Shabana Mahmood’s moral mission Can Labour return to its working-class roots?

Who is Labour for? It’s a question that has dogged the party since its formation, and it is proving no less bothersome in government. Yet outflanked by Reform on the Right, and the Greens on the Left, Shabana Mahmood has an answer. Her announcements on asylum act as a hard-nosed rebuke to colleagues — from Blair and Brown to Corbyn, to the mushy Milibands in between — who have oriented Labour as the party of liberal, metropolitan Britain for over a generation.

“The Government is shifting,” Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman agrees. With the Labour brand “very toxic” — particularly among the staunchly proletarian and provincial petty-bourgeois voters attracted to the populist iconoclasm of the New Right — not changing course would consign Labour to a future as one half of a despised duopoly. Yet, Glasman adds, things can change fast. Mahmood is trying her best to make sure of that. But in doing so she is engaging in a dangerous game, less “ming vase” and more bull in a China shop — decisively alienating one half of Labour’s base while desperately chasing the other.

Labour’s base has, of course, evolved over time, alongside the contours of Britain’s shifting class dynamics. In the interwar period, George Orwell identified a strand of middle-class, radical intellectualism resolutely detached from the culture of the broader labour movement, one that displayed a proud antipathy towards the quotidian culture of the nation at large. “England is perhaps the only great country,” he said, “whose intellectuals
 are ashamed of their own nationality.” The bourgeois radicals, Orwell added, “always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings”.

In a similar vein, the pre-war dockers’ leader Ben Tillett drew a distinction between “matter-of-fact, fighting trades unionism of England” on the one hand — and “the hare-brained chatterers and magpies” on the other. Such divides die hard. In his novel The Night-Soil Men, the recent fictionalised tale of Labour’s foundation, Bill Broady has the salt-of-the-earth Bradfordian and early Labour minister Fred Jowett lament the presence of a “raffish metropolitan crowd” in his fledgling proletarian party. The intellectuals, for their part, could dish it out too. In the Sixties, Tom Nairn, a thinker of the Marxist New Left, happily bemoaned the conservatism of an organisation that brought together two late-Victorian traditions: Fabian bourgeois liberalism and stolid trade unionism, the latter influenced by religious non-conformity and primarily concerned not with world revolution but the protection of its crafts.

This friction, then, between an effete elite and the mass membership of the broad labour movement, has always existed. And indeed it’s a dynamic that has arguably made Labour a more malleable, pragmatic socialist party than its Marxist continental cousins. After all, Labour’s postwar governments combined economic radicalism, nationalisation, and trade union power with a respect for The Crown and the House of Lords. As Clement Attlee observed, it was in the constitutional monarchies of Britain and Scandinavia that the greatest advances towards democratic socialism had been achieved, not least because of the continuities of symbolic power and national representation that remained amid class struggle. Yet as the influence of trade unionism and the old, grassroots cultures of the organised working-class has declined precipitously, so Labour has morphed into a thoroughly liberal-progressive party, with an often toxic brand, redolent of all the hectoring, right-on, detached habits of modern managerial officialdom.

In Mahmood and Blue Labour’s reading, a primary source of this toxicity is down to what the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has called a trahison des clercs — a treason of the Left-wing intellectuals, especially regarding the fraught politics of migration. Labour, in this telling, has abandoned the labour interest, leaving aside the working class as its primary political agents. Instead, it has embraced what Marxism Today used to call “a rainbow coalition” of different interest groups: students, public-sector workers and identitarian socio-cultural tribes. Since declaring “the forward march of labour halted” in the late Seventies, during a period of steep deindustrialisation, the Left’s leading theorists claimed there was no alternative but to seek new electoral alliances by “hegemonising” ethnic minorities, the feminist movement, LGBT activists and the counter-cultural youth, all under the benevolent leadership of bourgeois-bohemians.

Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council was the living embodiment of this shift. It signalled, he said, the arrival of “the post-1968 generation” into a dominant position in Left politics. His first tenure in the capital saw County Hall “swarmed with young punks, skinheads, Rastafarians and a host of other Londoners”, according to one of his thoroughly New Left contemporaries. While these developments enraged a Labour leadership focused on persuading working-class Thatcherites back into the Labour family, they also found critics among the far Left. The “Mersey Militants” who controlled the Liverpool Labour Party at the time accused the London crowd of being “loony” “middle-class intellectuals”, in the words of their most prominent spokesperson, Derek Hatton.

The contemporary Labour Party, as part of these transformations, has adopted what Streeck calls a “cosmoliberalism” not shared by large swathes of the public. “Modernisation” turned it from a part of the demos to a party of Davos. Most of its MPs have followed the same familiar path: university; a think tank, corporate consultancy, law, or public affairs; and onwards to Westminster. That’s why they all sound like they work for Deloitte — because many of them really did. And, for Streeck, it’s the Davos-style “cosmoliberal” mindset that sees working-class scepticism of free movement of labour and capital as a kind of betrayal of “international solidarity”. Indeed, the progressive activists who dominate the institutions of the modern Left are the only social segment who appear unconcerned with the recent historically unprecedented waves of mass migration, or with the “woke turn” of the last decade. Brexit, in their reading, is a racist project. Restrictionism on migration is always more-or-less Powellite. Opposition to unfettered globalisation, or support for a return to a more national economy, is horribly passé, or maybe even Trumpian.

Mahmood is trying to put paid to all that. Last week, I described her speaking style as “tepid”. The Birmingham MP is barely known outside the party, and her previous media performances as one of the mooted contenders in the unofficial race to succeed Keir Starmer were unconvincing. But, on Monday, setting out plans to emulate key aspects of the Danish Social Democrats’ hardline approach on migration, she was anything but. This was a cabinet minister in command of the House, more authoritative at the despatch box than any politician so far this Parliament. The Home Secretary is on a self-proclaimed “moral mission” to restore faith in a broken system: and, from her rhetoric at least, it’s hard to doubt her.

But she will struggle, and faces three major impediments. The first are the legal challenges her plans will likely provoke, not least at the European Court of Human Rights. That is a body which has rigorously applied its expansive interpretations of what it calls a “living document” to prevent convicted paedophiles from being deported lest it disrupt their “right to a family life”. Our own domestic legislation, the Human Rights Act, buttresses this lopsided liberal legalism. And that brings us on to the second impediment — the Prime Minister. After all, it was a fastidious application of exactly that kind of legalism that gave Keir Starmer a high-flying career at the bar. For all his lack of a grand meta-narrative, he remains at heart a vaguely progressive North London lawyer. More than that, he lacks focus. One can never be certain which particular Starmerism we’ll be offered on any given day. Possessing no vision of his own, his politics seemingly depends on whoever he’s just spoken to.

And yet Mahmood’s third impediment is perhaps the strongest: the Labour Party itself. Many of its parliamentarians, its activists, and its supporters will be bitterly opposed. This isn’t surprising, for Mahmood has merely fired the starting gun on Labour’s latest round of internecine civil war, an endless conflict centred on divergent conceptions of the very soul of the party, about who Labour is ultimately for.

Today’s polling shows the party way behind among almost every demographic except one — the privately educated. Labour’s safest seats are now, in reality, not in the so-called “heartlands”, or “left behind” Britain, but in the dynamic metropoles. Here, the rainbow coalition lives on. But the cities operate on what Glasman calls “the Deliveroo economy”. A salaried “creative class” are all-too-comfortable with unskilled mass migration, for the abundance of cheap workers it provides to drop off their takeaways, or staff their care homes — a permanent, affordable service class, whose presence can be celebrated as a marker of superior virtue and liberal tolerance.

