How Reform ate Labour's lunch Farage has charmed the working man

Mainstream progressives win a landslide General Election against a backdrop of anti-Conservative disaffection. In that election, a lower-class party formed just a few years before stands candidates for the first time. To everyone’s shock, the new party wins seats in Parliament. 

There follows a period of political chaos, shaken by repeated General Elections and coalitions, during which the new party goes from strength to strength, exerting pressure on the mainstream. Eventually it gains power, and make changes that define the social contract for the next 80 years.

Prophecy? No: history. The name of that party, adopted 120 years ago, was Labour. But even if history doesn’t repeat itself, it does seem to be rhyming. Except, this time, Labour are the incumbents, and the insurgents are snapping at their heels: this week a shock poll revealed that among trade union members, as many now support Reform as Labour. 

Trade union members. Labour was literally founded by trade unionists. The whole point of Labour, then the insurgents, was to give a voice to working people excluded from the political process. So what happened? Why does “labour” no longer vote Labour? The story is complicated, but perhaps the central underlying change is that the kind of “labour” that drove the emergence of Labour simply isn’t the political force in Britain that it was in 1906. 

The industries have gone. So, too, is the empire that supplied raw materials for those industries, and a ready market for the finished products. And in the aftermath of this disintegration, the industrial working class that once organized, mobilized, and founded a political party has fractured into multiple interests. In turn, some of these are as under-represented now as the industrial working poor was in 1906 — but for radically different reasons. 

When the “Labour Representation Committee” met for the first time in 1900, they really were giving a voice to the voiceless. At the time only around 60% of adult men could vote, and the poorest workers had no direct political representation. Meanwhile, living and working conditions for this class were so grim as to prompt national concern about public health.

The Labour Party was founded to be that voice. Their organizing principles, leadership, and initial funding were drawn from already well-established trade unions, and set out to provide representation for Britain’s working class. The party succeeded, and its arc transformed the country: devising, institutionalizing, and finally outliving an entire template for national solidarity.

Its grand, historic triumph was the welfare state. Social housing, unemployment benefit, and — centrally — the National Health Service all came together first as campaigning causes and then, after two world wars, as a comprehensive vision. All was facilitated by the increase in administrative capacity occasioned by total war, and energized by the cooperative effort and sense of common, national purpose engendered by the struggle. 

But the same wars that created that capacity and reservoir of goodwill also ended the British Empire, which was the larger economic unit on which our national industrial model was based. The replacement of “imperial preference” by the US-led GATT began to chip away at industrial profit margins. Over the same period, the postwar Labour government nationalized key industries in the hope of preserving them for the public good rather than the benefit of a few plutocrats. That in turn empowered the unions, who agitated for better pay even as Britain’s entry into the EU began to bleed factories away to cheaper European countries.  

Matters came to a head in the late Seventies, in the Winter of Discontent: a high-point of industrial action, and a low-point for functioning government. Public patience with nationalized industry and over-mighty unions ran out. Margaret Thatcher was elected; and by dint of privatizing swathes of industry, and closing the mines, she broke the unions and opened a new national chapter.  

Her interventions were socially costly, miring some parts of the country in deindustrialization, poverty, and despair even as they aided other parts of the economy to get moving again. And yet through all this the overall postwar social contract established by Labour more or less held, and has continued to hold. Everyone pays taxes according to their ability; anyone who needs help can receive it. Political debate is mostly about the fine detail. 

But a central effect of the transformation Thatcher wrought was to tilt Britain — including its working class — ever further from the industrial economy for which the welfare state was founded. In the process, the funding, administration, and scope of welfare have grown ever more politically problematic. 

Who is the “us” for which this solidarity is available? On what basis? This question has grown harder to answer among the people whose interests were, historically, given coherence and voice by Labour, as that class has evolved since the end of Britain’s industrial era. Now, a once cohesive, unionized, industrial proletariat comprises a multitude of sometimes contradictory economic and political subgroups. Many work in the public sector or for the “Blob” that, despite Maggie’s complaints, has mushroomed since her day and is now the strongest bastion of trade unionism, and directly or indirectly state-funded. Others bought their social houses, became prosperous, and joined the aspirational classes; these, along with those self-employed as tradesmen, have often been transformed by years of filing their own tax returns into fiscal conservatives. 

