ABSTRACT
To say that the Labour Party represents the interests of the manual working class would seem to state the obvious, yet the issue of whom Labour stands for is one of the most hotly contested issues of British politics. The discussion presented in this chapter is framed by current debates about the complex and difficult relationship between the Labour Party and working-class voters. In the face of Labour’s recent spate of election defeats, there have been repeated claims that the working class has turned away from the Party for good, as well as parallel claims that Labour has become a middle-class party, thus losing its primary raison d’être. This narrative of the betrayal of the working class has reached paroxystic levels with the Brexit referendum vote – widely interpreted as a desperate cry by the ‘left behinds’ of globalisation – in which 149 of Labour’s 232 constituencies voted Leave, ‘in defiance of the party’s wishes and at odds with the overwhelming majority of Labour’s mainly professional membership’. 1 Thus Theresa May, upon a campaigning visit to the north-east of England, claimed on 12 May 2017 that Jeremy Corbyn had ‘deserted’ the ‘proud and patriotic working-class people in towns and cities across Britain’, a statement echoed by then UKIP leader Paul Nuttall who repeatedly asserted his party’s ambition to supplant Labour as the natural home for the working class. Despite Corbyn’s Labour faring better than anticipated, experts and academics made similar assessments following the June 2017 snap election, with John Curtice stating that ‘the days when Labour was a party of the working class are long since over’ 2 and Robert Ford pointing out that the 2017 general election results had demonstrated that ‘Britain’s class politics has been turned completely upside down’. 3
