I have a long-standing comrade, a former miner who fought in their yearlong strike. Always a union guy, he voted Labour all his life, as did his whole family. He is unlikely to vote Labour again.
“My Dad would be turning in his grave if he knew that I might not vote Labour,” he told me. “But let me tell you this. I didn’t leave Labour. Labour left us.” Sadly, this sentiment is now commonplace.
I represent a constituency in the “Red Wall,” similar to the Rust Belt in America. Our areas voted Labour for a century. But many started voting Conservative in recent times. Many more stopped voting altogether. And more recently, some are turning to the right-wing Reform UK party.
This is a familiar pattern in many liberal democracies. Workers have moved away from center-left parties elsewhere as they have from the Labour Party in the UK. It’s true that voting patterns have changed, and not only in Britain. It’s said that this has happened because workers’ cultural attitudes have shifted to the right and away from the social democrats. But the truth is that the decoupling of social class and left-wing voting has been the consequence of decisions made by successive center-left political leaders who have failed to deliver for working-class communities.
As Bernie Sanders wryly commented after the US presidential election last year, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
The key to understanding the phenomenon lies in an analysis of the material conditions of life experienced by so many middle- and lower-income earners in the West. Too often the historic workers’ parties instead saw themselves transformed into…
Auteur: Jon Trickett
