When a Vanity Fair interviewer asked Tony Blair about his faith, Alastair Campbell memorably interjected: “We don’t do God.” In some respects, New Labour didn’t do class either.
Blair treated the subject as redolent of a failed past and as increasingly irrelevant in modern Britain. John Prescott may never have said that “we’re all middle-class now” (he described himself as a “working-class man” living a “middle-class style of life”) but Blair did declare that “the class war is over” in his 1999 Labour conference speech.
Keir Starmer and his cabinet, by contrast, have embraced the politics of class. At last Friday’s Chequers away day, the Prime Minister reminded his team that they were the most working-class cabinet in history. While Blair used the language of peace, Starmer deployed the language of struggle. “You all have your own stories about the battle you had to get here,” he told the cabinet. “This is a time for fighters. You are here to remove the barriers for working people to get to where they want to.”
It’s a theme that Wes Streeting reprised in his extended (17-minute) speech at last night’s New Statesman summer party. “[Starmer] has assembled the most working-class cabinet in history and that really matters, not for tokenism but because of the experience we bring to bear,” he said. “If you don’t have a diversity of perspective and experience, you end up through unconscious, if not conscious, bias making decisions in the interests of the privileged few.” (Blair, Streeting told me last year, was “too quick to declare a classless society”.)
It isn’t only Starmer and Streeting who speak the language of class. Their cabinet colleagues routinely connect their policy decisions to their backgrounds. When Bridget Phillipson – last night’s other guest speaker – announced the expansion of free school meals to all households receiving Universal Child she recalled the hunger she endured in her youth.
At last month’s Spending Review, the comprehensive-educated Rachel Reeves declared that she would “always prioritise” the 93 per cent of children who attend state schools as she defended the imposition of VAT on private school fees (a decision of which Blair is said to disapprove).
What else lies behind this turn towards class? In part it reflects a grim policy reality: though New Labour lifted half a million children out of poverty and dramatically improved public services, class differences endured and in some areas even hardened (not least housing).
It also reflects a transformed electoral landscape: Blair’s project was shaped by winning over middle-class voters in the south of England; Starmer has had to be far more attentive to the working-class voters who abandoned Labour in the “Red Wall” and Scotland (and who, as Morgan McSweeney understands, began to drift away during Blair’s third term).
Can class help Labour tell the story that so many feel this government still lacks? It can – and should – correct the perception that this cabinet merely represents “more of the same”.
As I note in my column in this week’s magazine, the relationship between the government and the trade unions, to take one example, has been transformed (when he became Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds found that his department lacked even the phone numbers of some general secretaries).
Confronted by Nigel Farage – a Dulwich College-educated stockbroker – plenty in Labour draw heart from the return of class politics. But while the government needs a compelling story, its fate may ultimately hinge on delivery. If voters don’t feel better off by the next election, then Labour’s invocations of class will fall just as flat as its “toff” attacks on David Cameron and Boris Johnson did.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Britain’s billionaire tax problem]
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