What does the future hold for the working class?
Born amid shocking violence and repression, now overlooked and neglected by the Party to which it gave life
By DAVID MYTON
On the evening of November 4 1963 four working class young men from Liverpool – The Beatles: John, George, Paul and Ringo - topped the bill at that year’s Royal Variety Performance at London’s Prince of Wales Theatre. They played four songs for the Queen Mother and her posh family and friends. Between songs, John Lennon cracked a joke and everyone laughed.
I was watching the performance on our rented television in the front room of my North Yorkshire council home. We were a working class family, along with the scores of other residents who inhabited council house estates.
For the most part our parents (and grandmas and granddads) had manual jobs such as cleaners and porters, worked in factories and shops, or on the roads and railways in various capacities. Many were veterans of the century’s World Wars (including my father and grandfather).
By and large they voted for the Labour Party, which regularly won the seat. The “posh” people who owned their own homes voted Tory. A few whackos voted Liberal.
Most people were happy, if not a little surprised, that The Beatles had made it to the toppermost of the poppermost. Whether the mop-tops liked it or not, they served as an example of what could be achieved with hard work, application, and a modicum of talent.
The barriers of class were now not insurmountable - embourgeoisement beckoned the ambitious.
This was the early 1960s, and English society was changing – including the working class, which had been around since industrialisation transformed the nation between 1780-1830.
Shocking violence and horrendous living conditions
That the working class existed at all was remarkable – its birth and gestation took place amid shocking violence and horrendous living conditions.
The emergence of this new class had been described in a brilliant book published in January 1963: EP Thompson’s The Making Of The English Working Class.
It told a hell of a story about a people who had emerged during the Industrial Revolution and had been, in Thompson’s words, subjected simultaneously to economic exploitation and political oppression leading to mass immiseration and suffering.
“The process of industrialisation was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain,” wrote Thompson. “… this violence was done to human nature”.
During the Industrial Revolution, relations between employer and labourer became harsher and less personal. Whenever workers sought to resist exploitation, he said, they were met by the forces of the employer or State, and commonly both.
For most working people the crucial experience of the Industrial Revolution involved changes in the nature and intensity of exploitation … “The process of industrialisation must, in every conceivable social context, entail suffering and the destruction of older and valued ways of life.”
The new economic conditions “cast the blackest shadow over the years of the Industrial Revolution”.
Class, Thompson argued, is not a structure, but rather is a relationship based on common experiences and interests. It is as much a cultural formation as it is economic and is “defined by people as they live their own history”.
For most working people the crucial experience of the Industrial Revolution was felt in terms of changes in the nature and intensity of exploitation. “The process of industrialisation must, in every conceivable social context, entail suffering and the destruction of older and valued ways of life.”
By 1833, he wrote, the working class presence could be felt in every county in England, and in most fields of life. Their culture was perhaps “the most distinguished England has known” and contained a “massive diversity of skills”.
Despite repressions and being told they had no rights, the working class “knew that they were born free”. They fought, not the machine, “but the exploitive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism”.
Condemned to live in atrocious housing
A significant part of this exploitation and repression included being condemned to live in atrocious housing.
In 1844 a 22-year-old Prussian man decided to investigate the lives of the poor in northern England. Enter Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy businessman who owned a cotton textile mill in Salford, Lancashire.
Engels, who would later team up with a certain Karl Marx, was shocked and appalled by the atrocious housing conditions in which many workers were condemned to live.
His book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, was first published in German in Germany in 1845 and the English language edition only came out in 1887. It was a horror story.
Every working man, Engels wrote, was constantly exposed to loss of work, and food, and to death by starvation. The dwellings of the workers “were everywhere badly built, badly planned, badly ventilated, damp and unwholesome”. Further, many people had died of starvation “under the most revolting circumstances”.
The English working class, says Engels, called this “social murder”.
