Worlds apart
Britain's political divides are often framed as culture wars, but class remains the key to understanding them, argues Jeremy Gilbert
The Gorton and Denton by election will be remembered as a historic turning point for both Britain and the Labour party: the moment when Labour in England first faced a serious challenger to its left. One thing that made the occasion so resonant was the symbolically divided nature of the constituency. On one side, Gorton, a multicultural Manchester suburb with a large population of students and young graduates; on the other, Denton, a declining mill town with an ageing, mostly white, largely non-graduate citizenry. It’s perhaps little surprise, then, that despite Hannah Spencer’s victory, Denton elected a swathe of councillors from the far-right Reform UK just two months later.
The fact that this is unsurprising is itself worth reflecting on. All over Europe, North America, and even Australasia, the association of the far-right with post-industrial communities outside of big cities and with small ethnic minority populations has become a cliché. If anything, the UK has remained an outlier in this regard: even at the 2024 general election, Reform were weaker in traditional Labour strongholds than on the coasts.
What is ‘class’?
The differences between such communities are often described with reference to some idea of ‘class’. But what exactly does this mean? Low-paid graduates working in the public sector, often paying exorbitant rents to private landlords, are routinely referred to as ‘middle class’. Yet retired homeowners living relatively comfortably, and completely securely, on stock-market linked pensions are described as ‘working class’ because they once had a manual trade – even though they haven’t depended on wages for years.
Arguably, when most people think about class – if they think about it at all – they do so with reference to a complex, rather muddled combination of economic, cultural and social factors. In so far as there is any coherent definition of what class is or how it works, it is probably still the case that, amongst non-academics, the most widely understood account is some version of the ideas of Marx and Engels, according to which social class in capitalist society depends on whether one has to work fora living or can derive enough income from profits, interest and rent. Of course, Marx and Engels’ thinking on class is actually much more sophisticated than that, and they never tried to formulate a single consistent definition of the concept. In fact, their conception of class was arguably not so different from that of many of their Victorian peers, who often understood society as divided into competing sets of ‘interests’: ‘the landed interest’, ‘the commercial interest’, industry, and labour.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to conceptualise class in a modern society. Political scientists and journalists still routinely rely on a definition of class loosely based on the ideas of the early 20th-century social theorist Max Weber, filtered through a set of expectations and assumptions that were largely formulated in the 1950s and 1960s – an era when university graduates were scarce and their careers assumed to be supremely secure, when housing was affordable for almost everyone with a regular income, and when social status was assumed to be clearly tied to a universally-understood occupational hierarchy. This is the origin of the famous ‘A, B, C1, C2, D, E’ ‘social grade classification system’. When I was a young Labour activist in the early 90s, it was still widely believed among Labour ‘moderates’ that old fashioned ideas like ‘capitalism’ and ‘the ruling class’ were giving way to a world in which it was middle-managers who held real power: another idea inherited from the 1960s, having been popularised by Anthony Crosland.
The realities of capitalism
Few of these assumptions seem to obtain today. A university professor in the 2020s can enjoy as little job security as a junior office-worker (I should know…), and for much of the population, media celebrity seems to have more value than any traditional idea of social, economic or professional status. In the ‘asset economy’, inheritance is more likely to determine your future than success at school or work. Corporate managers, and even prime ministers, seem to be the servants of the financial markets.
In the late 20th century, social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu developed sophisticated models to explain how different sources of status and power interacted and mapped onto each other in complex ways: from actual wealth and economic resources to ‘cultural capital’ derived from education, learning, style and aesthetic expertise. And as the century drew to a close, some sociologists grew sceptical that ‘class’ was still a useful way to think about social inequality at all. Others developed increasingly sophisticated ways of segmenting the population into multiple niche groups defined by shared careers, cultures, and localities (see, for example the BBC’s Great British Class Project). Today, however, in a world where the arts are more dominated by privately-educated people than they were in the 1940s, and where a PhD contributes less to lifetime earnings than a few bitcoins, it looks to many observers as if it is Marx’s understanding of class that has stood the test of time: it’s ultimately access to resources that determines what your life is like, how much power you have, and how much other people listen to you.
The attractions of such a model to progressives become obvious if we compare it to the way in which commentators on the right are trying to conceptualise the relationship between economies, culture and politics. In his 2023 book Values, Voice and Virtue, Matt Goodwin, then an academic and later Reform UK’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, set out how he believed Britain’s culture and politics had changed since the 1970s. What is striking about Goodwin’s account is that he effectively puts forward a model of class where access to assets and material resources play no role whatsoever in determining who has power and status. In Goodwin’s world, a cosmopolitan cultural elite – including, it would seem, everyone from a primary school teaching assistant with a degree to the director general of the BBC – lords it over a benighted ‘people’. The latter category seems to include anyone who dislikes foreigners, however large their house or investment portfolio may be. For Goodwin, class has seemingly nothing to do with economics; it is entirely a question of the differing ‘values’ held by a liberal elite and the oppressed masses of Brexit Britain.
The healing power of class struggle
That this odd way of conceptualising class has become central to the politics of right-wing populism should both interest us and worry us. Many in Labour’s ‘moderate’ and ‘soft left’ traditions have often preferred to avoid such divisive thinking at all, instead appealing to some idea of shared ‘values’ as the basis for a political programme and ignoring ideas of class altogether. But in a world of Gortons and Dentons, it should be obvious why this approach will be inadequate. The cultural differences between such communities are real and difficult to bridge, and their ‘values’ are not necessarily reconcilable because of the very different ways in which they experience and think about the lived realities of economic inequality. Where those communities might be reconcilable is precisely at the level of their shared economic, material interests: as workers (‘by hand or by brain’, as the original Clause 4 of the Labour party constitution put it), as public-services users, and as citizens who have been disempowered by 50 years of concentrating corporate power.
There is no question that the lived reality of class, and its various political implications, are complex, multidimensional and multi-faceted. If we really want to understand class, then we must draw on multiple intellectual traditions. But in a situation like our present one, it is worth keeping in mind the simple explanatory and rhetorical power of the arguments that animated the earliest socialists: without confronting the power of capital, there can be no equality and no democracy; and it is in the process of such confrontation that ‘class consciousness’ can overcome cultural differences. If Labour wants to begin healing some of the divisions scarring our society, then it may have to take a more confrontational attitude towards their causes.
In recent decades, Labour leaders (including Corbyn) have been understandably coy about naming corporations, the city and institutions such as the developer lobby as enemies. But much of the emotional power of Goodwin’s brand of populism comes from channelling people’s genuine sense of disempowerment towards harmless and inappropriate targets: ‘woke culture’, young people, immigrants. Labour might find that the only way to be at this brand of populism is by naming some enemies of its own, and doing so explicitly in the language of class.
