Know Your Place part 1: the class shift

This series from The Conversation is supported by the National Centre for Social Research, Natsen, the largest independent and not-for-profit social research organisation in the UK. What class do you consider yourself to be? It's a tricky business, asking a British person what their class is. Middle class. Working class. Working class. Working class. Middle class. It can make them uncomfortable. That asks me. It's super simple. And what class do you identify as? Working class. And can you tell us a bit more about why you feel that way? Just my upbringing. Yeah, mainly just my upbringing. It can't even make them attack defensive. And would you be willing to answer? Yeah, yeah. Okay, what class do you identify as? I don't identify in no class whatsoever, I think I think the whole thing is intuition. It does, however, always trigger an interesting response. I would say in terms of the privilege I have, I would say middle class, but I'd identify as working class from my views and standpoints. Okay, interesting. People feel class even when they can't say for sure which class they themselves belong to. It used to be much more straightforward in Britain. You did a manual job, you were working class, you bossed people around, you were middle class. And people voted according to that. If you were working class, you voted labour. And if you were middle or upper class, you voted conservative. We used to know our place and which party belonged to us. But that's no longer true. Voters have a lot fewer tribal royalties. And they're switching in ways that I don't think they've ever really switched before in the era of universal suffrage. By 2019, it's very difficult to see class as being a driving factor in most people's vote. So if class is no longer a driver of our political choice, what has replaced it? We clearly still think a lot about class in Britain today. So can it possibly simply have evaporated from our politics? I mean, clearly class is not a thing of the past. And you also now have this, in some ways, counterintuitive development of middle class people reclaiming their working class heritage in a way. The British relationship with class means that it's continued as an influence in politics perhaps longer than elsewhere. And if class doesn't matter in politics anymore, why does our new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer spend quite so much time hammering on about this? My dad worked in a factory. He was a tall maker. My mum was a nurse. We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up. I'm Laura Hood, senior politics editor at the conversation UK, and these questions have been bothering me as I've covered the highs and lows of British politics since the Brexit years. Welcome to Know Your Place, what happened to class in British politics? Over the next five episodes, I'll be exploring what broke the relationship between class and voting, and what that means for the future. There's probably no better place to talk about class than the University of Oxford, where the UK's elites have been educated for centuries. That's where my producer Anu Kanai met Geoffrey Evans. He's a professor of sociology and author of The New Politics of Class, the political exclusion of the British working class. Wow, that's a good collection. I used to work in the pottery industry in Sturgeon. Actually, what a two-year practice I worked in, are here. Obviously, this is all stuff from 1930 or thereabouts. It's all like Art Deco. The first thing you notice when you enter Geoffrey's office is an incredible display of pottery. Dozens of teapots, milk jugs and coffee cups, adorned shelves around his desk. As you can hear, I was taken in fact by how beautiful it was. What were you doing for them? Oh, I mixing slip in the slip house, which means you get all the the silica, which is really bad for you actually. I've still got marks from my lungs from it. And mix it with the various play, with the liquid form. So, right to the very start of the process. Right. That's what I mean, you did. About 60 minutes started there, actually, but then there's a different world. All gone now. I mean, one of those left behind post-industrial grim places. It's kind of sad to see how it's changed. So, you're from Stoke originally? Yes, that's right. Right now, yeah. So, Geoffrey is an Oxford professor, but he also left school at 15, worked very manual jobs in factories and only went to university in his mid-twenties. He's been researching politics and class for decades, investigating class identities. Even now, a lot of people, if you push them, will identify as work in class. Because they can't set working class background. I think identity is not changed as much as people thought. And some countries as it has, but in Britain, we are more entrenched in this view that many people, even people with what we think of as objectively middle-class jobs still feel working class when pushed. The decline of industry in the UK means that traditional working class jobs are a smaller part of the economy than they were in, say, the 1980s. More and more of us are working in offices or as managers. More of us are going to university than in the past. Yet, more people still identify as working class than middle-class. A lot of the middle-class types of jobs are not that great, and the university qualifications don't get you that wonderful life, whereas you go to university in 1980 and I went in the 80s, it was like, wow, what am I doing here? It's like a very different world and that middle-class people when it was like a very different world. But now, most people that university is all around the country and they come out of it and yeah, I don't think they feel like they're a member of a privileged upper middle-class elite anymore. Absolutely not. The National Centre for Social Research found in 2023 that 77% of people still believe that social class affects a person's life opportunities, either a great deal or quite a lot. In fact, more people think that this is the case than in the 1980s, a time when the class structure was far more overt. I put this to Tim Bale, who I often bother when I need help understanding British politics. He's a professor at Queen Mary University of London. This whole project has been sort of eye-opener in terms of how the way the British feel class just like within us and there are certain things that we don't need to say and a lot of people would like to think that class is a thing of the past but we carry it with us in our every interaction. Yeah, I mean clearly class is not a thing of the past and you also now have this in some ways counterintuitive development of middle-class people reclaiming their working class heritage in