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The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes
Recent events such as the Brexit vote and the 2017 general election result highlight the erosion of traditional class identities and the decoupling of class from political identity. The majority of people in the UK still identify as working class, yet no political party today can confidently articulate their interests. So who is now working class and how do political parties gain their support? Based on the opinions and voices of lower and middle income voters, this insightful book proposes what needs to be done to address the issues of the 'new working class'. Outlining the composition, values, and attitudes of the new working class, it provides practical recommendations for political parties to reconnect with the electorate and regain trust.
210 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 2, 2018
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February 20, 2020
The apparent end of a role for the working class in matters concerning the governance of the countries of post-industrial capitalism is a grave concern for the social policy communities that place a high value on equality and social justice. This grouping has begun to swell in recent times as the understanding that the sluggish growth rates which are now endemic across the so-called 'mature' nations are responsible for the entrenchment of austerity and the impoverishment of the public sector. Despite all the evidence that the system is creaking at the seams the rich continue to get richer at an alarming rate, mainly by way of the financial innovations which have allowed them to manipulate economic development to provide ever more ways to inflate asset values and increase income from rents.
Meanwhile what passes for democratic life veers in the direction of a populism which emanates from elite interests dictating the terms of the political agenda and determining the legitimacy of who is permitted to have a say. What seems to be an enhanced role for working class people in politics, measured by the fascination with the defection from the old loyalties to some form of social democracy as represented by poor people voting for Trump or the crumbling 'red wall' in northern England, is actually quite bogus. Playing a role on the politics of modern-day capitalist societies is strictly limited to waving a flag and going yaw-ya-yaw at some Johnsonian or Trumpian rally or another.
Has anyone got any ideas as to how the working class can be snapped out of it and brought back to an engagement in democratic politics which might get the progressive bandwagon rolling again? Claire Ainsley has, but unfortunately none of them are new. This is a book firmly in the Fabian tradition of social democratic politics which assumes that support for the centre-left is glued together, essentially, by sensible, centre-left policies. If only things were that simple.
We can agree that the very definition of ‘working class’ in the modern world is fraught with difficulty. Marxists have made the relationship of social groups to what they call the means of production the central issue, with the proletariat emerging in this scheme from a segment of society which has no means of sustaining itself other than through the sale of their labour power to the folk with the wherewithal to provide them with a wage. There’s plenty of scope for sub-divisions of this class in this analysis, with workers engagement in manufacturing industrial goods which expand productive capacity being contrasted with those engaged in making goods for direct consumption, facilitating the circulation of capital, and the provision of direct services. Discussion around these themes is concerned with determining the nature of the class power that potentially resides in the proletariat, and on the basis of that understanding, formulating strategies to allow it to be realised.
The Fabian tradition started from another premise. This is essentially about the abject, miserable condition of a section of the working population and the role that progressively minded, middle class people might play in raising them to a higher standard of life. Some notion of power is present in this outlook, revolving around that numerical size of this group and the role it might play in determining the outcome of elections. A revived interest in the predicament of the working class in the policy community has come about in recent years because of all the evidence that points to the fact that the group that has decidedly lost out from all the changes of the last forty years – collectively known as the turn towards neoliberalism – is large and in the range of 40 per cent of the population in a country like the UK. Yet these are the people who as recently as a decade ago were discounted as a political force, not by right wing ideologues who have always been dismissive of all talk of class tension and class struggle, but by the ‘third way’ generation of social democratic politicians. So, what do the heirs of this tradition make of class, now that they have been obliged to return to the subject?
Well, it’s complicated. Getting a handle on the subject requires a well-organised social survey but fortunately one is at hand in the Great British Class Survey which came out of academic sociology in 2017. This offered up a picture of class today in which five strata lie between the extremes of the ‘elite’ and the ‘precariat’. These are made up of an established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, and emergent service workers. As Ainsley herself says the boundaries between these groups are blurred. Just why an electrician, for example, should figure as a new affluent worker but a carpenter only makes it into the precariat isn’t entirely clear on first blush. More confusing is the fact that care workers figure as typical occupations in all three traditional working class, emergent service worker and precariat categories. What is it that really decides what slot in the system you are at?
