What is a working person? This question dominated the lead-up to Labour’s first Budget in over 14 years. After Rachel Reeves stood at the despatch box and announced tax rises for farmers, business owners and entrepreneurs, it’s at least become clearer who Keir Starmer doesn’t mean when he talks about working people. Since then, the Prime Minister has had to deny that he is mounting a class war by targeting private schools and landowners. Yet class is an important part of Starmer’s political project – with the work beginning long before he entered Downing Street.
‘I thought people were looked down on for how they voted. I thought there was no empathy with why somebody might have voted to leave the European Union’
In Starmer’s team, one group of voters – disengaged Leave voters who might have taken a punt on Boris Johnson in 2019 – are viewed as integral to Starmer’s election victory and keeping him in No. 10. The work on identifying this group and bringing these voters back to Labour has been led by Morgan McSweeney, his No. 10 chief of staff. Some of the thinking originated from a book by Claire Ainsley, who served as Starmer’s policy chief from 2020 to 2022.
‘2016 was really important because it was what was happening in this country in terms of the referendum and this sort of bewilderment about why people had voted for Brexit,’ Ainsley recalls, when we sit down for a recording of the Women with Balls podcast. ‘And of course, in the States where we saw Donald Trump being elected and again, that same reaction of people feeling very sort of aghast that this had been people’s response.’
To Ainsley, a lifelong Labour supporter, it did not sit well with her. ‘I thought the response was dismissive. I thought people were looked down on for how they voted. I thought there was no empathy with why somebody might have voted to leave the European Union. And I honestly found that repulsive… that attitude, I thought it was so wrong. I thought our job on the centre left should have been to accept that that’s how people had voted.’
Her response was to write a book – The New Working Class – which ‘described a different working class to say this wasn’t just about the traditional working class that used to exist, which is an important part of the population… It’s about putting it together with the more modern working class. So, people who work in the service industry, who are not in some far off, distant northern town or city. They are living and working amongst all of us all of the time’. The book, published in 2018, had plenty of ideas that would go on to become mainstream – such as policies for a points based migration system, accepting the EU result and welfare reforms likely to cause controversy on the left.
The granddaughter of a miner and the daughter of a trade unionist, Ainsley, who at this point was working for the independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation, hoped it would hold sway with the Labour party. Led by Jeremy Corbyn, the party was arguing with itself over Brexit and the right direction post the referendum result. However, she found ‘it was actually the Tories who were much more interested in it at the time’. ‘I really pushed it to Labour and they just were not in a headspace to be able to deal with it at that time. I wrote a letter to John McDonnell… And I did get a meeting with him, but they didn’t particularly follow it up. Tories, on the other hand, they do not mind where they get their ideas from. They were much more interested because they will go wherever they need. They’re like magpies for new political ideas.’
Eventually, however, it fell into the hands of the right Labour politician: the late Jack Dromey, who was MP for Birmingham Erdington. He put Ainsley in touch with Steve Reed – now environment secretary. He then shared it with Morgan McSweeney who was working at Labour Together, the think tank that formed much of the backbone of what would become Labour’s agenda. ‘[Morgan McSweeney] was really just struck by the analysis that he had and that we shared of Labour having left working class people behind,’ says Ainsley.
When Starmer became Labour leader, Ainsley went to work as his head of policy – the first woman to hold the position – but left before the election(‘I was definitely at the point where my family needs were going to overtake what I could do in those jobs’). ‘I believed in what Keir was doing and what Morgan was doing to basically take the Labour party back to working people,’ she says. ‘I definitely feel that lots of the policy work that we got done, that foundation was laid in lots of the big pieces of work that we did, whether it was around our kind of our fiscal responsibility, industrial strategy, employment rights. I also think that we got away from talking about issues that I would describe as a bit niche to the Labour party. So a lot of it was about what we didn’t talk about as much as what we did talk about.’
Now outside, Ainsley retains close ties with the Labour movement as the head of the Progressive Policy Institute. The think tank was recently caught up in the furore over Labour sending volunteers to help the Democrats in the US election, which led to criticism from the Trump campaign. Ainsley plays down the significance: ‘What was really interesting was following it in the States, where it didn’t really register as a huge story, but the media over here just faithfully followed the story. If we’re going to have to deal with Trump as an actor in not just in our politics, but in our media, more often, we’re going to have to get used to asking more questions.’
She says there are things to learn and leave from the Democrat playbook. Reeves was ‘absolutely right’ in the Budget to invest but warns that ‘You can invest, but it is not necessarily what people are going to feel in their pockets’. So, what would ensure Starmer and McSweeney keep the ‘new working class’ on side? It’s hard to say it’s going well for Starmer, with his personal approval ratings falling and a backlash from the winter fuel payment cut. She replies: ‘an absolute focus on living standards, so basically people feeling that their wages are going further within a fairly short space of time is going to be really important. And Labour having the proof points to be able to say, yes, this is how I’m feeling better off compared to how I was feeling under the Conservatives, and they’ve got to not take their eye off that ball’.
It’s not just the Conservatives that Starmer needs to be mindful of – with Nigel Farage’s Reform party also making inroads. ‘The split from the main parties really didn’t show itself up in terms of the parliamentary majority that Labour got, but it did show itself in terms of the way that people voted… So I do think it’s important to see it as more than a blip,’ Ainsley says. ‘Labour’s best bet is to be that broad church and to kind of straddle that coalition between new working-class voters and more socially liberal middle-class people, that that is their only kind of coalition that holds.’ That means a ‘better agenda for working people’. And what of Kemi Badenoch, the new Tory leader? During the leadership election, she was criticised for giving an interview in which she said her experience working in McDonald’s meant she had experienced what it was like to be working class. ‘I don’t think Kemi Badenoch is working class… And actually that wasn’t really what she was trying to say,’ Ainsley argues. ‘I think if you accept the point that actually what she meant was it gave her an insight. I think that if she can use that, that will be more effective in terms of what makes your class up.’
How the public view their social status, Ainsley says, is key to any party’s electoral pitch. And perhaps a lesson for the Democrats after Kamala Harris’s celebrity-filled US campaign saw the working-class vote move largely to Trump. ‘The thing that I found really interesting in the research I did is that if you ask people, they are more likely to say they are working class than they are middle class, and that has got stronger over the last few years rather than less. So I think that any political party that just pitches itself to middle class voters or to university graduates is never going to win an election.’
Listen to the full episode here.
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