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UK Labour Party: Betrayal of the Working Class or Utopia Through Capitalism

Natalia Forrest - 1/14/2005

May 1997 - Britain awakes to a new dawn after years of living under the shadow of grey Conservatism. Tony Blair had arrived and the age of 'Cool Britannia' had begun. After the regime of Margaret Thatcher (John Major was just a brief aberration) and the follies of hyper-privatisation, the possibility of a better, fairer Great Britain was upon the land, and the working class would be rewarded for their support. While perhaps a Scandinavian level cradle-to-grave support system was never envisaged, socialist ideals would now have room to grow, with possibilities now available to all, not just a privileged, moneyed few.

But the envisaged Utopia never came. The grand aims of socialism have been swept away for a privatised, aspirational market-economy capitalism that is hard to distinguish from the Tory version of how things should be run. As a result, the proletariat has deserted Labour, and when they vote, if they can be bothered to vote at all, they choose to support the far-right British National Party (BNP). With their reliance on the chardonnay swilling aspirational lifestylers of the suburbs, Labour has taken their traditional base for granted, and lost them in the process.

Of course, this is only the type of hyperbole beloved of tabloid editors and armchair pundits. Or is it? In a society so often perceived as strictly divided by class, how important has the working class been to Labour, and Labour to the working class? Who is the working class these days anyway? Has New Labour deserted the socialist principles of Old Labour, and if so, did they really have a choice? So often we can't be bothered to look beyond the headlines and ask ourselves these questions. But those with an interest in New Labour and what it stands for should start to look beyond the preconceived notions of who Labour supporters are and what they have achieved.

The first question we should ask is: what exactly is the British 'working class'? While symbolically the general populi (and some academics) may cling to the image of the male manual worker, this is patently not the case in a post-industrial Britain where only 22% of the population are employed in 'traditional' working class industries. Working-class, like so much else of the 'class system' in modern day Britain, is really just built on self-perception, and with the recent 'trendiness' of a working class background, even a YBA (Young British Artist) can claim working class credentials, even if both their income and how they choose to gain it are as far removed from the traditional idea of the working class as a member of the aristocracy. As terms such as 'working class' become amorphous in 21st century Great Britain, their usefulness in describing the support base for major political parties becomes redundant.

Furthermore, the 'working class' has never been as solidly pro-Labour as is usually presumed and studies have shown a strong pro-Conservative element among these people. Upper-middle class nouveau riche can choose to vote New Labour as often as a council-flat dwelling construction worker will choose to vote Tory (or the BNP).

No matter who is keeping New Labour in power, the party has had to weather claims almost from day one that they have abandoned their socialist principles in favour of a privatised market-economy similar to the Thatcher regime that came before; that for all their claims of radical change New Labour has failed to change 'the way things are done'; that frankly, not much has really changed at all, and New Labour is so far removed from Old Labour that it's not really Labour at all. This is reflected in the headlines about the state of Tony Blair's government today. There is little discussion about the economy, or even government policies on services. Rather, the media focuses on the supposed leadership tussle between Brown and Blair, and ongoing perceptions about the effect the Iraq war and a lack of WMD have had on Blair's ability to remain as leader of his own party. When considered, these are highly political, almost rarefied topics that don't actually affect the day to day lives of much of the population. But these seem to be the things worth discussing. For why discuss Labour and the economy, if the perception is this will be no different than the Tories and the economy? And why discuss the issues that interest the 'working classes - health, education, equality - if their support can be taken for granted? Yet when surveyed, people continue to complain about the condition of just these things. Does this mean Labour should be concentrating on improving these issues? There is always room for improvement, but what is really needed is honest investigation and reporting on the state of things. If Labour really wants to win the next election, which some commentators say could be as early as May, they need to do a better job at moving the media spotlight away from the issues that only interest a few political-watchers, and onto the improvements that have been made since they came to power.

To paraphrase an old saying, you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time. However, there is a case to be made that perhaps some of the people should accept that there are the preconditions to be happy some of the time. In a piece looking at the Socialist parties' disenchantment with the Blair government published in the Guardian last year, David Aaronovitch makes the point that "[i]f, in 1994, a Labour supporter had been told that in 10 years, unemployment would be below a million, interest rates below 5%, that there would have been the greatest increases in public spending ever undertaken, thousands more of the kind of people we always wanted thousands more of, big increases in overseas aid, third world debt reduction and significant inroads made into child poverty, then she probably would have said … "Bring It On!" " Perhaps Blair and his cohorts have failed to deliver Utopia on a plate, but the working classes, whoever they are, along with the rest of society, have probably ended up with something much better than what they had before 1997. If only they took the time to look beyond the headlines to see it.