The answer has less to do with occupations per se that decides this issue, but the amount of economic, social and cultural capital you command. It turns out that the electrician has a more exalted status because she is held to have moderately good economic capital, though relatively poor status social contacts, (even if they are highly varied), and moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital. The carpenter on the other hand has to scrape by with poor economic capital and the lowest scores across social and cultural capital. But if these are the factors that really account, can we presume that an experienced carpenter doing high end work in fitting out luxury apartments can switch class with the electrician engaged on a zero-hour contract with an insurance company to do repair work on domestic appliances? If so, this is a remarkably fluid class structure, with the boundaries between one segment and the next being constantly traversed.
What about the new working class? According to Ainsley this is an amalgam of the traditional working class, emergent service workers, and the precariat. What they are held to have in common is a “similarity of economic and financial experience compared to those who are better off.” That at least explains why so-called new affluent workers are not considered part of the working class – i.e. because they have got more money and, potentially, all that brings with it. To be part of the new working class you have to be on the skids and heading in a downward direction, and your poverty of social contacts and culture isn’t going to help you neither.
Ainsley has other things to say about the new working class. She reckons they are more disparate, atomised and operate with multiple social identities, making the formation of a collective social identity less possible, (except of course for social scientist who can weld a collective identity out of these fragments). The traditional working class is deemed to be older, with an average age of 66, and less likely to be from an ethnic minority background. Emergent service sector workers have an average age of 32, are more likely to be better educated, and around one-fifth is of BME background. The precariat is made up of both the young and old, the well- and less well educated, and every ethnic minority under the sun. What really shows them up is the fact they are very, very poor.
How much weight should be given to the diversity component as a reason why this new working class is not able to sustain any sort of collective identity? There never has been a time when the working class existed a uniform, monolithic bloc spontaneously manifesting solidarity as its fundamental stance in society. It has always existed in fragments which were often in conflict over the distribution of the crumbs from capitalism’s dining table. The reason why this was overcome, as E.P. Thompson explained in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, was that narratives became available to literate workers in the turbulent years of the rise of capitalism which facilitated an understand of where there stood as labourers in relation to society as a whole. Methodism, the radicalism of the corresponding societies, Chartism, socialism in its various forms, all converged on a message which made revelations about the existence of exploitation and social injustice the great themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Acting on this understanding led to solidarity, institutionalised in the rise of the trade unions, cooperativism, and, eventually, the Labour Party.
The history of this process is marked less by the role that policy advocacy made in binding together the fragments of the working class than the occurrence of points of crisis which had the effect of reinforcing the new identity that wage earners had begun to elaborate that they were part of a working class that was vulnerable to being exploited by capitalism. Hobsbawm’s forward march of labour across these centuries was not a story of steady advance marked by the accumulation of progressive reforms. It was rather a time of lurches forward gained through a victory in struggle but then abruptly arrested as the bourgeoisie regrouped and checked further movement. Years would pass as tensions built up and new conflicts were generated to the point that a fresh crisis hit the system. If these led to a fresh period of progress it was because the underpinning narrative which sustained the consciousness of class and its grievances which sealed the commitment of wage earners to collectivism and solidarity.
The victory of the right which led to the ascendency of neoliberalism came about because traditional trade unionism and social democracy lost the ideological resources that sustained the challenge which the working class movement had presented to capitalism. The prosperity of the post-war period, ironically achieved because welfare and corporate state limits had been placed on corporate capitalism, created the material conditions for a shift in thinking about the reasons why these good things had come about. The consumerist spread of the idea of choice encouraged some people to think that their better circumstances had come about primarily because of the sensible decisions individuals had made about what was best for themselves and their families. Meanwhile social democracy took its revisionist turn and began to proclaim the end of a capitalist system founded on laisser-faire and the maximisation of profit, arguing instead that the corporations were now partners of the state and shared its interest in planning for a better future. The consequence of this was that, as the system moved back into crisis during the ‘sixties, the labour movement was deeply divided as to what course should be taken to protect the interests of workers. Was the restoration of the competitiveness of British industry in world markets to be achieved through a programme of state-led investment, or the devaluation of the currency? Harold Wilson’s choice of the latter revealed the extent of the ideological befuddlement that now gripped the labour movement and handed the initiative to the resurgent capitalist currents eventually resolved themselves into the Thatcher-Reagan melange in the ‘eighties.