But change was on its way. In 1884-85 the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes investigated the situation, culminating in the Housing Acts of 1885. By the outbreak of World War One about 24,000 new council houses had been built in England and the number grew as the years passed.
Out of all this turmoil there emerged the British Labour Party, created in 1900 – “the result of many years of struggle by working class people, trade unionists and socialists, united by the goal of working class voices represented in British Parliament” – and led by the genuinely working class Scottish trade unionist and coal miner, Keir Hardy. https://labour.org.uk/about-us/labours-legacy/
From the bowels of the trade union movement
Hardy and his colleagues bequeathed a political party which, at that time, genuinely represented and supported the working classes, now beginning to make their presence felt throughout society.
In the words of renowned trade union boss Ernest Bevin: “The Labour Party grew out of the bowels of the trade union movement”.
When Ramsay MacDonald became the Labour Party’s first Prime Minister in 1924, he inherited a position made more complex by a changing international system and a world economic crisis. However, his government knew who and where its major supporters were – the working classes – and so worked to improve housing and social security, among other things.
Clement Attlee, who became Labour’s leader in 1935, put the working class front and centre of Labour’s policy direction.
Attlee, born into a bourgeois family and having studied at Oxford University, became deputy prime minister in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government. He then led Labour to a shock victory in the 1945 general election and went on to introduce a raft of policies that would benefit the working classes (and others) – a sweeping nationalisation program, a new National Health Service offering free treatment at the point of delivery (brain child of Aneurin Bevan), a major house-building drive, and a “cradle to the grave” welfare system envisioned by William Beveridge.
The Conservatives soon won power again before the likes of Labour’s Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan came to power, both profoundly influenced by the “white heat of the technological revolution”. Although still bonded to the party’s working class roots, nevertheless there was growing conflict with the trade union movement.
Society was changing and by the late 70s public sector strikes had become endemic leading to the bitter “winter of discontent” disruption in 1978-79.
After Callaghan lost a “no confidence” motion in March 1979, the resultant general election that May saw Margaret Thatcher installed as PM and the Conservatives back in power.
And now it was all change with the dawn of neoliberalism and the free market fetish. If a public industry could be privatised, then it would be, including much of the nationwide transport, while traditional heavy industries were also fading away as new, faster and cheaper, methods emerged. It was an echo of what was happening in the US under President Ronald Reagan.
And then came the general election of 1997 in which a youthful Tony Blair led the re-branded New Labour into power. Pragmatism counted more than ideology while radicalism was given a new meaning.
The new radicalism: ‘what counts is what works’
“We will be a radical government,” said Blair, “But the definition of radicalism will not be that of doctrine, whether of left or right, but of achievement. New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals but not of outdated ideology. What counts is what works.”
Blair also drove the replacement of the Party’s Clause IV – commitment to the common ownership of the means of production – with a “third way” committed to both social justice and the market. There was also a shift to “globalisation” involving policies designed to make the economy “more productive and flexible in the face of international competition”.
This and other reforms centred on promoting equality, human rights and social justice set the template for future Labour governments.
Parallel to all of these changes was a continuous growth in access to higher education following the Robbins Report of 1963. By 1999-2000 there were 1,259,700 full-time students, a 10-fold increase over 46 years, with also an increase in part-time students from 123,700 in 1965-66 to 764,400 by 1999-2000, writes Andrew Rosen.
“Moreover, there were more female than male students and the proportion of students who were members of ethnic minorities was larger than the proportion of Britons who belonged to those minorities … By the end of the 20th century, greatly-increased numbers of students and the expanded role of higher education made it a far more important determinant of social class than ever before,” he adds.
History shows, however, that while the trade unions generally have supported the Labour Party “they will not support a Labour Government when they feel that their interests are directly threatened,” according to Professor Vernon Bogdanor in a Gresham College lecture. However, he adds, those who were closest to the working class understood it was not militant.
Ernest Bevin, he records, once said: “The most conservative man in the world is the British trade unionist when you want to change him. You can make a great speech on unity, but when you are finished, he will say, “What about the funeral benefits?”
