“Labour has also taken over as the party of the better off — people with university degrees, middle-class lifestyles and stable employment. In a poll by the British Election Survey last year, the ratio of Labour’s vote share among the richest voters (earning more than £70,000, or $93,000) to the poorest voters (earning less than £30,000) was larger than any other major party. All its talk about the working class and “miner’s lamps” is tribal hooey. If you want to meet real working-class people today (and most of them aren’t interested in politics) you are much better off going to a Reform UK gathering.
Rather than speaking for the marginalized — economically or otherwise — Labour has become the guardian of the status quo. It’s now the party of public-sector professionals, NGO functionaries, tenured academics, local-government employees, teachers, doctors and bat inspectors. Its voters and activists are more likely than those in other parties to enjoy stable incomes (and index-linked pensions), courtesy of the taxpayer. And they are more likely to brandish their university degrees as proof of their moral worth, just as old-fashioned Tories might have wielded their coats of arms.
Gascoyne-Cecil once said that `hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essence of Conservatism.’ That could just as easily describe the current Labour Party’s attitude toward any novel ideas that challenge its core base, the public sector.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($)
He’s making the point that Labour is now the main “establishment” party. My main reservation about his thesis, which is pungently expressed, is that the LP only secured 34 per cent of the popular vote in the “loveless landslide” of 2024, so the complacency that might seem to come out of Labour could be less entrenched than in the late 19th Century Tory Party of Lord Salisbury’s time.
Wooldridge makes a few errors in his article, however. This sentence jars: “Hence the recurrence of the same family names in the party’s annals (Peel, Salisbury, Chamberlain), and hence the ruthlessness with which its operatives dispatched ailing prime ministers.” As far as I know, while Robert Peel’s father was an MP, the Peels were not a great dynasty. Apart from that sort of detail, though, it is a good read. What he is describing is how a party once defined by standing up for the “working man” has become very different. To an extent, it resembles how a scrappy Silicon Valley start-up ends up as a clunky behemoth and ends up, eventually, being taken apart by private equity buyout folk, or just goes into slow decline.
I don’t think that undermines his claim that Labour is the Establishment party. As per Gawain Towler’s recent article, the power of the Establishment lies in quangos, legal chambers and state sinecures, not just the inhabitants of the Commons and those who vote for them. Tony Blair’s greatest achievement was remodelling the British Establishment into its present globalist, leftist configuration. Even more remarkably, he also managed to do this to the Conservative Party.
I don’t think that undermines his claim that Labour is the Establishment party. As per Gawain Towler’s recent article, the power of the Establishment lies in quangos, legal chambers and state sinecures, not just the inhabitants of the Commons and those who vote for them. Tony Blair’s greatest achievement was remodelling the British Establishment into its present globalist, leftist configuration.
I think that is partly true – and Wooldridge does not really talk about the Blairite settlement, if we can call it that – but 34 per cent of the vote on a low turnout is pretty shallow, and it is brittle. A year ago, Reform was cresting at 30-plus per cent and there was a real likelihood of Farage & Co in Downing Street. Things have changed since the knifing of Starmer and Farage’s own issues over his finances, plus a bit more vigour from the Tories, particularly Badenoch.
I think today’s Labour movement has a very “defensive” mindset. It wants to protect “its people” (public sector employees, the Quangocracy, bits of the private sector dependent on State contracts, corporate HR types, students, and of course all those who live off the taxpayer via welfare) (The military, while in the public sector, are probably the exception, as well as some ordinary police. So Labour will, as Wooldridge say, spend a lot of time trying to restrict competition in all its forms: weakening independent education, reversing Tory reforms to give parents more say over their children’s education, encouraging welfare dependency, renationalisation of certain industries, and trying to entrench more EU laws that restrict upstart competition from outside Europe. This is all about “battening down the hatches”. Some of the people who want to do all these things might still be idealists about socialism, some are simply looking for a secure, quiet life. They use bogeyman terms such as “neo-liberalism” to describe everything they hate and fear (with good reason): the “creative destruction” of capitalism, open trade, limited government, free, often noisy media and exchange of ideas, meritocracy in the broadest sense, liberal patriotism, and voluntarism, philanthropy and so on.