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A nation held its breath as the clocks struck ten on the evening of 12 December 2019. Many of my colleagues across the labour movement had been hopeful of a positive result in the general election. Not necessarily an outright victory for the Labour Party (only the most optimistic – or delusional – foresaw that), but certainly a hung parliament leading to a minority Labour government supported perhaps by some kind of arrangement with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. And these days, in labour movement politics, such an outcome would have been considered a victory.

Some of the more realistic anticipated defeat. A few – such as those who stood in the ‘centrist’ tradition of New Labour and had never reconciled themselves to the Corbynite ascendancy – positively willed it. But hardly anyone expected the annihilation that came to pass and, with it, the devastating loss of so many Labour heartland seats.

And so it was that as the exit poll flashed up on TV screens, forecasting a thumping eighty-six-seat majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, the hopes and dreams of a stunned British Left collapsed. For many of the Left’s foot soldiers, the next few hours would be spent grimly observing the prediction turn into a painful reality – the Tories eventually secured an eighty-seat majority – as the results rolled in and the sheer scale of the wipe-out become apparent. Constituencies that had been Labour for as long as anyone could remember – in some cases, for nearly a century – fell like dominoes: Blyth Valley, Great Grimsby, Bishop Auckland, Leigh, Wakefield, Bassetlaw, Sedgefield, Wrexham, North-West Durham, Bolsover, Don Valley – the roll call was chilling.

The sense of disorientation felt by many on the Left over the following days was palpable. How could this massacre have happened? Voters had suffered a decade of austerity; Boris Johnson was a clown who had to be hidden away from the public during the campaign; Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, was playing to packed houses everywhere; Labour could lay claim to having more members than any other political party in western Europe; the Brexit saga had proved debilitating, but there was still an energy and optimism across the movement such as hadn’t existed in years. So why had working-class supporters deserted their party in this way?

For my part, I watched these events unfold with the same deep sense of disappointment but none whatsoever of surprise. I knew this moment had been coming: I had been warning about it inside the labour movement and beyond for long enough. In fact, just four days before the election, I had tweeted:

Thursday will be a pivotal day in the history of the British labour movement. If our Red Wall crumbles, as some of us have long predicted, it will be a time for serious & honest reflection. If we win, then I really don’t understand politics as much as I thought I did.

The rupture between the Labour Party and the working class was an accident waiting to happen, and one which it didn’t take unique powers of observation or exceptional political wisdom to foresee. It didn’t begin with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader. It had, in fact, been brewing for the greater part of three decades – during which the party had swallowed a poisonous brew of social and economic liberalism – intensifying significantly in the second half of that period. The further the party travelled along the road to the imagined sunlit uplands of cosmopolitan liberalism and global market forces, renouncing much of its history along the way, the more it alienated its working-class base. You needed only to go to the right places and speak to the right people to understand this.

But so many in the labour movement, including those among its upper echelons, didn’t go to these places or speak to these people – at least not enough. Instead, they mixed in their own exclusive circles comprising only those who thought exactly as they did. Many spent their working lives in professional occupations or the public or voluntary sector, in their spare time moving in the world of trade union committees, Labour Party meetings and assorted protest movements. They were usually rooted in the cities – especially London – and had, in many cases, gone through university. On social media, they would follow or engage with only those who shared their worldview. They confused Twitter with Britain. Some were members or fellow travellers of various far-left groups (though the further they progressed in the labour movement, the more likely they were to hide the fact).

Little wonder, then, that the Left became increasingly detached from those living in working-class communities up and down the country, and ignorant of how they think, what they believe, and why they believe it.

The handful of us who warned of impending electoral calamity were often written off by others inside the movement as ‘reactionaries’ (or worse) who held a ‘nostalgic’ view of the working class. We were told that today’s working class really did desire the move to a more globalised world, in which such concepts as borders and national sovereignty were of diminished importance, traditional values – such as around family and patriotism – were obsolete, and liberal progressivism enjoyed hegemony. Well, some of them did, no doubt. But, from where I was sitting, most seemed thoroughly ill at ease with such a proposition.

I would have loved to be proved wrong. I am a democratic socialist. I want the Left to succeed and be able to address the injustices of the world and improve the lives of those it ultimately exists – or at least once did – to represent: the working class. I have always done so. That’s why I joined a trade union aged sixteen in 1991 (when I landed a Saturday job stacking shelves in the Dagenham branch of Asda) and then the Labour Party (of which I am still a member) in 1994; why I became an activist in the Fire Brigades Union when I began my career as a professional firefighter in 1997 (eventually serving on the union’s national executive); why I joined the National Union of Journalists when someone thought my opinions worthy of a column; and why I have spent much of my adult life participating in campaigns and activities across the labour movement.