For Labour’s romantics, the fact that the party has been captured by that particular urban milieu is a source of profound shame. To quote Clause Four, after all, Labour was founded “to secure for the workers, by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their industry”. But we have passed from an industrial past, through to a grimly post-industrial present. When Labour was founded, Britain made around a third of the world’s steel. Now we make around 0.3%. Instead, we send emails, sell coffees, pump our housing market. Service work dominates. Almost half of school-leavers go on to university. The economists refer to this model as “cognitive-cultural capitalism”, and a smug generation of Third-Way politicians promoted it as something they called “the knowledge economy”.

But Labour, say the romantics again, shouldn’t exist for graduate professionals, but for genuine workers. The mass production and assembly lines may have receded into memory, or at least been offshored to the Far East. Yet the armies of non-graduate workers remain, only now in warehouses, retail, call centres — all in aggregate as estranged from the modern party as ever. To that extent, then, Mahmood’s immigration plans represent a real, decisive shift aimed at recapturing Labour’s putative real people. Glasman tells me that, in addition to her plans on immigration, Mahmood “is strong on the Left flank”. She’s “an economic nationalist, basically”, he says. “She wants to see the primacy of the national economy, and serious reindustrialisation.” This is about a fundamental restoration of secure, unionised work in domestic industries located outside the unaffordable, service-dominated urban centres.

Unfortunately, such a politics has not yet been much in evidence from either Labour in general, or from Mahmood in particular — though it is sorely needed. There has been no per capita or real wage growth in almost a generation. It’s clear, today, that the knowledge economy and John Prescott’s refrain that “we’re all middle class now” was a chimera, built on credit and unsustainable financialisation. University no longer offers a pathway to bourgeois respectability. The downwardly mobile graduates are themselves revolting, hurtling towards the alluring purities of “eco-populism”. As for the desperate post-industrial proletariat, it’s increasingly flirting with the populist Right. Is it any wonder, given all this, that Labour is in a near-constant state of identity crisis? The awkward reality is that its original class base, with which it has formed a nostalgic attachment, in fact no longer exists, or at least not in the way it once did. Rather than appealing to a cultural imaginary gleaned from an LS Lowry print, or a Ken Loach film, Labour must therefore relearn how to speak to the average man and woman in non-metropolitan, new-build Britain.

Could it look overseas for help? The Danish Left’s clampdown on asylum and migration has been credited with seeing off the threat from the Right. Its message to working-class Danes was conciliatory. “You didn’t leave us, we left you,” said the slogan. But it hasn’t been plain-sailing. The Social Democrats have just lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in over a century, ceding power to an eco-socialist outfit — and portending, perhaps, the fate of Labour’s equivalent cosmopolitan tribe abandoning it for radical-liberal pastures. If Denmark is what success looks like, then, there’s a serious trade-off. Mahmood’s gamble is based on the hope that she can reconnect her party with its working-class roots, wooing them back into the fold. If that means sacrificing the trendy, gentrified parts of the big cities, then so be it. A calculation has been made that most urban Labour constituencies are still classed as “safe”, whereas Reform-leaning seats tend to be more marginal. Glasman tells me that “the key feature of this era that we’re in now” — a period of deglobalisation, economic upheaval and populist revolts — “is that the working-class vote is decisive”.

Not everyone is convinced. Even a sympathetic MP tells me that “our electoral coalition is so upside-down that maybe a Blue Labour pivot is impossible”. But Mahmood’s wager is brutally simple: that Labour can no longer claim to be the party of workers while treating the politics of borders with liberal disdain, all while viewing the nation-state as an anachronism. She is betting that the people Labour was built to serve still want a government that protects them — not a globalised free market that dissolves them. If she is right, she may yet drag her party back into congruence with one side of its base. But that comes at the price: the hemorrhaging of votes in the citadels. The stakes of the game are existential, as the soul of the party is up for grabs yet again. And this time, it may be the last chance anyone gets to claim it.

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