Hard Labour

Sir Kier Starmer, Labour's shadow Prime Minister, just changed his shadow 'cabinet'. Political media were universally unimpressed. One of the many pieces of under-developed commentary that popped out of his head was a fatuous insistence that 'I will entirely take the blame (for the flat failure of Labour's recent election for councils, mayors, political police chiefs and the Welsh and Scottish partial parliaments). Sir Keir's second decision, after 'taking the blame', was to throw out key figures of his leadership - except of course, himself. Wet, wet ,wet. In the end Sir Keir had to re-install his main, shadow-cabinet minister into a new post, because she had been voted as Labour's deputy and had decided to stay.  

London, Manchester and Liverpool held the mayoral Labour vote. Manchester increased it. The Tory drive into the Midlands and the North East continued. Scotland saw the start of victory for independence and Labour came in third behind the Tories in Scotland. Only Welsh Labour could crow that they nearly won a majority in the Welsh Parliament.

Virtually every known public media pundit, from across both the unhappy right (that still worries about the PM Boris) and the ragged part of the liberal left, have suggested that the 're-construction' of the British working class is what has suddenly changed politics. But a little thought contradicts this strange idea. For example it supposes that the British working class, say those previous to the Thatcher period, would have been lapping up Sir Keir (and dumping Boris). Which would leave us today with the idea that it is the working class's political changes that are failing Sir Keir! 

On the other side, if you listen to Blair, Labour only started winning elections because it became Blair who built an empty but smarter Tory-type party! Sir Keir was too traditional for Blair. In Blair's world, the working class had changed completely. Thatcher's legacy had been swallowed. So, Sir Keir was too busy checking the water and trying to dissolve the remnants of the mass party that Corbyn had built. He did not manage to out-Tory the Tories! 

This palaver is becoming 'common sense' both inside and outside the Labour Party. But its bedrock actually emerged from the deep relationship between British Liberalism and the origins of the Labour Party. In modern times it was summed up by Blair's 'Middle Way' but there were many historical stages of LibLabism, which has become the specific feature of the British social democracy. And, in this Labourite world, it is the curious and sometimes incomprehensible 'do-ings' of the British working class that is blamed for the failure of the would-be, morally profound, Labour Party - that works so hard and without (only a few) millionaires. Now some analysts suggest Labour's political failure was a result of the worker's (new?) cultural shifts, instead of their ancient class politics ...    

So much tosh is needing to be squashed. Sure, there have been great economic, social and political changes across all the classes since 1945. And part of those changes in the British working class was certainly related to the increasing shared approaches of the two main political parties over the years. Social democracy in Britain (and in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries) have dissolved or is dissolving. The British social democratic decline is part of a Western development. Which is part of the world wide (failing) globalisation. The social democratic parties have largely responded to this fact - but not to the actual deep and increasing decline of the real changes of the working classes. Social democracy cannot do that. It has always been set up to maintain the working class within the interests of a system that can offer reforms. Easier when you have an empire. Insoluble if the historic concessions are dissolving in thin air. 

The main features of the working class in Britain (and across the West) are the reduction of its funds. Funds are the acceptance of income, deriving from various sources. Throughout working class history, work has constantly changed. From farm labourers to car factories to private carers. The division of labour has been organised and reorganised and reorganised again in the name of profit. Today, the shift of Western workers, especially the youth, has taken a global feature in that a distribution of their labour turns more and more away from what used to be high-ended pay and resources to underdeveloped and semi-developed payment, coupled with increased work time. 

More recently, working class funds now include the diminution of public welfare that were won previously in bitter battles in parts of Europe and East Asia. Fully private old age welfare now dissolves the public remains of health and welfare. Private developments that used to provide funds for the working class are reduced or removed, as with transport and housing. In other words, the modern change in the working classes is the constant drive to remove or cut working class funds, with wages being the most heavily reduced among the young. 

Why does this elementary crisis of the working class not force politics to challenge and change a system that is so unbearable? 

Farm labourers (shoe makers, coal heavers, cotton weavers etc) found it very hard to collect their class together, bring their demands together, and to create mass action, in the early 19th century. Yet the Chartists nearly broke the most powerful state in the world. The car factory workers in the 1930's USA led the New Deal much further than FDR. Their strikes and lockdowns provoked new state governors, linked across the continent from ports in San Fransisco to the New York rag trade and increased wages and maintained employment in a desperate period. The Social Democratic politicians may have shot their bolt today. But working class people can and will again create the means to build up new unities and bring in old and new workers' unions to take up the major crises of their lives. There are new hints already surfacing. The Scottish young want independence for what? To put up flags and sing patriotic songs? No. This is a new unity beginning to work out the design for a new society. A large part of the UK NHS is working to define its base in society and the means to guarantee its resources independent of Westminster. 

To summarise; we are not getting working class decisions to 'go Tory' - anymore than the working class supported Thatcher in the 1980s. Working class people determine immediate and direct responses in what is a field, the far distant political classes, of little interest and less connection. Following the 1950s in Britain, Westminster politics as such were seen, gradually, as a deeply disinteresting part of society, largely owned by a different class. Indeed, after WW2 the working class has trailed away from the interests of Britain's so called democracy and, latterly under Blair, even the remains of the Labour Party. Inevitably, the association with the mystical politics in Westminster only erupts where there is a direct interest and, as working class life becomes more difficult every day, only a direct interest works for obvious reasons. 

Attlee delivered the NHS. Thatcher, after defeating the most radical unions, sold out public housing. Boris threw down Brexit. But politics does not belong to the working class. They have to make their own. 

Here are some examples of working class politics in the UK. Bristol youth, led by black youth, the most impoverished sector of the city, toppled a slaver's statue in the river. The same people have started the battle, now enshrined by the Queen's speech, to push the police back against their new rights to stop demonstrations. (The core of the Jilet Jaune movement in France.) Black Lives Matter and women's self-defence have broken out of the lock-down defined by the police and Westminster politics. Major meetings are trying to bring the NHS into the hands of those who need it. It could be added that 10 million voters stood by Corbyn's reforms - despite the real role of Westminster politics and its powerful allies. (The well expected tragedy was the failure of Corbyn and his MPs to set up a new party based on the 10 million.) The voters in Scotland have decided their own politics - which will have to break Westminster if it is to win. In Northern Ireland a new Ireland is being created - outside the UK. 

The real creation of working class politics is yet to come, but from the Charter, the mass unions, the beginnings of the Labour Party, and now the growing response to the deep difficulties of working class life, there is more than hints of a new sort of change.