Will Labour ever have another John Prescott?

In the immediate aftermath of John Prescott’s passing, as with the death of any athlete or musician or writer, there’s an instinctive invitation to take stock and see what about the game has changed. Who had the greater footballing gift, Bobby Charlton or Harry Kane? Who was the greater pop innovator, David Bowie or Ed Sheeran? It’s harder to see who will carry Prescott’s particular torch into the modern era.

He was derided by Blair-haters as a symbolic, empty sop to Labour left tradition, a human curtain by which Tony Blair’s army of modernisers would cover their surgical reconstruction of the Labour Party. Yet it’s also true that Prescott was a living link between the traditions of Old Labour and its New Labour replacement. He was a representative of the party’s founding tradition as a party of the heavy-industry workforce, trade unions and the working class – a tradition that had been dying for decades even before he rose to prominence.

Despite being trusted by Blair with a large portfolio – covering democracy, transport and environmental issues – with the shiny New Labour in power, his public image was as a throwback. Someone sitting uncomfortably in the backseat of a political journey that led him away from leading strikes and staunch Euroscepticism to delivering the Labour conference speech that helped abolish Clause 4. Whether he did this out of a genuine change of heart or a pragmatic desire to be along for the ride, he was given too little credit. He was mangled in the press and sometimes by colleagues as still stuck in the past. Blair must surely now regret describing Prescott’s attitudes in his memoirs as like those of ‘a dinosaur’.

Would the Labour Party today have space for a character like Prescott? In truth, even during the New Labour era, the party couldn’t replicate its postwar tradition of bringing forth MPs from the existing real economy. When mines and heavy industry were replaced by call centres and retail stores, New Labour didn’t bring this new working-class workforce into parliament. By the time Prescott had become deputy prime minister in a Labour government, the working-class traditions he represented were linked to the new, deindustrialised post-Thatcher economy by a thread.

There have been greater changes in the Labour Party and the Labour movement in the years since the end of New Labour. The party has become ever more middle class in terms of membership (most members are in the top three income groups, according to Tim Bale’s Party Members Project). As has its vote, with ABC1 voters now outnumbering its C2DE vote. Compared with earlier iterations of the party, today’s Labour consists of far more degree-educated professionals and comes with a focus on ‘progressive’ social attitudes that make it much less likely to tolerate any ‘dinosaur’ in the ranks.

As Labour began to prepare for power in 2022, choosing its candidates for the next parliament, I watched it entrench its new identity as a party of and for middle-class professionals. Routinely, a local bus driver with union backing would be outmanoeuvred for a seat by an elite-backed professional barrister. Or a local nurse would apply and not be shortlisted in a seat that eventually went to a lobbyist. Indeed, the Labour Party in government in 2024 has more professional lobbyists sitting on its benches than it does tradespeople, health or care workers, retail staff, Uber drivers or delivery workers.

The next John Prescott would face incredible barriers to find a place in the party that was founded to represent people like him. Labour has almost no new MPs that left school to work as manual labourers. Could a giant character with a no-bullshit speaking style, and someone who famously struggled with dyslexia, navigate the modern left’s obsessions with social table manners and elongated academic terminology?

The next John Prescott would likely have voted for Brexit. There is only one new Labour MP from Starmer’s landslide win that voted Leave and he has since disowned his vote. The next Prescott almost certainly would not have the £3,000 to £5,000 to hand that some candidates are said to have spent on glossy promotional videos and other materials. As someone considered to be left-wing, would he even be able to make a longlist in the party’s utterly uncompromising new era of factional exclusivity and identikit political identities?

When I launched a programme, Blue Collar Parliament, in the past year, I hoped to address Labour’s inability to find more John Prescotts and Angela Rayners. I found myself participating in a depressing ritual of calling the party’s bluff. Speaking to Labour members around the country, it became clear that most members are only dimly aware that the party occupies a narrow class bubble. If they are, they don’t see it as a problem, so long as some people can escape to the upper-middle class. Even in a country where one third of children grow up in poverty, class is still unimportant to the Labour rank and file when choosing their representatives.

I found some arguments so common that I created a bingo card to cross them off. Familiar retorts included, ‘Well we have Angela Rayner’, or ‘If we choose a local bus driver over a London lawyer that will punish success’. They seemed completely unaware of the tradition of ministerial success on the part of those from working-class professional backgrounds that runs through Labour history – from Ramsay MacDonald to James Callaghan and Nye Bevan. A tradition personified in the New Labour era by John Prescott.

As John became Lord Prescott, absorbed into an establishment he railed against as a young man, it’s hard not to wonder if he ever reflected on how he and Labour had changed in his lifetime. Whether under Corbynism’s pretend Old Labour leanings (ran by a cadre of London-based millionaires), or Milibandism (again, London-based millionaires), or whatever will come to characterise Starmerism (slightly more strategically gifted London-based millionaires), Labour today is a party of middle-class professionals and the upwardly mobile.

Prescott was carried to the top of politics by this class of modernisers. A group that came to completely dominate the political left and built a wall of social norms and shibboleths that separated Labour from the working-class and blue-collar professionals it was supposed to represent. Did he ever wonder: was I the last of my kind?

David Littlefair runs the Blue Collar Parliament campaign. Follow him on X: @LabBeyondCities.