. It is now a Party of Councillors and Special Advisers, with a membership dominated by the public sector middle class. Labour has been the author of its own troubles too. It failed to adapt to change in the 1970s and 80s, attacked the low paid and appeased the powerful, and at a local level is disorganised and sometimes sleazy. Its failures are structural. There is no strategic plan, sectarianism is rife, it has regular financial crises, fragile or unelectable leaders are appointed, and disastrous rule changes are made in an age when social media and the internet can disrupt politics on a daily basis. Power has been turned upside down as a consequence.Political parties matter. Badly organised, ineffective leaderships create policy failures in government, and Labour has failed to ensure a supply of its own working-class or capable candidates too. 'Goodbye to the Working Class' explains why and how this happened. It is a human story of significant consequence for our politics.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839783944
• Langue: English

Extrait

Goodbye to the Working Class
Social change, incompetence and sleaze push Labour to the brink
Reg Race
Goodbye to the Working Class
Published by The Conrad Press Limited in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-839783-94-4
Copyright © Reg Race, 2021
The moral right of Reg Race to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by:Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CREDITS
I have relied on many people to develop the ideas in this book, and their evidence and concerns have in large part supported the conclusions that I have drawn about the plight of Labour, one of many social democratic parties in the Western World that are in terminal decline or serious trouble.
In order to produce the evidence required, I asked many leading members of the Party for an interview. I wanted to test whether the positions that I thought were correct would survive discussion, and by and large they did. I gave a specific promise to all of them - sitting MPs, former Ministers, leading Party officials, key activists - that I would not quote their views or attribute them directly in this book. I hope I have kept my promise. It is sad that so many people who know what is going on are not empowered to speak their minds in a constructive fashion, and that tells you something about the culture of the modern Labour Party.
I have also eschewed the Labour practice of blaming individuals for the failures of the Labour Party. This is a fruitless activity because there are much bigger forces at work; but misjudgements over key issues have contributed mightily at times to the decline of credibility, and at times have created mayhem.
In writing this contribution, I have also relied heavily on my own personal files from political and organisational activities over the last 60 years. I tend not to throw things away, which is useful when writing a book of this kind. But this is not a diary: diaries are subject to short term distortions based on what is thought important at the time, whereas reflection after time can lend perspective.
Over the years I have gained valuable insights from many people who have influenced the trend of my thinking: my university tutor, Fred Whitemore, whose utter realism was always a sheet anchor to ground over-enthusiastic views; David Cowling, who lent substantial amounts of his valuable time to harvesting election statistics; and many others in the grassroots organisations who contributed valuable ideas.
I would also like to thank the very good people who helped in the production of this book, especially Natascha Engel, a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, who advised on editing; Victoria Simon-Shore, who was helpful on legal points; James Essinger, my publisher; Erica Martin, who provided excellent access to the photographic libraries of the pre-digital world; Charlotte Mouncey, who edited and collated the pictures and charts and supervised typesetting; Emma Lockley, who produced the invaluable index; the staff in the House of Commons Library who helped unearth long forgotten parts of Parliamentary history, and confirmed the non-existence of others; and most importantly of all my wife Mandy Moore, who encouraged and supported me throughout the gestation of this book and was extraordinarily tolerant. Mandy and I have worked together on many political projects over 40 years and this book could not have been written without her insights as a feminist.
Of course, all errors, miscalculations and misunderstandings are my responsibility alone.
It is, of course, entirely possible that I am wrong about everything.
Dr Reg Race
Blackheath June 2021
PREFACE
T his book is about power, who has it, who has lost it, and how the main party of progressive ideas in Britain, the Labour Party, has lost its way because of multiple failings over decades. Some claim that this is just the result of demographics or individuals. It isn’t.
I started writing this book knowing that there was a problem: how to explain the upending of power in Labour, so far removed from the stable, consensual landscape that RT McKenzie, writing in 1955, described in the afterglow of the Attlee Government. I decided that I would tell this important story based on my own experiences, linked to insights from the academic world, national data and polling evidence, so that the reader could see the extraordinary and completely unprecedented changes that have taken place.