a way. People suggesting that somehow they're working class because their grandfather did a manual job even though actually their parents went to university and so did they and they're in fairly middle-class occupations. So I don't think we can completely dismiss class from any consideration of politics even if we say that it's now quite difficult to predict as it were someone's vote from their class position. But so why do you think that people want to claim working class status? Yeah, I mean it's a really difficult one. I can feel it in myself I think sometimes you know but it would be ridiculous of me to call myself working class because my dad was a university lecturer and my mum was a teacher you know and the fact that okay my dad's dad worked in an aircraft factory. I mean my relevant is that you know but a lot of people will do that. Yeah, yeah. Many of us are working in what we're once thought of as elite jobs but are unable to get on the housing ladder. Some of us are becoming millionaires off the back of manual jobs. Lots of us are ostensibly self-employed but are really working as wage slaves to kick economy algorithms. We have grandparents who worked in manufacturing or as in my own case in coal mines but just two generations later might find ourselves on the receiving end of a jibe about the metropolitan elite or as that just me. If you think that class is still easy to describe let me ask you is Victoria Beckham wrong to describe herself as from a working class family? Yeah I mean I think also we both come from families that work really hard both of our parents work really hard. We're very working working class. We're just honest. I am being honest. Did you drive that drive you to school? Okay in the 80s my dad had a Rolls Royce. This clip is from the couple's recent Netflix documentary Beckham and after all poshbice's dad was a working class North Londoner. He made a fortune after creating his own electrical wholesale business and he drove around with a white van alongside his Rolls Royce. So when does As a person, stop being one class. and start being another? - I'm not sort of professed. I still go back to Stoke every week. However, you know, keep quiet about my life down here 'cause it's just too dumb privileged. And although I've got very strong memories of what it's like working in the factories and that, it's a long time ago now. - In 1967, legendary political scientist Peter Pulitzer wrote, "Class is the basis of British party politics "or else is embellishment and detail." And when I sat down with John Curtis, Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow at the National Center for Social Research, he mentioned Pulitzer's quote straight away. - And essentially the point was that it wasn't a one-to-one relationship, but that people who were in working-class jobs. So people who essentially were engaged in manual work, they were doing what they were told to do and they were essentially manual jobs. They tended to vote labor, which, of course, was founded at the beginning of the 20th century in order to provide representation for working-class people. Conversely, middle-class people, people in reasonably usually well-paid, professional or managerial jobs, together with people who are self-employed, who are always an important part of the Conservative Coalition, that they were more likely to vote Conservative. Labor folk at the end of the day were more concerned about inequality, more middle-class folk, were more concerned about growing the pie, having incentives for business to be able to grow the economy, et cetera, et cetera. And so that, you know, divide was an important divide. - Of course, it's never that simple. - One thing that was always true even back in the 1950s and 1960s, given that then the working-class were more numerous than the middle-class. The Conservative Party was only able to win elections by having some success out of putting to working-class voters. But equally now, as the occupational structure was changing, and we were becoming a majority-middle-class society, as opposed to a majority-working-class society, so Labour had to think a little bit about what, hang on, how do we expand our class base? - The Labour Party has continued to grapple with this question into the 21st century, too. But for the most part, that underlying pattern stood, working-class people voted Labour, and middle-class people voted Conservative. Until 2019. - I've just been to see her majesty, the Queen earlier on, and she agreed to dissolve Parliament. - It was strange and confusing in many ways. That was the year that Prime Minister Boris Johnson hid in a fridge to get away from journalists. - I'll be with you in a second, I'll be with you in a second. - Right, he's been taken inside into the freezer. - He's gone into the fridge. - And do you remember that incident when he snatched a reporter's phone to avoid a difficult question? - You're a few to look at the photo. You've taken my phone, put it in your pocket, Prime Minister. - It was a weird time. But the most striking and significant feature of the 2019 election was the fall of the Red Wall. - Pride Valley in Northumberland, election night's first shock result, when this seat time blew, the dye was cast. Boris Johnson wasn't just going to take Labour's Red Wall, he was going to wipe it out. - A block of constituencies across the middle and north of England that had previously been solid Labour, working-class heartlands, switched to voting for Boris Johnson's Conservatives. In some cases, it was the first time laboratories had ever taken the seat. And in a lot of cases, it was the first time lifelong Labour voters had voted for the other side. His Tim Bale again. - By 2019, it's very difficult to see class as being a driving factor in most people's votes. Class voting seems to have completely disappeared. And that is in part because a lot more middle class people are voting Labour and Liberal Democrats but it's also because a lot more working class people are voting Conservative. And I think they're whilst clearly an attempt on the part of the Conservatives to corral those people into their electoral coalition, not necessarily on the basis of economic policies but generally speaking on the basis as a few like a cultural appeal to working class voters. - Johnson, an eaten, educated posh boy, was lauded as some kind of pide-piper of the working classes. He'd woo'd England's post-industrial communities to the party of the aristocracy. - If you look at surveys of working class voters, they are still to the left of most voters when it comes to the economy and public services but they are more authoritarian if you like than most voters. When it comes to cultural issues, obviously