
It’s easy to be caught up in the granular detail of our 24/7 news cycle, forgetting this viral put-down or that Prime Minister’s Questions will not change the course of British politics forever. We can obsess over how votes changed since 2019, comparing one election to another, but in doing so we miss out on the long(er)-term trends; zooming out and asking big questions is necessary from time to time.
And so, in spirit of the idea, here is a big question: is Labour still a working-class party?
This will be an imperfect exercise, given how many competing definitions of “working class” there are. Who counts? Anyone who identifies as working class? That would mean 56 per cent of us qualify, including more than half of the Labour vote (though Reform’s voters are more likely to think of themselves as working class. See below.
If it is a simple case of self-identifying then job done. Article over! But what about better identifiers: background, income, housing status?
Recently I’ve been looking into the long-term trends of council house voters. Labour’s support among those in social and council housing in 2024 was unusually low (especially given it was a so-called “change election”): last year just 43 per cent of those living in a council home voted Labour; 20 per cent voted Reform and 12 per cent voted Conservative. Compare this to 1997, another change election: 64 per cent of council housing households voted for New Labour, 15 per cent went Conservative. Note, too, how Labour’s 2024 performance is worse than in 2010, when the party crashed out of office with 29 per cent of the vote.
The 21-point drop from 1997 can be partially explained by the nine-point difference in the Labour vote between 1997 and 2024. But this fact remains true: Labour is performing comparatively worse among the council and social housing electorate than it used to.
Tales of council estates written off by Labour activists as “always on side” come to mind. In the 2014 Heywood and Middleton by-election, Labour clung on to the seat by only a few hundred votes. Ukip activists reported they were first to go knocking on several estates in the constituency in over a decade.
Does all of this disqualify Labour from being a party of the working class? By the housing metric, Labour’s claim to the identity is fairly flimsy. But just 16 per cent of Britons are in social or council housing right now (compared to 22 per cent in 1997). It may be an outdated or less relevant qualifier than it was in the past. Instead, we should consider the idea that “working class” today doesn’t mean what it used to. The traditional indicators for the struggling members of society have transformed, in part because there is a reduced supply of things like council housing, but also because we are living and earning differently. Take a look at the other demographics.
The biggest swings to Labour when compared with previous change elections came from those renting privately and those currently paying off a mortgage. Whereas in 1997 43 per cent of mortgage holders went Labour, in 2024 that number was 38 per cent. Considering the national difference in the Labour vote between those two elections is nine points, this five-point gap actually indicates overperformance in 2024. Mortgage holders are less Conservative than they have ever been. And it’s here where the Tories lost the most – it’s among these newly bought semi-detached communities, these newbuild housing estates, where the swing away from the Conservative government was the greatest. This reflects a simple fact: these are the newly struggling.
Does Labour speak for the struggling more than the not-so struggling? Yes. Obviously. But in some cases, whether on council estates or within the housing association, those long-lasting Labour bonds are fraying, weakened by the arrogance of party activists. Labour remains a party for the struggling in Britain for now. But it isn’t guaranteed to last.
[See more: Keir Starmer can’t escape the European question]