Others again, especially in the de-industrialized Midlands and North, languish on welfare, or struggle in the gig economy. There are countless other pathways too. But identifying a common political interest among them has grown increasingly difficult. Accordingly, Labour has sought to triangulate a new political coalition: now Labour’s “people” are (among others) bourgeois progressives, public-sector workers, students, ethnic minorities, welfare recipients, plus a tribally Labour rump of the old industrial working class. Where internal contradictions appeared, these were papered over by people, especially the latter group, having no other viable political vehicle. 

But this coalition doesn’t look as though it’ll hold much longer. For one thing, parts of the coalition now do have other places to go. But for another, the political measures now required to sustain Labour’s flagship political achievements are on their way to destroying the solidarity on which those achievements were predicated. Labour was founded, with justice, to give political representation to a class whose conditions were miserable and voice non-existent. Its greatest victory was the postwar welfare state, which continued — even after the demise of the industries that gave rise to it — to set the template for how a civilized modern country should take care of its own. 

But now the strain is showing. Falling birth rates have shrunk the working-age tax base, meaning taxes have to rise just to keep services at the existing level. This has begun to prompt increasingly sharp questions about value for money, not to mention intergenerational justice. To mitigate this, successive governments have sought to replenish the tax base and boost nominal GDP via inward migration. And even if this had, for a while, something like the desired economic effect, it also depressed native wages, especially at the lower end of the scale.

Meanwhile, policymakers who pursued this strategy didn’t take into account the attenuating effect that rapid demographic change would have on the sense of collective solidarity upon which the whole postwar welfare state was premised. The sociologist Robert Putnam showed that the greater the “diversity” within a community, the less civically engaged it was: less volunteering, fewer voters, less charity donation and fewer community projects. His findings have been disputed, but the point is an intuitive one: if a welfare state is about taking care of “our own”, you need to be able to define “our own”. 

But the modern Labour Party, perhaps as a byproduct of the post-industrial coalition it embraced, can no longer answer the question: who is the “us”, for whom social solidarity should be defined and sustained? Who is “our own”? In these formless conditions, then, the contract that Labour created for the country is showing signs of implosion. Meanwhile, those with the most to lose from the end of a cohesive “imagined community”, the lumpenpetitbourgeoisie that evolved from the Old Labour working class, are among the angriest about its perceived dissolution, into GP waiting lists, petty crime, high street money-laundering, two-tier everything, and all the mutinous rest of it. 

Anecdotally, if I had a pound for every mutter I’ve heard from people who would once have voted Labour, about how our taxes mostly seem to fund seaside holidays for Afghans, I’d be able to fund my own week away in Cromer. In the end it probably doesn’t matter how often the idealists repeat that asylum is a trivial cost, relative to adult social care, or that it’s not that many sexual assaults. Perception matters for public consent to taxation. And the public perception is, increasingly, that the “us” is paying the taxes, but the solidarity is directed elsewhere.

Of course, none of this is to blame law-abiding migrants, all of whom surely just want to get on in life. But it adds up to a situation in which public enthusiasm for the postwar social contract is up against a shrinking tax base, in a population on its way to being so multicultural that national solidarity as such is now unimaginable save to those who depend economically on the state, are rich enough not to feel the pinch, or else wildly idealistic about a community of all humanity. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those still supporting Labour typically fit this description: public sector workers and welfare dependents, well-off lefties, and a rump of true believers. But even this latter group is increasingly defecting to the open-borders Green Party. Meanwhile, now, the other lot — the Old Labour voters Labour so long took for granted — also have somewhere else to go. Among those now thoroughly disillusioned by Labour’s refusal to define “us” with any clarity or purpose, many — even, it appears, among those still active trade union members — are going. 

That “somewhere” is an unknown quantity, led by a man considerably longer on charisma than attention to detail. It’s a caucus that’s faced accusations of dodgy funding, and which is accused from one side of being a Roman salute away from full-fat Hitlerism, and from the other of being the “Uniparty” in a teal-colored tie. But it’s also, as plainly as was the Labour Party in 1900, giving a voice of sorts to a currently voiceless political constituency. 

History doesn’t repeat. But, sometimes, it does rhyme. If either side of Reform’s critics turn out to be right, the lumpenpetitbourgeoisie are in for a bitter disappointment. Even if the critics are wrong, I doubt this group will exactly get their small-c conservative wish, of an “us” that’s once again solidaristic and cohesive, just like after the two wars. But either way, I think eventually a version of this political caucus will do again what the Labour Party did before, for better or worse: rewrite the social contract. 

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