Let us be clear: the defeat of the PLP 1 leadership candidates in 2015 and 2016, and the election of an insurgent outsider with a wholly differing policy platform, is the only time in Labour’s history when the membership has in fact taken over. There is reason to believe that some of the conditions for this upending of ‘normal service’ are still present, and that a repeat cannot be ruled out.
1 . Parliamentary Labour Party
It is also true that the Labour Party’s members and its Parliamentary representatives have undergone a total sea change. From being a working class party hammering on the gates of Parliament to win change, with working class members and a substantial presence of manual workers in the PLP, it has now been transformed into the most middle class party in Britain. Manual worker representation in the PLP has almost ceased to exist, and the membership is now very largely from the public sector middle class. None of this has been deliberate, but extraordinarily foolish actions by leaders have enabled it.
In addition, the party’s electoral base has been transformed. Social democratic parties in Western Europe have had a hard time because of the significant reduction in working class voters, their electoral base, in recent years.
What is not so clearly understood, certainly if we are to go by discussions at Labour branch meetings and conferences, is the size of the change: the working class, utterly dominant at 75% of the population in 1911 and still over 60% in 1960, 2 has now been reduced to a declining rump, sized at perhaps 23%. Great industries have fallen: mining, entirely gone; manufacturing, significantly reduced; agricultural work, seriously cut; textile production, largely gone; and the world of coal, steel, steam and manufacturing that I grew up in in industrial Manchester and Salford has disappeared like sea mist on a warm autumn day.
2 . AH Halsey, British Social Trends since 1900 , Macmillan 1988, page 9
In its place are swathes of shop workers. The retail sector is now the dominant and by far the largest occupational group in Britain. Napoleon’s alleged phrase that we were ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ has become literally true 200 years later. Also dominant are the own-account workers, the ‘white van man’ beloved of the Sun newspaper, and criticised by some arrogant people in the Labour Party. Hugely important also are the growing ranks of the professional workers, greatly expanded in size and clout because of specialisation within the professions, and dominant in many places. The wider group of non-manual workers grew in size and overtook that of manual workers in the late 1970s, with the white collar labour force growing by 287% between 1911 and 1981.
It is also true that these great changes in the electorate are consequent on the underlying forces in the economy as technology drives forward, reducing the need for staff and thereby challenging the basis on which taxation is predicated. This further impacts on the provision of public services, and our ability to provide the essentials of life for those who cannot manage to provide expensive housing and other services for themselves.
This is not the only reason for Labour’s decline. The Labour Party when in government also has a habit of facing the wrong way on economic issues when there is a crisis. The débacle of 1931 was caused by the inability of Labour ministers to understand that the Gold Standard was not an immutable and sacrosanct policy, even when none other than JM Keynes told them loudly that it wasn’t. Labour in 1931 demonstrated an acceptance of the status quo, promptly reversed when the 1931 General Election was comfortably over and the more flexible political establishment was in charge again in a Conservative-dominated government, which ditched the Gold Standard in short order.
In the great crisis of 1975-6, when Labour ministers deliberately performed a volte face , introduced monetarism and engineered a substantial attack on public services (some would say the most substantial attack ever mounted on them in Britain), the policy was based on an extraordinary misreading of the public accounts. The Labour leadership said they were in massive deficit when they were not, and they knew this, but they cut anyway, legitimising and paving the way for the Thatcher revolution. This was a different class of poor decision-making: a scramble to adopt what they saw as a new consensus, thrillingly ditching their manifesto commitments on the way.
There have been great successes, of course: the reforms of the 1940s under Attlee are the classic example, as was the creation of the Open University in the 1960s, and much of the Blair/Brown re-provision of public realm infrastructure in the 13 years of Labour power from 1997. But niggling doubts remain as to whether we could have done more. Great issues, like the reform of social care and the regulation of the financial sector, were either fudged or postponed for another day - and that day never came.
Labour has also failed to comprehend the role of political parties in the running of the State. The Conservatives have the pick of those leaving the top schools and universities when they want them, but Labour has failed consistently to understand that it needs to have a pipel