Mythic Nostalgia and Unconscious Middle-Class Guilt Is Driving Labour onto a Dangerous Path

Keir Starmer’s embrace of a ‘Blue Labour’ strategy to serve the ‘real’ working-class and fight off Reform UK perilously ignores how society has fundamentally changed, writes Chris Grey

Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney has led the Government’s ‘Blue Labour’ strategy. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press

The dynamics of party politics in Westminster are increasingly dominated by ‘Labour versus Reform UK’, a contest which looks likely to frame the next election.

Nigel Farage claims his party to be the true representative of the working-class, and says he is ‘coming for’ Labour. Keir Starmer has declared Reform to be his Government’s main challenger, and seems to see appealing to ‘Red Wall’ voters with the socially conservative agenda of ‘Blue Labour’ as the means to defeat it.

As an electoral strategy, this rests upon juggling different voter segments in different kinds of seats within the vagaries of the UK’s ‘first past the post’ electoral system. Depending on how data is interpreted, and assumptions about voter behaviour, it is possible to make a case both for and against the viability of this strategy.

But beneath the psephology lies a different issue, less amenable to statistical analysis, which goes deep into the political psychology of the Labour Party: Farage has forced into the open longstanding questions about the identity of Labour as the party of the working-class and about what ‘working-class’ actually means.

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