Yet despite this, as Ainsley reminds us, the idea of being working class in Britain has not died. A majority of the British public still identifies as working class. With 60 per cent of people opting for this self-identification it seems that the moral values that motivated generations of working class people still assert influence today. Many of these people have the levels of educational and cultural capital that ought to raise them to middle class status and the persistence of working class identity can be seen as an attempt not to be stigmatised by the parasitic dependence on accrued assets and rent-seeking economic activity which many see as the hallmark of the more elevated classes. Or it might also be the case that behind the façade of professional status in the modern world there are anxieties and frustrations and a sense of being put upon in the workplace that can feel a lot like exploitation. Have this conversation with any university professor or NHS doctor you know and see if they agree that this might be the case.
Working class identity lurks in the background and grievances continue to exist which sustain the idea that working life is still a story of exploitation and alienation. Furthermore, the whole system continues to bump its way towards yet more episodes of crisis and disjuncture. With levels of personal debt much the same as they were prior to the 2008 meltdown, a new shock to the security of affluent worker occupations anticipated from the next wave of digitised artificial intelligence, and the really big challenge from climate change on the horizon, the progressive left might be better of organising its strategies around the anticipation of these ominously looming prospects and making sure that its labour movement will be fit for that purpose, Without more encouragement to move working class politics in that direction Ainsley’s list of policy ideas is bound to look more than a little pallid.
Meanwhile what passes for democratic life veers in the direction of a populism which emanates from elite interests dictating the terms of the political agenda and determining the legitimacy of who is permitted to have a say. What seems to be an enhanced role for working class people in politics, measured by the fascination with the defection from the old loyalties to some form of social democracy as represented by poor people voting for Trump or the crumbling 'red wall' in northern England, is actually quite bogus. Playing a role on the politics of modern-day capitalist societies is strictly limited to waving a flag and going yaw-ya-yaw at some Johnsonian or Trumpian rally or another.
Has anyone got any ideas as to how the working class can be snapped out of it and brought back to an engagement in democratic politics which might get the progressive bandwagon rolling again? Claire Ainsley has, but unfortunately none of them are new. This is a book firmly in the Fabian tradition of social democratic politics which assumes that support for the centre-left is glued together, essentially, by sensible, centre-left policies. If only things were that simple.
We can agree that the very definition of ‘working class’ in the modern world is fraught with difficulty. Marxists have made the relationship of social groups to what they call the means of production the central issue, with the proletariat emerging in this scheme from a segment of society which has no means of sustaining itself other than through the sale of their labour power to the folk with the wherewithal to provide them with a wage. There’s plenty of scope for sub-divisions of this class in this analysis, with workers engagement in manufacturing industrial goods which expand productive capacity being contrasted with those engaged in making goods for direct consumption, facilitating the circulation of capital, and the provision of direct services. Discussion around these themes is concerned with determining the nature of the class power that potentially resides in the proletariat, and on the basis of that understanding, formulating strategies to allow it to be realised.
The Fabian tradition started from another premise. This is essentially about the abject, miserable condition of a section of the working population and the role that progressively minded, middle class people might play in raising them to a higher standard of life. Some notion of power is present in this outlook, revolving around that numerical size of this group and the role it might play in determining the outcome of elections. A revived interest in the predicament of the working class in the policy community has come about in recent years because of all the evidence that points to the fact that the group that has decidedly lost out from all the changes of the last forty years – collectively known as the turn towards neoliberalism – is large and in the range of 40 per cent of the population in a country like the UK. Yet these are the people who as recently as a decade ago were discounted as a political force, not by right wing ideologues who have always been dismissive of all talk of class tension and class struggle, but by the ‘third way’ generation of social democratic politicians. So, what do the heirs of this tradition make of class, now that they have been obliged to return to the subject?
Well, it’s complicated. Getting a handle on the subject requires a well-organised social survey but fortunately one is at hand in the Great British Class Survey which came out of academic sociology in 2017. This offered up a picture of class today in which five strata lie between the extremes of the ‘elite’ and the ‘precariat’. These are made up of an established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, and emergent service workers. As Ainsley herself says the boundaries between these groups are blurred. Just why an electrician, for example, should figure as a new affluent worker but a carpenter only makes it into the precariat isn’t entirely clear on first blush. More confusing is the fact that care workers figure as typical occupations in all three traditional working class, emergent service worker and precariat categories. What is it that really decides what slot in the system you are at?
