White van man is back. Only this time, it’s a woman. The Green Party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election is a plumber called Hannah Spencer, and the reaction to the news was unhinged.
Her credentials as a tradie were hysterically questioned by right-wing accounts on that humble forum of the ordinary man, X. After slowly realising she is in fact a plumber, X users instead moved on to accusing her of not being a working-class one because of her mythical multimillionaire husband (she isn’t married) and her council ward of Hale (one of Greater Manchester’s most affluent). Brendan O’Neill over at alt-right site Spiked accepts she’s a plumber, just not stereotypical enough (“She’ll never have a rolled-up copy of the Sun in her arse pocket. She’ll never be caught taking a five-minute break to find out the football scores.”)
When I asked her about these reactions, Spencer responded: “I’ve been a plumber for nearly 20 years. What do they want, to see a toilet I’ve fixed?” In her view, “the right don’t like the idea of a young, working-class woman in politics. They want to keep Westminster for a small club of posh boys that all went to the same schools or studied at Oxbridge. That’s why things have been run into the ground – we’ve had too many politicians that don’t know what it’s like to graft.”
Sexism and sneering are surely at play here, as she detects. But there is something in particular about tradespeople of whatever type that tends to send Westminster mad (and not just because they’ve been quoted £15bn for fixing up the Houses of Parliament).
White van fever struck hard in 2014, when out canvassing the Labour politician Emily Thornberry took a photo of a white Transit van parked outside a house with St George’s flags in the window, and tweeted it with the gnomic caption “image from #Rochester”.
This incident, which got Thornberry sacked from the shadow cabinet, is remembered for highlighting Labour’s uneasy relationship with the English flag. But what short-circuited political brains at the time was the fact of the white van. It resulted in one of the more desperate interview responses I can recall – when the then Labour leader Ed Miliband was asked what he thought when seeing a white van, he responded: “Respect”. (The only appropriate response, of course, was “CLEAN ME”.)
Labour had such a spectacular meltdown over its identity and soul back then because it was supposed to be the working-class party – and the white van man, in the political imagination, was the totemic working-class Brit. He still is. Look at the Tory-turned-Reform politician Robert Jenrick’s campaign against tool theft; look at Nigel Farage’s embrace of market trader turned influencer Thomas Skinner; look at how often Keir Starmer evokes his toolmaker dad.
In this sense, our leaders – largely drawn from the hovering-in-the-kitchen-making-builder’s-tea class – are not out of touch with the public. When the New Statesman asked the British public whether they categorised certain occupations as working, middle or upper class (or not a class signifier at all) in a 2021 poll run by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, plumbers were labelled “working-class” by 60 per cent of voters.
But, when you break this down by age, it seems the younger Britons are, the less likely they are to see plumbing as a working-class job. In fact, attitudes towards class are changing: the younger the voter, the more emphasis they put on economic, rather than cultural, class factors, as we have found in previous New Statesman studies. Celebrites well known for their working-class upbringing are seen chiefly as upper class by younger respondents (for example, the footballer Marcus Rashford is seen as upper class by 56 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds compared with 10.3 per cent of those aged 55-64).
Millennials and Gen Z are more likely than older generations to link class to income. They are alert to what politicos have missed: that working a trade can make you part of the boss class, not some kind of proletarian. These are the “superstar tradesmen” of the sociologist Dan Evans’s 2023 book A Nation of Shopkeepers – old schoolfriends who were “very successful self-employed tradesmen” and had “lots of money, or at least a lot compared to me [a graduate in academia]” and were “confused about my lowly state”.
In fact, Britain’s “new working class”, as the ex-Starmer adviser Claire Ainsley wrote in her influential 2018 book The New Working Class, is “multi-ethnic, comprised of people living off low and middle incomes, and likely to be occupied in service sector jobs like catering, social care or retail… The trouble for political parties is that none have caught up with modern social class dynamics”.
Old class assumptions and identities are changing. This is why it shouldn’t cause hysteria when the Green Party runs a plumber as its candidate against Reform UK’s career academic. And yet, as a political class, we are still blinded by the grubby headlights of the white van.
[Further reading: How the left forgot the petty bourgeoisie]
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