You might say that this political partisanship was inevitable. I come from a family which, like pretty much every other family in our community, voted Labour. I have a vivid memory of my dad watching the news on TV in the early morning after the 1983 general election and griping about Margaret Thatcher’s victory over Michael Foot. He was a shop steward for the old Transport and General Workers’ Union at his works depot, and my mum, a secretary, later worked for the GMB union. Though I had little idea at the time what this all meant – and while neither of my parents were especially political in any broader sense – I understood from quite early on that Labour and the trade unions were good and Thatcher and the Tories were bad. (I imagine that this was what inspired my twelve-year-old self to stand as the Labour candidate in the mock general election at my comprehensive school in 1987. I won by a landslide – though I’m quite certain this was a consequence of geography rather than any personal qualities!)

If we are products of our environment, then my politics are shaped immeasurably by the borough of Barking and Dagenham and its people. For it was in this most working-class of places – part of the county of Essex before it was swallowed up by the Greater London conurbation in 1965 – that I lived for the first thirty-five years of my life, most of it on the sprawling Becontree council estate, and which provides the backdrop and inspiration for many of the ideas and opinions expressed in this book. In fact, almost all of what follows in these pages owes itself to what I learned there.

In particular, the convulsions that were experienced in Barking and Dagenham in the first decade of this century – during which it found itself thrust into the centre of a national debate over globalisation and immigration – were instrumental in forming within me an utter certainty that a major schism between the political establishment and the working class was on the cards. For I watched during that period at the closest quarters as the people of the borough were ignored or written off as racist and bigoted by a political and cultural elite who knew nothing of their lives and showed little willingness to learn.

These were my friends and neighbours. I had lived and grown up alongside them. They were mostly decent, hard-working, tolerant, people – the kind upon whose loyalty and endeavours the success and prosperity of our nation has over generations depended. Yet, as the full impact of the new global market began to take hold, and as their lives and community were subjected to rapid and unprecedented economic and demographic change, their expressions of anxiety and discontent fell on deaf ears. They soon came to realise that not only was much of the liberal establishment impervious to their plight, it actively despised them.

Everything they had ever known was suddenly transforming around them. The cheerleaders for globalisation told them it was all for their own good. They said it would bring improved GDP and cultural enrichment. But the people of Barking and Dagenham felt no better for it financially, culturally or spiritually. It wasn’t change per se that they opposed; it was the sheer pace and scale of it. And if I – a young left-wing activist and member of the Anti-Nazi League who had marched against the National Front – could understand this (as I came to eventually), why couldn’t the politicians who had been around for much longer?

So it came as no surprise, at least not to those of us living in the borough, when the far-right British National Party (BNP) moved in and took advantage, coming from nowhere to win a dozen seats on the local council in 2006 – the party’s best ever result in local government. Just a few years previous, such an event would have been unimaginable in Barking and Dagenham. When, though, the BNP proved ultimately to be no solution to their woes, tens of thousands of locals, their patience exhausted, simply moved away. For them, the place was no longer home. They left behind a borough scarred by atomisation and resentment. Where there was once an enduring harmony, there now existed discord. A solid, stable, blue-collar, working-class community had been torn apart, its people betrayed, and few with any kind of power or influence seemed in the slightest bit bothered about the fact. As I often said to friends and neighbours afterwards, ‘Someone really ought to write a book about what happened here.’

Hundreds of working-class communities similar to Barking and Dagenham can speak of their own experiences of having been neglected by our political class in recent times. These places – inhabited by proud citizens who place a high value on social solidarity, belonging and rootedness, and are often imbued with what many among the political and cultural elites deem to be outdated and uncultivated views – have become the new frontier in British politics. The quiet – and, more latterly, not so quiet – rebellion that has been fomenting in these areas is what gave us Brexit. It’s what gave us the evisceration of the Labour Party in 2019. It’s what has created a challenge to the dominance of cosmopolitan liberalism, which its advocates were certain represented the end point of social progress.

The people in these places cried out to those in power to heed their concerns. But for years these cries went unheard. That Labour – the party towards which so many working-class voters had for decades shown so much loyalty – was complicit in this disregard of them was inexcusable and ought never to be forgotten.

Labour was certain that it knew better than those who had supported and sustained it for over a century. The party tried to tell them what was good for them and it brooked no dissent. If the working class couldn’t see the virtues of global liberal progressivism, then it was wilfully ignorant.

This mindset owes itself to the fact that there has existed for some time on the Left a disturbing level of group-think, the consequence of which is that key planks of ideology are rarely challenged and the certainty of partisans in their own moral rightness is mutually reinforced. By extension, those who dare to think or argue differently – especially if they do so from within the movement – are marginalised and abused.