The answer has less to do with occupations per se that decides this issue, but the amount of economic, social and cultural capital you command. It turns out that the electrician has a more exalted status because she is held to have moderately good economic capital, though relatively poor status social contacts, (even if they are highly varied), and moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital. The carpenter on the other hand has to scrape by with poor economic capital and the lowest scores across social and cultural capital. But if these are the factors that really account, can we presume that an experienced carpenter doing high end work in fitting out luxury apartments can switch class with the electrician engaged on a zero-hour contract with an insurance company to do repair work on domestic appliances? If so, this is a remarkably fluid class structure, with the boundaries between one segment and the next being constantly traversed.
What about the new working class? According to Ainsley this is an amalgam of the traditional working class, emergent service workers, and the precariat. What they are held to have in common is a “similarity of economic and financial experience compared to those who are better off.” That at least explains why so-called new affluent workers are not considered part of the working class – i.e. because they have got more money and, potentially, all that brings with it. To be part of the new working class you have to be on the skids and heading in a downward direction, and your poverty of social contacts and culture isn’t going to help you neither.
Ainsley has other things to say about the new working class. She reckons they are more disparate, atomised and operate with multiple social identities, making the formation of a collective social identity less possible, (except of course for social scientist who can weld a collective identity out of these fragments). The traditional working class is deemed to be older, with an average age of 66, and less likely to be from an ethnic minority background. Emergent service sector workers have an average age of 32, are more likely to be better educated, and around one-fifth is of BME background. The precariat is made up of both the young and old, the well- and less well educated, and every ethnic minority under the sun. What really shows them up is the fact they are very, very poor.
How much weight should be given to the diversity component as a reason why this new working class is not able to sustain any sort of collective identity? There never has been a time when the working class existed a uniform, monolithic bloc spontaneously manifesting solidarity as its fundamental stance in society. It has always existed in fragments which were often in conflict over the distribution of the crumbs from capitalism’s dining table. The reason why this was overcome, as E.P. Thompson explained in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, was that narratives became available to literate workers in the turbulent years of the rise of capitalism which facilitated an understand of where there stood as labourers in relation to society as a whole. Methodism, the radicalism of the corresponding societies, Chartism, socialism in its various forms, all converged on a message which made revelations about the existence of exploitation and social injustice the great themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Acting on this understanding led to solidarity, institutionalised in the rise of the trade unions, cooperativism, and, eventually, the Labour Party.
The history of this process is marked less by the role that policy advocacy made in binding together the fragments of the working class than the occurrence of points of crisis which had the effect of reinforcing the new identity that wage earners had begun to elaborate that they were part of a working class that was vulnerable to being exploited by capitalism. Hobsbawm’s forward march of labour across these centuries was not a story of steady advance marked by the accumulation of progressive reforms. It was rather a time of lurches forward gained through a victory in struggle but then abruptly arrested as the bourgeoisie regrouped and checked further movement. Years would pass as tensions built up and new conflicts were generated to the point that a fresh crisis hit the system. If these led to a fresh period of progress it was because the underpinning narrative which sustained the consciousness of class and its grievances which sealed the commitment of wage earners to collectivism and solidarity.
The victory of the right which led to the ascendency of neoliberalism came about because traditional trade unionism and social democracy lost the ideological resources that sustained the challenge which the working class movement had presented to capitalism. The prosperity of the post-war period, ironically achieved because welfare and corporate state limits had been placed on corporate capitalism, created the material conditions for a shift in thinking about the reasons why these good things had come about. The consumerist spread of the idea of choice encouraged some people to think that their better circumstances had come about primarily because of the sensible decisions individuals had made about what was best for themselves and their families. Meanwhile social democracy took its revisionist turn and began to proclaim the end of a capitalist system founded on laisser-faire and the maximisation of profit, arguing instead that the corporations were now partners of the state and shared its interest in planning for a better future. The consequence of this was that, as the system moved back into crisis during the ‘sixties, the labour movement was deeply divided as to what course should be taken to protect the interests of workers. Was the restoration of the competitiveness of British industry in world markets to be achieved through a programme of state-led investment, or the devaluation of the currency? Harold Wilson’s choice of the latter revealed the extent of the ideological befuddlement that now gripped the labour movement and handed the initiative to the resurgent capitalist currents eventually resolved themselves into the Thatcher-Reagan melange in the ‘eighties.
