“A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me” John Lennon, 1975
It’s odd to think a song written fifty years ago is in essence the Labour deputy leadership pitch of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.
Add in that she is a woman, and much of the Labour narrative is that the post ‘must be a woman’ – though that seems more of a vibe than an actual rule – and that’s she’s from the North East and has emerged from a very humble and deprived background. And that is pretty much the skillset she offered as her pitch for the job.
Now put aside that she is indeed a working class success story, against the odds, that she’s bright, articulate and determined -and that’s still true even if you disagree with her, and I do – arguably this is a young, successful politician who actually has things she can justifiably brag about.
The key bit however was still “I’m working class”, like it is a special dust and inheritance that so obviously makes her ideal for the job.
When did we adopt this sanctification of working class credentials?
It’s illogical and in terms of aspiration, equality, and meritocracy, it as absurd as thinking the daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper or the Viscountess Astor, are somehow better people as a result of their background. Backstory, I grant can be a powerful political narrative, but class? I thought we were all pretty keen to make that a thing of the past. I certainly am. I’ve been branded ‘posh’ for years, and I went to Cambridge, Phillipson to Oxford. My parents were not wealthy, I’m the son of a vicar. I have no idea what my ‘class’ was or is, nor do I much care.
The odd thing is, there’s a lot you can admire in Phillipson’s diligent rise from humble background to a high ranking position in government much as the woman she seeks to replace was seen by some as the apex of working class heroines, Angela Rayner.
The Manchester Evening News, even went so far as to suggest the ‘real’ reason Rayner was brought down. Apparently, it was not for underpaying stamp duty by £40,000 on a new house whilst being Housing Minister and advocating higher property taxes. Nor was it for claiming she’d been given the wrong advice, when actually she’d been told to seek advice, but didn’t.
It was an establishment ‘plot’ to topple her because she was “working class”. It sounds like the 1960’s plot of “I’m all right Jack”
The odd thing is, I can find you quite a number of Tories who liked Rayner far more than the anaemic lawyerly character of Starmer, precisely because they see her as a robustly down to earth working class character.
I think the idea ‘the establishment’ – a word that can mean whoever you need it to mean these days – found her ‘working classness’ so offensive it had to be removed, is hysterical nonsense. It’s an excuse presented with little supporting evidence, bar some albeit nasty tweets, the word of Labour MPs or Rayner herself.
People worked for her removal because she broke the rules she endlessly insisted others had avoided in the past. ‘One rule for them, and one for the rest of us’, was her personal opposition slogan. And far from being a disadvantage, she saw her working class roots as supporting the blossoming of her political career.
And here lies a wider problem.
Over the last three years the number of people who self-identify as working class in the UK has risen from 48 per cent to 52 per cent. The issue with such figures is that they will include people who don’t work, or no longer work, some Tories, and people who are not themselves working class but came from a working class background. As a societal marker it is wildly vague, and not that instructive.
Even so it seems Lennon was on to something, as it being seen as ‘something to be’.
This ‘added value’ of being working class seems to me to be at the heart of Labour’s mantra of being ‘in the service of working people’. They mean working class people, a group like ‘the establishment’ they can and have fashioned to mean whoever they want it to mean, at any given time. It might sound good to some, but what it’s never meant is ‘all people who work’.
Lucy Powell, is another northern woman with working class credentials who wants to beat Phillipson to the post of deputy leader and may do so not least because Phillipson is apparently the preferred choice of Sir Keir Starmer, that son of a tool maker, now Prime Minister. By his support, what he may have built her is an internal establishment electoral barrier to her success.
Bell Ribiero-Addy, will be fighting the cause for that socialist trend of the party who’d love Starmer stuck with the very people he tried so hard to remove, but can’t if the Labour movement votes her in. She was once chief of staff to Diane Abbott. The many ‘workers’ will be firmly on her agenda, the ‘few’ will be in her sights. The few being anyone who isn’t working class.
Kim Leadbeater, and Alison McGovern frankly will merely narrow the votes available to the others, and with a threshold of 80, that’s important.
The irony is the person with the potential to upset all their plans is Emily Thornberry, the only person who had to step aside from a political role because a tweet of hers, about flags, was seen as snobbish sneering at the working class!
Both Thornberry and Powell have an axe to grind with Starmer and privately he won’t want them in the role. Who the Tories might be most concerned about is tricky to judge but I do know they have a regularly updated dossier on Thornberry that awaits deployment if needed.
Whoever wins, and whatever opposition parties make of it, as champions of equality, let it be because they display a skillset and arguments, and principles that Labour think they want, not some race for who can display more some inverted atavistic badge of social standing.
Aspiration, hard work, personal responsibility and an entrepreneurial spirit and economic environment, are all values the Conservative party should, and mainly do now, promote. These values offer opportunity for all, whoever you are.
None of it need be encumbered by some bizarre political version of the famous sketch where successful Yorkshire older men, try to outdo each other with who had the hardest start in life.
As it famously ends “you tell the young people of today, and they won’t believe you”
They’d be quite right not to. Show not tell. Do don’t say. The past is not always the best source from which to build the future.
We neither need, nor should want, ‘class’ to come into it.
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