This, in turn, has created a culture on the Left – one which in recent years has begun to infect public life generally – in which freedom of expression is nominally defended but is, in reality, under attack as never before. Honest debate and disagreement, particularly around contentious issues, are becoming increasingly precious. In their place, a rigid and oppressive conformity is demanded. Opinions that are still common currency across large parts of our nation have been delegitimised and effectively banished from the public square.

We have a new national religion – liberal wokedom – and anyone who blasphemes against it can expect to be vilified by its high priests and followers. Those who hold positions of prominence or influence had better be especially careful, for they risk seeing their livelihoods or reputations destroyed if they dare express dissent.

These days, arguments are frequently shut down simply by one party in the dispute claiming to have been ‘offended’. Giving offence – even unintentionally and regardless of the merits of what has been said or done – is itself now seen as a sin worthy of punishment. Where we once placed a high premium on reasoned and respectful debate permitting the expression of a range of diverse and competing views, we now have echo chambers, ‘safe spaces’ and draconian hate legislation, all of which serve the purpose of supressing unwelcome opinions and enforcing an official orthodoxy from which nobody can expect to depart without repercussions.

It is no coincidence that at the same time as acting as the driver for this suffocating new reality, the Left has increasingly immersed itself in the destructive creed of identity politics, in which minorities are divided into discrete categories according to their race or religion or sexuality, and classified as inherent victims who must be protected from an oppressive and ‘privileged’ majority. This entire approach has, in practice, gone far beyond the laudable objective of defending people against prejudice, and has sought instead to promote the separateness and unique characteristics of these groups as virtuous in their own right, and the groups themselves as thereby worthy of favourable political treatment. Needless to say, all of this serves only to fragment the working class and undermine what should be the primary goal of developing common bonds and building the maximum unity required to defend its interests.

The modern Left and the working class currently inhabit separate worlds and are motivated by conflicting priorities. The fact that at the 2019 general election – after nearly a decade of Tory-imposed austerity – so many working-class voters were willing to place their faith in a Tory party led by an old Etonian instead of the party that was considered to be their ‘natural home’ is a stark reflection of the extent of this estrangement. Whether the Tories are able to hold on to these voters will depend on whether they improve their lives and communities in a tangible and lasting way, providing them with hope, investment and opportunity. If they do, Labour’s problems will only deepen, for there is no route back to power that does not pass through these places and win back the hearts and minds of those who live in them.

There is a chance, of course, that Labour has lost for ever much of its one-time core vote. That’s why it would be a fatal error for the party to assume that things could not get even worse. An organisation whose members, activists and representatives have so little in common with so many working-class voters – neither speaking their language, nor sharing their interests or priorities – can hardly hope to maintain their support. In today’s Labour Party, it is the liberal left and, to a lesser degree, the far-left that hold sway – two camps whose adherents are often at loggerheads with each other in the battle for supremacy, but neither of which ultimately has the capacity to reconnect the party with its old heartlands. The party is now an organisation comprised largely of urban middle-class liberals, students and social activists; it is no surprise, therefore, that it is towards this constituency that its policies and pronouncements are most overtly aimed.

Labour has a mountain to climb if it is to be a serious electoral force again. And if it proves unequal to the task, it will relegate itself to being a party of permanent protest. In everything it says and does over the coming years, Labour must consider as a first concern what the impact will be in its old working-class heartlands. All policy development must be geared to this end. This will mean a sharp rebalancing of its priorities – focusing less on topics that do not command mass appeal or interest, and more on the doorstep issues that voters see as relevant to their everyday lives.

The party needs to combine the goal of creating a fairer and more egalitarian economy with a social programme that speaks to the instincts of millions of working-class voters. It must rediscover a part of its history of which so many of its activists today are ignorant: the early Labour tradition that spoke to the patriotic and communitarian instincts of the working class and understood that we are social and parochial beings with a profound attachment to place and a desire to belong.

This will necessarily mean discussing openly issues such as globalisation, family, law and order, the nation state and national identity, immigration and welfare, and being prepared to change position. It will mean, too, reappraising the cultural revolution that has been taking place in our country since the 1960s and assessing candidly whether everything that it spawned has been to the good.

The past few years in Britain have been a lesson in what happens when an arrogant elite takes its hegemony for granted. If you don’t take people with you, if you haven’t won hearts and minds, if you plough on stubbornly when millions of working-class voters are imploring you to hold back or change course, then you are asking for trouble. And, in the end, trouble came.

Our politics is fracturing. Liberal progressivism is in retreat as working-class people seek to revive the politics of belonging, place and community as an antidote to galloping globalisation and rapid demographic change. The assumption that greater economic and social liberalism would pave the way to a new age of progress, prosperity and enlightenment now looks woefully mistaken. Tribal party loyalties are crumbling as sections of society long ignored by the ruling elites start to kick back. The Left bears a heavy responsibility for this polarisation, and it is why it currently stands decimated and flirting with irrelevance.

In this book, I set out why this happened and how it might be fixed.

But first, a point of explanation about my use of the term ‘working class’, which is of course interpreted in all sorts of different ways by everyday people, political activists and academics alike. Some believe it is determined by personal characteristics such as accent or lifestyle, or whether a person owns his own home or takes a holiday abroad, or by qualifications or income. Many on the Left argue that it covers all those who are forced to sell their labour in return for a wage; others get sniffy about including certain sections of the middle class – or the ‘petit bourgeoisie’ – in this definition. Then there is the much-used National Readership Survey (NRS) social grading system, which defines class by occupation type, with the working-class falling variously into the C2, D and E categories. Some believe individuals (such as the self-employed) should be free to define themselves as working class, regardless of other factors, if that is how they see themselves.

All of the above definitions have some legitimacy, and all have their weaknesses. There will likely never be a universally accepted definition of ‘working class’. You pays your money and takes your choice.

For the purposes of this book, I have avoided any standard scientific definition except where it is relevant to the point being made. Instead, I use the term ‘working class’ as I have understood it all my life. I use it as many of my friends and neighbours and workmates understand it. I use it in a broad sense in the way that, I suspect, the man on the Clapham omnibus or in the Red Lion understands it – to describe the stratum of society whose members often do the toughest and most grinding jobs (consisting, for example, of physical labour or work in blue-collar industries, factories, call centres, retail or frontline public services); those whose wages and social status are generally at the lower end of the scale; those who own little or no property or wealth, beyond perhaps their own home and some modest savings; those who are likely to have little authority or control in their workplace; those who live in the grittier parts of Britain, particularly our post-industrial, small-town or coastal communities and those districts of our cities that haven’t yet succumbed to gentrification or been colonised by the professional classes; those who are unemployed or more likely to be in receipt of benefits; and so on.

Given the wide variety of options, I expect some will find fault with my broad definition. That is their prerogative. But if the reader genuinely cannot comprehend my perception of what it means to be working class, and the reasons why I see it that way, I probably cannot help him. I do think most people will get the point.

I should say, for the avoidance of doubt, that when I use the term ‘working class’ I most certainly do not mean only the ‘white working class’, and anyone who infers such a thing when reading these pages has completely missed my argument. On the occasions in the text that I do refer specifically to the ‘white working class’, it is because it is relevant to the point being made.

My ‘working class’ is what might legitimately be described as the ‘traditional working class’ (or, once upon a time, the ‘industrial working class’), but that is not a euphemism for white. It would include, for example, the West Indian who came to Britain as part of the Windrush generation and worked on London’s transport system; the Muslim who settled in a Lancashire mill town; my own late father-in-law who came in the 1960s from India and was employed as a sheet metal worker; and so on. Some on the Left think such people by definition cannot be considered part of our nation’s traditional working class. I think that view betrays their own prejudice.

I do acknowledge, of course, that the working class as I describe it is not homogeneous in its beliefs, and not all would have traditionally seen Labour as their natural home. Some might even consider themselves instinctive Tories. But I believe strongly that, regardless of individual party political preferences, there is a common thread running through much of this working class – one that is patriotic, often socially conservative, communitarian, rooted, and which places a high value on family, place, social solidarity and cultural stability.

All of this must be set against the emergence in Britain of what some have described as a ‘new working class’ – younger, urban, more likely to have gone to university, highly diverse, less politically tribal, and more liberal and cosmopolitan in outlook. I think there is merit in this analysis, as such a cohort is certainly beginning to take shape. Members of this group may have limited financial means and face many of the challenges that those among the more traditional working class face, particularly, for example, in relation to precarious employment and lack of affordable housing.

Despite this, however, I am sure that several of them would – at least for the moment – reject some of the arguments made in this book. I do not as a consequence suggest that this group cannot be considered a legitimate part of the working class; indeed, such a claim would be absurd. Neither do I suggest that the labour movement should not be responsive to their aspirations and demands. On the contrary, it is the job of the movement to build the maximum possible unity across the class.

Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that as things stand this cohort still constitutes only a minority among Britain’s wider working class and, moreover, is not what the broader population immediately think of when they hear the term. Maybe that will change in time. For now though, I think my use of the term ‘working class’ in its more traditional sense remains perfectly valid and will be widely understood.¹