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Labour in the Wilderness: The Party Must Reclaim Its Working-Class Roots

Thomas G Clark argues that Labour’s branding focus on winning back the ‘Red Wall’ shows how lost it is

Labour Leader Keir Starmer. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Archive/PA Images

Labour in the WildernessThe Party Must Reclaim Its Working-Class Roots

Thomas G Clark argues that Labour’s branding focus on winning back the ‘Red Wall’ shows how lost it is

Labour has slipped behind in the polls. Whereas the party has roughly rivalled Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in recent months, it has regressed precipitously and its deficit is now in the double-digits.

At the start of last month, it was reported that Labour had paid a private advertising agency for strategic advice on winning back the so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats – formerly staunch Labour constituencies that were lost to the Conservatives in the 2019 General Election.

This private, London-based marketing agency came back with a presentation saying that voters don’t know what Labour stands for anymore, and that the party should focus on “the use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc” to “give voters a sense of authentic values alignment”.

The more I have thought about this, the worse it looks, from all kinds of angles.

One of the worst aspects is the news that Labour has sacked its community organising unit, reportedly a day after the marketing report was leaked – a contrast that epitomises its managerialist mentality. This decision makes it seem as though Labour is more interested in paying private consultants to interpret the views of voters in distant, non-London constituencies, than actually listening itself.

Call me simple-minded, but surely the way to win back working-class northerners is to construct and sell policies aimed at materially improving working-class lives and communities.

The problem is, over the decades, the Labour Party has been hollowed-out from within. Almost all of the crucial positions, including a number of the once-safe Red Wall parliamentary seats, have been handed to well-off, establishment, political placeholders – many of them hand-picked from the party’s internal bureaucracy and parachuted into working-class communities they previously had absolutely no connection with.

The current Parliamentary Labour Party is arguably an incarnation of an Oxford University seminar, rather than a forum for the working-class.

If Labour is serious about winning back the Red Wall, it should insist on all-local shortlists for candidates and prioritise prospective politicians with at least a decade of practical, real-world experience over people who have spent that time making their way up the Labour ladder.

Instead, however, the party seems now to be focused solely on its branding – superficial presentation – and notions that voters can be won back to the cause simply through flag-waving, patriotic rhetoric and by Keir Starmer looking smart in a suit.

Such proposals reek of elitism and come across as a smug and economically-comfortable – a middle-class capitalist’s conception of northern working-class people.

They also betray a classist worldview in which ordinary people are just too irredeemably simple to understand policy proposals and too disengaged from politics to ever expect to see and hear just a few people like them represented in the ranks of the Labour Party.

It is based on a conception of the working class as mere lumpenproletariat, too intellectually deficient to actively engage in politics and who need to be tricked into supporting a political party.


Offering Substance

I am proud of my northern working-class roots and I am profoundly offended by this interpretation of what me, and people like me, would be impressed by.

I don’t want the Labour Party to steal the clothes and rhetoric of the Conservatives or UKIP. I don’t want flag-waving and fatherlandism. I don’t want the party to pay middle-class, London-based consultants to tell the leadership what they think working-class people in the north are crying out for.

I want it to listen directly to me and to people like me, and tell me – in clear and understandable terms – how it is going to materially improve my life and the lives of people in the communities I have lived in. And I want to see the Labour Party elevate people from ordinary working backgrounds into the corridors of power, so that they can represent the interests of workers and local communities in a system that is almost completely monopolised by people who are comfortably well-off, or even richer.

What I would like to see is substance – policy, representation, community engagement, respect – not superficial presentation trickery aimed at conning the working-class into returning.

To this end, the Labour Party should significantly expand its community outreach team – rather than getting rid of it – so that there is a community engagement officer and a tailored community engagement plan in every Labour seat and target constituency. A social media strategy based on a simple question – “How can Labour help you?” – could also work, inviting people from local communities to connect with the party and explain what they want and potentially get involved.

It is hard not to conclude that the Labour Party is lost. The people running it should, instinctively, know about the interests and the priorities of the working-class. It is what the fundamental, foundational purpose of the organisation is supposed to be.

Thomas G Clark runs the platform Another Angry Voice


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