Britain’s wage slaves are revolting Labour is failing its working-class base

It’s the city’s neo-gothic Anglican Cathedral that people first notice when arriving in Liverpool. It stands in stark contrast to the sterile glass-and-steel conference venue where Labour’s suited and booted gathered this week with the corporate lobbyists in tow. Giles Gilbert Scott’s gargantuan masterpiece dominates the skyline, imposing itself over both the smart, regenerated docks and a sea of red-brick Victorian terraces.

What few visitors ever discover, though, is that under the church’s foundation stone, laid in 1904 by King Edward VII, a trade unionist stonemason left a time capsule message in a tin. Along with a copy of two socialist papers, The Clarion and The Labour Leader, was a note: “We, the wage slaves employed on the erection of this Cathedral,” it reads, “dedicated to the worship of the unemployed Jewish carpenter, hail ye! Within a stone’s throw from here human beings are housed in slums not fit for swine…”

There, a stone’s throw from the conference, those wards remain neglected. Race riots plagued Liverpool Walton last year, with some of the most violent scenes witnessed in a nationwide summer of thuggish discontent in the aftermath of the Southport murders. This is the poorest constituency in the country, and also one of the safest Labour seats. Dockside jobs have long been replaced by low-paid service work, or long-term unemployment. With cheap, dilapidated housing stock, it’s a primary location for “migrant dispersal”. Labour is losing its grip to a Faragist insurgency here and across its former bastions, where the modern equivalents of the “wage slaves” of the cathedral time capsule reside. Polling shows Reform creeping up on even the safest stalwarts in Merseyside’s red fortresses.

One wonders, then, how secure Keir Starmer feels here. Not in the sterile atmosphere of conference, but outside, in the city’s bars and pubs, where conference delegates have detected an unusual hostility to the Labour invasion. One “traitor”, a disgruntled Labour delegate, was told to “fuck off” back to London. So while the consensus is now that the putative “King of the North”, Andy Burnham, overplayed a weak hand, the Reform threat is hardening.

The Prime Minister’s speech was uncharacteristically defiant, as he announced a “fork in the road” moment for the country. He painted the choice facing Britain as one between the declinism of the insurgent new Right and the rosy uplands of Labour. In his telling, Britain isn’t broken, and he reeled off a list of committee-approved examples to stir patriotic feeling: all the familiar notes on our NHS, Lionesses, community volunteers, and, cringingly, “the swagger of Oasis”.

Yet on those subjects where Britain does feel broken — on migration, on growth, on infrastructure, and on industrial revival — the Prime Minister is clearly detached from reality. In conference land, the Government is going all-out on growth. But out here, in the real world, we’re looking at a stagnating economy, wondering where the boom is coming from. In conference land, globalisation is over, and we are focused on national production, not cheap imports. But outside, the Government is presiding over a decimation of heavy industry. Stopping the boats will prove difficult while the Government remains confined by the judiciary’s expansive interpretations of ECHR rules. Emptying the hotels, in practice, means transferring residents to scarce social housing, or those cheap HMOs in areas like Liverpool Walton.

But this speech was designed for the Labour faithful — reassurance for attendees at the centre-Left Disneyland without the thrills. Though they might have momentarily drowned it out amid a sea of warm white wine in the conference corridors, discontent is rising. A note was circulated among the backbenchers shortly after the summer recess. “Keir Starmer has no vision and the Government has no purpose,” it read. “He will never have one. The cabinet is incapable of leadership.” When I read this excerpt to Maurice Glasman at our UnHerd event, he agreed with the sentiment. But he was also quick to caveat that this is not the time for a leadership contest — if only because there’s no obvious replacement waiting in the wings.