The making of the English working class was characterised by high levels of violence and the imposition of terrible living and working conditions. But once established as a social and cultural force, generally it became conservative and in the most part rejected ideologies such as Marxism.
Political theorist and academic Tom Nairn writes that after the 1840s it quickly turned into “an apparently docile class … The ideas of Marx penetrated the consciousness of the English workers less than anywhere else”.
‘Wedded to the narrowest bourgeois ideologies’
Instead, the working class “embraced one species of moderate reformism after another, became a consciously subordinate part of bourgeois society, and has remained wedded to the narrowest and greyest of bourgeois ideologies in its principal movements”.
Professor Bogdanor says that the views of the working class appear to have little in common with those of middle class Labour leaders:
“Working class voters, it has been discovered, are not sympathetic to the international ethos of Labour, an ethos which welcomed immigration and multiculturalism and championed the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities,” he says. “Paradoxically, the electoral success of the most left-wing leader in Labour history [Corbyn] came not from an increase in working class support but from an increase in middle class support.”
According to author Michael Lind, today’s democracies are “polarised along class lines between a college-educated metropolitan overclass of managers and professionals, on one side, and, on the other, a majority working class divided among old stock natives and newer immigrants”.
He adds: “As the old institutions that once defended the interests and reflected the interests of working class citizens – trade unions, religious congregations and local political parties – have weakened or vanished, power in the three realms of government, the economy and culture, has become increasingly centralised in the managerial elite and the non-democratic institutions that it dominates, including bureaucracies, judiciaries, corporations, the media, universities and non-profit organisations.”
‘Labour is the party of university graduates’
The working class movement away from Labour was seen dramatically in this year’s July 4 British general election (won by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party)
According to Joanna Williams, a YouGov survey of how people actually voted “shows that Labour is the party of university graduates”.
“Forty-two per cent of those with a degree voted Labour, compared with only 18 per cent who backed the Conservatives. When it comes to those who have no education beyond GCSEs only 28 per cent backed Labour, compared with 31 per cent who voted for the Conservatives and 23 per cent who opted for Reform UK”.
It appears that many working class citizens have embraced populism, opting to vote for the new Reform party.
“Labour is in charge, sure, but … nipping at its heels is a very big section of the public who outright reject the political ideas, moral crusades and green lunacy of the establishment,” writes Brendan O’Neill.
The Labour Party has changed but so have the working classes. This class was born amid terrible violence and exploitation. Nevertheless it became a potent force in English society, politically and economically. Now, not so much.
EP Thompson wrote about the “making” of the English working class. Will it – can it - be unmade?
References
The Royal Commission On The Housing of the Working Classes 1885 - https://www.le.ac.uk/eh/teach/ug/modules/eh3107/rchousing.pdf
Professor Vernon Bogdanor, Gresham College Lectures -https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3TaPgchJtQDcBVdJ24qKjG7kNJVDi_z
The Labour Party, The British attempt to construct a socialist commonwealth 1945-1951, The General Election of 1945, and Britain in the 20th Century
Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour 2nd Edition, Wiley, 2006
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England - https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/index.htm
Labour’s Legacy - https://labour.org.uk/about-us/labours-legacy/
Michael Lind, The New Class War. Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite, Atlantic Books, London, 2021 pp 141-42
Tom Nairn, The English working class, New Left Review – March-April 1964 - https://newleftreview.org/issues/i24/articles/tom-nairn-the-english-working-class
Brendan O’Neill, ‘The true story of this election: populism is here to stay’ Spiked Online - https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/05/the-true-story-of-this-election-populism-is-here-to-stay/
Andrew Rosen, The Transformation of British life 1950-2000. A social history, Manchester University Press 2003
E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, London, 1963
Joanna Williams, Labour is no friend of the working classes, Spiked Online - https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/16/labour-is-no-friend-of-the-working-classes/