‘Who were those People?’: The Labour Party and the Invisibility of the Working Class

Labour’s historic cross‐class alliance of ‘workers by hand and by brain’ has endured a hundred years, but it has never looked so vulnerable as today. Brexit, in particular, has spectacularly exposed—and widened—a crack in the alliance. On opposite sides of the argument sits a high proportion of the Labour party’s working‐class supporters (the so‐called ‘left behinds’) and the liberal and relatively affluent middle classes (the so‐called ‘metropolitan elites’). Much of the traction in the Brexit debate was, and still is, achieved through ‘identity politics’. But where the question of class is concerned, this is not as new as it can sometimes seem. No one used the term ‘identity politics’ in the early twentieth century, but Labour representation, from the very start, had an important psychological dimension to it. It exploited a formidable and tenacious working class desire ‘to be counted’ and not be pushed into the shadows of public life. The notions of respect and humiliation (or outraged respect) continued to provide vital sources of fuel in the growth of the Labour Party for the next fifty years, and beyond. If the party is to have a future, it will need to get to grips with the feeling of many of its traditional supporters that they do not count anymore. And to better understand that feeling, it could look with profit to its own past for guidance.