Yet despite this, as Ainsley reminds us, the idea of being working class in Britain has not died. A majority of the British public still identifies as working class. With 60 per cent of people opting for this self-identification it seems that the moral values that motivated generations of working class people still assert influence today. Many of these people have the levels of educational and cultural capital that ought to raise them to middle class status and the persistence of working class identity can be seen as an attempt not to be stigmatised by the parasitic dependence on accrued assets and rent-seeking economic activity which many see as the hallmark of the more elevated classes. Or it might also be the case that behind the façade of professional status in the modern world there are anxieties and frustrations and a sense of being put upon in the workplace that can feel a lot like exploitation. Have this conversation with any university professor or NHS doctor you know and see if they agree that this might be the case.
Working class identity lurks in the background and grievances continue to exist which sustain the idea that working life is still a story of exploitation and alienation. Furthermore, the whole system continues to bump its way towards yet more episodes of crisis and disjuncture. With levels of personal debt much the same as they were prior to the 2008 meltdown, a new shock to the security of affluent worker occupations anticipated from the next wave of digitised artificial intelligence, and the really big challenge from climate change on the horizon, the progressive left might be better of organising its strategies around the anticipation of these ominously looming prospects and making sure that its labour movement will be fit for that purpose, Without more encouragement to move working class politics in that direction Ainsley’s list of policy ideas is bound to look more than a little pallid.
January 1, 2021
Really interesting book, written well before the general election of 2019 when the issues and policy stances the book discusses arguably came to the fore. Ainsley doesn't always suggest solutions that are easy (or necessarily palatable) but particularly stimulating thinking about how policies and their communication map onto values held by the new working class.
May 8, 2018
Reading this up to and then wrapping up this book after the recent local elections makes me think this book should have been released much sooner!
A quintessential guide the changing scene we see in Politics today, Ainsley gets to the heart in this book about what politicians have to do to make Politics better and more accessible to the electorate and does it incredibly well.
I feel it's a very honest book that really is needed now post these elections and before March 2019 and I would love to see a book post-brexit from the author about how class has impacted the whole situation around Britain in Europe.
(I received an ARC from NetGalley for a honest review).
A quintessential guide the changing scene we see in Politics today, Ainsley gets to the heart in this book about what politicians have to do to make Politics better and more accessible to the electorate and does it incredibly well.
I feel it's a very honest book that really is needed now post these elections and before March 2019 and I would love to see a book post-brexit from the author about how class has impacted the whole situation around Britain in Europe.
(I received an ARC from NetGalley for a honest review).
June 21, 2020
Easy to read 200 page A5 paperback with startling information. There are people other than politicians. Clair Ainsley describes voters disappointment with the present system in a similar way to George Monbiot. As two dogs fighting over a bin lid; doing little else.
The diagrams in black and shades of grey are hard to decipher but the points are well made in the text.
My conclusion after reading the book which admirably sets the scene as at today ; is that labour supporters are fed up coming second at elections and must widen the appeal of the trundling vehicle to everyone and die hard true fans welcome all newcomers.
The diagrams in black and shades of grey are hard to decipher but the points are well made in the text.
My conclusion after reading the book which admirably sets the scene as at today ; is that labour supporters are fed up coming second at elections and must widen the appeal of the trundling vehicle to everyone and die hard true fans welcome all newcomers.
August 8, 2020
Thought this might be helpful for a module I teach on. It isn’t particularly helpful. It doesn’t say anything new about social class, but rather puts forward policy and communication directives to reach out to working class voters. Written pre-Brexit, some of this stuff the Tories have done quite successfully. Decent enough book if you don’t know much about social class and politics/policy. But it is fairly ‘centrist’ in its outlook.
December 9, 2020
5* as a guide to what Keir Starmer's policy platform might look like (Claire Ainsley is his new Exec Director of Policy), 2* as a political platform, 3* in neutral terms (i.e. putting my political opinions aside)
June 23, 2018
This is excellent, very up to date, and covers all the issues that matter to the many jams in our society. A group that is too often ignored.
July 12, 2019
We’re living in strange times, and this books helps towards defining the new social and political landscapes. Recommended.
February 20, 2021
Honest book and easy to read. We are living through some very strange times ... recommended read. Love the way Claire writes.
kindle
April 30, 2018This book should be read by every single policymaker, as it is sympathetic to the plights of the working class and offers realistic solutions to improve their situation.
January 20, 2019
This book at the new composition from the working class in this modern age compared to how it was previously viewed in the 70s to 90s. It also looks at the needs of this new working class and how they are not being fully represented by any of the main parties. It is a very useful assessment of the erosion of the previous very rigid class divisions in our society and how many people see themselves as working class even though they would not be describe as this my many of the varied definitions of this.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews