Labour’s defeat in the Hartlepool by-election on 6 May demonstrated the terminal nature of its condition. The Labour Party does not provide any opposition to a completely reactionary government which through its incompetence and corruption has killed tens of thousands of people. Instead, its policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the government has made it complicit in the appalling outcome of the Tories’ Covid-19 pandemic response. Labour is now demonstrably incapable of assembling the electoral coalition necessary to win a general election. Irrelevant to the backward sections of the working class that dominate so-called Red Wall constituencies, it also cannot begin to answer the needs of millions of skilled graduates undergoing rapid proletarianisation. It faces disintegration. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
Such a development will accelerate given the political direction that leader Sir Keir Starmer is taking. From the relentless campaign against the Labour left, to the recruitment of an Israeli intelligence officer to manage Labour’s social media and the establishment of an Anti-Semitism Advisory Board stuffed with the most reactionary Zionists imaginable, Starmer is showing absolute determination to expunge any trace of Corbynism. His appointment of Rachel Reeves as Shadow Chancellor is a pointed insult: her support for benefit sanctions and declaration in 2015 that ‘We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen as, and we’re not, the party to represent those out of work’ demonstrate that the worst reactionaries are back in charge of Labour. The declared policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the Tory government is a declaration of non-opposition in conditions where a principled campaigner like the footballer Marcus Rashford can force significant concessions from the government over school meals through sheer political determination. ‘Constructive engagement’ allows Prime Minister Johnson to swat aside any call to bring forward the start of its coronavirus public enquiry from 2022. With millions falling into destitution if the weekly Universal Credit uplift of £20 is removed in September, along with many suffering unemployment with a simultaneous end to furlough arrangements, and hundreds of thousands facing homelessness as the no-fault eviction moratorium terminates, the need for opposition is critical. That need is being answered outside, and in opposition to, the Labour Party.
Hartlepool debacle
Hartlepool was one of the so-called Red Wall of Labour-voting constituencies in the north of England, many of which fell to the Tories in the 2019 general election. In fact Hartlepool had bucked the trend because the reincarnation of UKIP, the Reform Party, took 25.8% of the vote, effectively denying the Tories a victory. Come 2021 and the Tories took virtually all the Reform Party votes, ending up with 51.9% against Labour’s 28.1%. While Labour Party leaders attempted to seek solace in local election gains in the main cities of England and retained mayoralties in Bristol, Liverpool, London, and Manchester, overall they also lost 327 seats and control of eight councils.
These results, the talking heads and op-ed commentariat declared, proved that Labour remained out of touch with its historical manual working class base in the towns of the North and Midlands which had voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU in 2016; it was now reliant on support from white collar middle class Remain voters in the major cities of the country. Labour MP Khalid Mahmood put it in its crudest terms when he declared that ‘in the past decade, Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people…A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party. No wonder it is doing better among rich urban liberals and young university graduates than it is amongst the most important part of its traditional electoral coalition, the working class.’
The legacy of Thatcherism
Yet like virtually all analyses of what is happening within the British working class, Mahmood misses crucial points, in particular that the working class in those constituencies which shifted to the Tories are, in their majority, outright owners of their homes, giving them a significant material stake in the system. By 2017/18, 75% of all households where the Household Reference Person is aged 65 or over owned their home outright, five million in all; the figure for white households was 79%. These are working class people who were able to take advantage of Right to Buy and the enormous discounts available on the purchase of council homes in the 1980s and 1990s, or who had been able to pay off mortgages over their working lives helped by the low house prices outside London and relatively low interest rates.
This is the Thatcher generation, the so-called C1 and C2 social classes, junior administrative and skilled workers who defected from Labour to Thatcher’s Tories in the 1979 general election. They are now a relatively privileged layer of the working class which remains a bastion of nationalist and individualist reaction, and which is playing a decisive role in electoral politics – in 2016 over Brexit and then in the 2019 general election. As we said in analysing the result of the 2019 general election, such workers 30–40 years ago:
‘…had not needed a higher education or even A–Levels to get a job with sufficient security to buy a home or make a quick buck from the sell-off of shares in the former nationalised industries such as oil, gas, water and electricity. They happily subscribed to the individualist ethos that Thatcher cultivated and then to the chauvinism following the 1982 Malvinas War that led to the landslide Tory election victory in 1983.’ (See General election 2019: The legacy of Thatcherism, FRFI 274).
They make up the 58% of those with GCSE qualifications or lower who voted Tory as opposed to the 31% who supported Labour (YouGov). Just because they own their homes does not mean that they are income-rich: 21.1% of outright homeowners are in the poorest household income quintile; many are living in relative poverty. A further 24.5% are in the next poorest quintile. Furthermore this age-group is over-represented in the Red Wall constituencies as young people have left the towns and migrated to larger cities either looking for work or to go to university. In Hartlepool, for instance, the number of over-65s in the population grew by 26.9% between 1981 and 2011, while the number of 18-24-year-olds fell by 24.5%. The older generation is also far more inclined to vote than younger workers. In the 2019 general election, 75% of those aged 65-74 voted, and 80% of those aged 75 plus, compared to 53% of those between 18 and 34. The votes of these older age groups broke down three to one in favour of the Tories in 2019 compared to Labour, while the younger age group voted two to one in favour of Labour.
The ruling class sees the political value of this elderly layer: the material stake it possesses in the form of home ownership makes it electorally conservative and therefore a bastion of reaction in politically turbulent times. That is why it has been prepared so far to pay for the pension ‘triple lock’: the commitment to raise the state pension by the highest of average increased earnings, prices or 2.5%. In turn this layer regards the triple lock as its prerogative, and dismisses with contempt those they regard as lacking such entitlement – in particular migrants and benefit claimants.
Graduate proletarianisation
But what of Mahmood’s ‘rich urban liberals and young university graduates’? In 1999, Tony Blair as Prime Minister committed to a target of 50% of young people going to university with a notion that a future economy would depend on a highly educated workforce. That level was finally reached in 2019 when 50.2% of under-30s were either in university or were graduates. 440,000 UK students entered higher education in 2020, including 36% of all school leavers; in the 1960s it was 4% and truly was a middle class privilege. Of 400,000 graduating each year more than 25% are from minority ethnic communities.
However, students now leave with a mountain of debt in tuition fee and maintenance loans, many having had no choice but to take a paid job alongside their studies. They then find that they no longer have a passport to the professional job of their choice, and have to seek part-time or temporary employment in the hospitality or retail sectors to survive, if they are not already working there anyway. In other words, they are very much part of the working class, and its more precarious section at that. The average British house price is now approximately 50% higher than it was in January 2009, and in London around double. At £256,405, average house prices had risen 10.8% in the year to March 2021. This means that even if graduates find tenured employment, the combination of limited job security and the constant downward pressure on wages will deny them the stake in the system that their parents have.
To dismiss this new layer as ‘middle class’ is to fail to understand what is happening. These young workers were behind the support for Corbyn in 2015. He was an outlet for frustration at the absence of any opposition to austerity and the accompanying diminution of opportunity for material advancement compared to previous generations. Conditions were forcing them into association with other poorer but specifically oppressed sections of the working class – black, Asian and other migrant workers. A further blow to their prospects came with the Brexit referendum result: they had regarded continued EU membership as crucial to alleviating their deteriorating position. Their political consciousness has acquired an anti-chauvinist and anti-racist character: the emergence of the movement against climate change and associated eco-destruction is pushing them towards anti-imperialism.
The cowardice of the Labour left
The defeat of Corbynism following the 2019 general election represented a watershed: no longer could this layer rely on the Labour Party or its leader as an apparently credible vehicle for social progress. Instead, what it faced was Labour’s reversion to an openly reactionary leadership. This new generation has joined others on the streets – the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and the huge pro-Palestinian protests of the last few weeks – and increasing numbers are now prepared to oppose Labour in defence of their own interests.
Labour is now chasing the votes of the reactionary elderly working class in the North and Midlands as it champions patriotism, law and order and smart suits. Black Lives Matter is dismissed as a ‘moment’; Hamas rockets in response to Zionist aggression are condemned. Showing it is on the side of law and order means abstaining on the Police Bill until it becomes politically impossible to continue to defend the indefensible, and being patriotic means waving the flag while condemning the government for not being tough enough on Russia and China. Its stance will inevitably accelerate the alienation of the younger city-based working class.
Corbyn himself remains excluded from the Parliamentary Labour Party, too cowardly to abandon his rotten party. The rest of the Labour left is no braver: it still peddles the illusion that Labour can become a vehicle for progress, and will try to obstruct the development of any movement outside Labour’s influence or control. But the evident failure of Corbynism is an albatross round the neck of the Labour left: it is not seen as a credible option by those who want to change the world and understand that they cannot rely on others to do it for them. Labour has become irrelevant. This is a new generation, and its only choice is to join Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and fight for socialism against the Labour Party.
