Labour’s Ladder Problem

Labour is often accused of abandoning the working class, but part of the truth is more awkward. Labour helped change the working class.

For generations, the promise was not that the miner’s son must become a miner, the docker’s daughter must marry a docker, and the factory worker’s children must file obediently into the same factory. The promise was that they might have choices their parents never had.

Better schools. Grants. Colleges. Universities. Council housing. The NHS. Employment rights. Public-sector careers. Decent pensions. The slow, imperfect but real widening of opportunity.

And then, when some of it worked, Labour got blamed for no longer representing the old world it had helped people escape.

There is something faintly absurd about that. You spend decades trying to give working-class children a ladder, then get denounced because some of them climbed it. The pit closed, the grammar school opened up, the daughter became a nurse, the grandson works in IT, buys a small house with a horrifying mortgage, and then complains that Labour no longer understands people like him.

But Labour did not change in isolation. It came increasingly to reflect some of the people it had helped create: educated, socially mobile, public-sector, professional, graduate, managerial, mortgaged and fluent in the language of policy.

Many of them still clung to Labour, not because they were pretending to be miners or factory workers, but because Labour was part of the family story. It was the party of the school, the grant, the NHS, the council house, the union card, the first secure job, and the belief that your children might not have to live exactly as you had lived.

Of course, the reverse also happened. Some of the people Labour helped did not cling to Labour at all. They moved up, bought houses, accumulated a bit of wealth, and quietly discovered that their politics had acquired a driveway. The party that had helped their parents get security now looked less attractive once they had something to protect, something to pass on, and a suspicion that taxes were aimed specifically at their new kitchen extension.

None of this is a conspiracy. It is what happens when a movement built around aspiration sees some of that aspiration succeed.

It is a bit like accusing a car maker of betraying its customers because it no longer builds a 1970s Mini. The whole point of industry is that products evolve because customers, roads, safety rules, expectations and technology change. People wanted better brakes, less rust, safer structures, heaters that did more than breathe faintly on the windscreen, and engines that did not treat motorways as a personal insult.

So car makers stopped building the old Mini in its original form. Not because they hated Mini buyers, but because the world had changed and the buyers had changed.

Labour’s mistake was not modernising the model. Its mistake was sometimes forgetting the people who still needed basic, reliable transport and could not afford the showroom version.

Because not everyone climbed the ladder. Some did. Some moved sideways. Some stayed exactly where they were, in towns where the industry went and the decent jobs went with it. Those people did not need nostalgia. They needed decent wages, secure housing, reliable transport, affordable energy, working public services and a bit of dignity at work.

That leaves room for a new working-class politics. But it would have to be genuinely pro-worker, not just anti-migrant, anti-London or anti-everything.

Otherwise it is just a protest vote pretending to be a programme.