Labour and the Tories are now reaping the whirlwind

Party-conference season is now over. Yet despite the next General Election still being four years away, this year’s headline speeches had an air of urgency and desperation not usually seen so early in the political cycle.

For Labour, it appears as though the seriousness of Britain’s problems has finally dawned on it. Whether it is capable of addressing those problems is another matter. Britain remains a deeply unequal and unfair place in which to live. As of last year, the poorest fifth of the UK population has a median household income of just £16,800 – a decrease of 2.6 per cent from the previous year. This year, the incomes for all but the top 20 per cent of earners will fall.

Eye-watering increases in the cost of food and household bills have been compounded by increasing rents and mortgages. This has left communities ravaged by poverty and scarcity. In 1968, housing costs amounted to nine per cent of a household income for the poorest quarter of the population – in 2021, the average was 21 per cent. In contrast, for the richest quarter of the population, housing costs constituted just four per cent of average income in 1968, and were just six per cent in 2021.

The situation becomes even bleaker when we drill down into life in Britain’s deindustrialised towns. Here, the working class once had full employment and strong community bonds. The only thing that connects today’s working class to this past is the poor health some now share with their parents and grandparents, despite the difficult manual work being a thing of the past.

The people who I am talking about make up almost half of the population. These economic inequalities have had entirely predictable consequences. Depression has morphed into rage, and people are ready for rebellion.

The catastrophic demise of the Tories and now Labour has caused the rise of Reform UK. For those who have had little regard for or understanding of class inequality, this political rupture has been frightening to witness. For the first time in multiple generations, the working classes are being seen and heard. The major parties appear to have suddenly realised that they need the poorer half of the country to vote for them. But all the signs indicate that this epiphany has come far too late.

Nigel Farage and Reform have fed off the white-hot anger working-class communities feel towards Labour and the Tories. Farage has had an open goal talking directly to them about reinvigorating manufacturing industries. He has had another free kick talking to them about Britain’s cultural decline. Farage and Reform are unashamedly patriotic, like many working-class people. They are sick to death of a political and media establishment telling them their country is racist and their past shameful.

This week, we witnessed a classic example of the bourgeois culture war that has long been waged on the working class. Former Manchester United and England footballer Gary Neville blamed ‘middle-aged white men’ for creating the hostile national climate that caused the shocking Manchester synagogue attack. He also said the English flag was now being used in a ‘negative fashion’. This from a man who made his fortune from patriotic, middle-aged white men watching him play football. His sneering attitude towards the concerns of working-class people exposes the gulf that exists between the rich and the poor in this country.

Reform cannot take these votes for granted. People are angry at Labour and the Tories, but if Reform continues to grow its parliamentary numbers simply by absorbing ex-Conservatives, it will rapidly lose its appeal. The Greens and a new left-wing coalition led by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn – currently called ‘Your Party’ – are also looking at the working class for support. But they offer the deindustrialised working class absolutely nothing.

Instead, the Corbyn-Sultana coalition and the Greens will be in competition for students, middle-class liberals and the ethnic-minority vote. They can count on the former but the latter might not be as enthusiastic in their support: ethnic minorities have been hit harder than anyone else by the failed economic orthodoxies of recent decades. One need only look at last year’s US presidential election to see that the political left no longer has a monopoly on non-white voters. Sultana’s favourite refrain – ‘The real enemies of the working class don’t arrive in a small boat, they fly in by a private jet’ – is exactly the kind of woke sloganeering that many are beginning to reject. Where I live, one woman said: ‘it isn’t the private-jet man in the HMOs [houses of multiple occupancy] up and down my street.’

Politics has shifted. Decline and scarcity cannot continue indefinitely without the resulting sense of hopelessness and anger upturning the party-political status quo. The desperation of our major parties shows they now understand the gravity of the situation. But for the country they have so long taken for granted, it is too little, too late.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.