Leadership talk is cheap. And with Burnham slinking out of the conference, moments before Starmer’s keynote speech, that leaves a telegenic Health Secretary, the Blairite Wes Streeting, in contention. But Streeting is defending a minuscule majority of 528 votes in his constituency of Ilford North, holding his seat — just — against a pro-Gaza candidate at the last election. Even the slightest of swings against a miserably unpopular Labour Party would see him leave the Commons. The Blue Labour favourite, Shabana Mahmood, according to Glasman, is a bonafide representative of a “Left-conservative” current that is fiercely patriotic. He assured me that she would combine bold economic radicalism with harder-edged policy on crime and migration. But Mahmood is a relative unknown outside the party. And both she and Streeting hold views that the Labour selectorate — an achingly middle-class and liberal-progressive bunch, on the whole — would find difficult to stomach.

Glasman bemoans this effete “lanyard class” of graduate professionals — metropolitan urbanites who live separate lives and speak a different language from his party’s traditional, working-class base. But in the receptions and the bars around Liverpool’s ACC, there is little of the old proletarian culture in evidence. Instead, the conference is thronging with people who know what “IPPR” stands for. That is a deeply weird thing. At the fringes, all manner of legislative tweaks are plied as the answer to our woes. Net zero will be a catalyst for climate jobs. Planning reform will keep the wolves from the door. One activist, sceptical, tells me “we’re fucked”. Is it any wonder that lower-income, non-graduate workers are abandoning them in droves for Nigel Farage, someone even a sober, Left-leaning former Bank of England economist, Andy Haldane, has described as the closest thing the UK has to “a tribune of the working class”?

In private, some MPs express despair. Others think it can be turned around. More than one reminds me that Thatcher, in 1981, was desperately unpopular, and yet two years later she won a landslide. But there are two variables which they have conveniently forgotten. One is that Javier Milei is hardly about to invade the Falklands — which means no British warships dispatched to drive a patriotic national fervour to rescue our PM.

The other is the growing economy of which Thatcher was the beneficiary: back then, Britain was leaving the recession of the early Eighties, buoyed by North Sea oil tax receipts. Today, growth remains elusive. We’re living in a different world. Rather than being boosted by the beginnings of China’s pro-market economic reforms and Reaganite deficit spending, the developed world’s whole economic model has been upended by Donald Trump’s tariffs and the decoupling of Washington-Beijing’s “Chimerican” growth engine. Labour faces a hostile global economic environment, a bear market for the sovereign debt of advanced economies. The Budget will raise taxes and be perceived negatively. It will not give us a Big Bang.

And so it’s no wonder that at conference drinks receptions, at private dinners, in quiet corners of the strange, clinical corridors, people are speaking of regicide. The Prime Minister’s authority hangs by a thread. With his personal polling worse than Liz Truss, the mood in Liverpool is dour and, among some, resigned to what will constitute a disaster of historic proportions — a nail in the coffin of social democracy at the next general election. The paucity of an obvious alternative is all that saves Starmer from open, desperate insurrection.

That may come soon. But not yet, they say. Perhaps after the forthcoming difficult budget, or a disastrous round of local elections next May. Maybe cabinet colleagues will one-by-one visit the Prime Minister in Downing Street, to tell him, with regret, that he no longer retains their confidence. But not yet. The Labour-loyalists of the SW1 army live in an alternative reality. They inhabit a political space in which hundreds of thousands of people aren’t marching the streets in support of Tommy Robinson. In which they’re not 10 points behind a party promising mass deportations.

But outside, communities don’t feel on-the-up, or united in Starmer’s fever dream of camaraderie; they are plagued by the visible fraying of the public realm, disinvestment, and a breakdown in cohesion. Outside, the cost-of-living crisis never ended. The Labour response, echoing emptily in Liverpool, seemed almost a denial, a tired boosterism delivered by a PM whose rhetorical capacity is fundamentally suited only to a register of dull miserablism.

Hermetically sealed in a self-soothing conference, progressive, graduate officialdom will try to convince itself that a weary public will cling on to each word of Starmer’s speech on BBC News, assuming piecemeal reforms are quite enough to turn things around. But it couldn’t be more detached from the people Labour was founded to represent.

The stonemason wrote his socialist paean two years before the Labour Representation Committee, created to provide the working-classes with an alternative to the bourgeois Liberals, became the modern Labour Party. Today, Starmer’s lanyard class has reclaimed it for the bourgeois liberals. The wage slaves will be seeking a new home.

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