Given the wretched state of our politics, you might have thought it would be impossible to sum up all that’s wrong with it in one sentence. But it sounds like a spirited if anonymous member of the shadow cabinet was determined to give it a go.
Briefing about Labour’s (overwhelmingly) elected and energetic deputy leader, this frontbencher told the i newspaper that “Angela is best being utilised as Blair did with John Prescott”.
Not only was it proposed that Angela Rayner be “used”, but that she should be used in the same way as another, earlier member of that endangered political species: MPs with direct experience of the rough edges of working-class life. Imagine the (justified) outrage there would be if someone suggested Keir Starmer used a black woman MP such as Dawn Butler “as Joe Biden does with Kamala Harris”. No Labour frontbencher would say that to a journalist. You might even hope they wouldn’t think it.
The weird thing about the refusal to take class-based slights seriously is that everyone with anything to say about British politics can agree on one thing: the way the working class is cut out of it is a dangerous problem.
Right across the spectrum, from the pop-up rationaliser of populism Matthew Goodwin to the anguished progressive professionals who compulsively specify that experience is “lived”, everyone frets about voters with pressing needs who don’t turn out to vote. About the estates where people feel that public policy is something that is done to them. And, indeed, the questions that proletarian alienation pose for democracy’s future.
Almost everyone agrees, too, that the lack of working-class voices at the top greatly aggravates such problems. And yet, things are getting worse.
As always in the peculiarly British minefield of class, the exact definitions are contentious. But according to one tally published by the journalist Michael Crick last month, out of the 100 candidates picked by Labour for winnable seats in this parliamentary cycle, just one could be called working class.
Rayner is not always to my taste. Last year she made a thuggish quip about how the police should shoot terrorists first and ask questions later. But my tastes are beside the point. The issue is democratic representation.
At a time when tracts of the country are losing sleep over heating and eating, here is someone at the top table who is happy to talk about the once-a-week shared-water bath at her grandmother’s, someone who has actually worked zero-hour contracts (before they were called that) to administer the very care services that are currently in crisis.
As I found when I interviewed her for Prospect 18 months ago, the value of her backstory for her politics is not symbolic but very practical: she has forensic thoughts on what needs to be done to regularise casualised employment practices, and has chivvied her party to embrace substantial plans for that.
The murmurings against her underline—once again, as if it needed more underlining—the perennial factionalism in Labour culture. Even if Starmer is not directly encouraging the briefing about clipping her wings, the mere fact it is happening casts a damning light on the “HR” of his operation.
Recall that, two years ago, Starmer made a bungled move to sack Rayner as campaign co-ordinator to pin the blame on her for the party’s grim local elections results; he was outplayed by her and ended up giving her various new jobs. She has appeared pretty loyal since, and yet a hoped-for triumph in a different set of local elections is now being mooted as a chance to cut her down to size. I’m not sure exactly what lessons colleagues will draw from these chaotic turns about how to act when the going gets rough, but they’re unlikely to be helpful.
These, however, are local difficulties of the Labour party: they pale beside the class problem that dogs the political system as a whole. Working-class voices are too often locked out. When they do break in, the Westminster mainstream is less interested in listening to what they have to say than in deploying them as a comms strategy—to show distant folk in post-industrial wastelands that “we ‘get’ people like you”.
No representation without utilisation! It’s a sham that voters are quite right to see through. And of all our political parties, there is one in particular that really ought to remember that it was founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, not the Labour Utilisation Committee.