particularly immigration and to some extent Brexit as well. So I think what Boris Johnson was trying to do was to launch a cultural appeal to working class voters. And to some extent an appeal based on a promise having got Brexit done to expand public services once again and obviously leveling up was to a certain extent an attempt to appeal to that more leftist feeling among working class voters. So I think Boris Johnson was consciously doing that or at least those around him were consciously doing that. The fall of the Red Wall was really part of a trend that had been happening for several decades. In 2019, some working class voters did move away from Labour towards the Conservatives but they didn't move as a class group. - We shouldn't underestimate the kind of power of the get Brexit done slogan. - That's Paula Surridge. She's Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. She's the reference for political surveys. Those that voted for Brexit wanted Brexit done but there were also by that point, a lot of what we might think of as kind of soft remainers. So people who weren't campaigning for second referendum who just actually wanted Brexit done so that they could talk about other things so that they could talk about what was happening to public services, what was happening to high streets and so on. So it was a really, really powerful slogan because it brought this coalition together of people that absolutely voted for Brexit and wanted Brexit done but also people who were just a bit tired of talking about Brexit. - So what we really saw was not really some great class alignment where the work in class is suddenly decided to vote conservative. It was a lot of people wanting an end to something that had happened in 2016. - Yeah, and people whose feelings were that their communities had really declined empty high streets. What we might consider low level anti social behaviour but which makes people's lives miserable, all those kind of things that people wanted to see change. And some of them had voted for Brexit because they thought that might bring that change and then in 2019 they voted conservative because they thought that might bring that change. - If it felt like a flocking of the working class to the conservatives, it's because election strategists were tapping into our very British tendency to see class everywhere. - People in Britain understand politics in class terms. After the 2019 election, we did focus groups in what at that time were called the Red Wall Seats and these class-based images of politics came through in the way that people talked about politics. You know, they would talk about people who were just out of themselves, wealthy people that would use the language of class to talk about the different parties and they would use the language of class to talk about what happened in 2019. So I think that's left politics in Britain still deeply coloured by class, even if actually the straight-up relationship between individual parties and particular classes has broken down to a certain extent. - And you know what else was messy in terms of class and voting? - Well, at 20 minutes to five, we can now say the decision taken in 1975 by this country to join the common market has been reversed by this referendum to leave the EU. - Brexit. We often hear that the Brexit vote was a revolt by the working class against the elite, especially from its chief architect, Nigel Farage, now leader of the reform party. - And I think it was the old Labour vote that came to us as we campaigned as hard as we could in those areas. - So if we look at how demographics connect with Brexit vote, class is not the most important factor. Education is a stronger predictor of Brexit vote than class with those with degree or high-level education, more likely to vote remain than those with lower level qualifications. So the middle class in Britain is bigger than the working class in Britain. So if you take both the remain vote and the leave vote, there are more middle class voters in both because they're a bigger proportion of the population. But if you take an individual middle class or working class voter, the working class voter is more likely to have voted for Brexit than the middle class voter. So you can move the data around to make both. arguments. So does Brexit tell us anything about class and politics? If we look at party identity, so whether or not people feel attached to a party, we can see a real step change in the people saying that they don't feel attached to a political party between 2014 and 2017. So what Brexit does is it makes people think about two connections to parties, their connection or whether or not they want to see greater redistribution of wealth, more funding for public services, those kinds of issues. And then it puts alongside them these issues around tolerance, law and order, we could potentially throw immigration into that. And so people then have got two different ways of assessing which party best represents their interests. And that creates this additional volatility and it creates a lot of swing voters, many of whom are working class who want to see left-leaning economic policies, redistribution, only for public services and so on, but want to see, sometimes we talk about it as social conservatives, sometimes we talk about it as authoritarian, but want to see those policies around immigration, around stronger sentencing, policing and so on, more towards the right. So then who do they vote for? Who represents those issues? I've never heard it put in such good terms, I feel like I suddenly understand this. So much better. If you like this podcast, why not listen to what's wrong with democracy, a new weekly podcast from Tortoise Media in partnership with Open Society foundations. Join political scientist Ben Ansel and guests from the world of politics as they explore the issues affecting democracies both near and far and whether our fractured body politic can be put back together. Search for what's wrong with democracy wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow the feed to make sure you don't miss an episode. So during Brexit and the 2019 election, the conservatives didn't really become the party of the working classes, but the class rhetoric was very much there. Our class instincts were readily triggered. What about 2024? We did it! A changed Labour party, ready to serve our country, ready to restore Britain to the service of working people. So the first time in 14 years Labour, a party originally set up to represent working people, was back in power. John Curtis again. Labour thought to have any chance of being able to win that they would need to have to particularly reconnect with working class voters and also by the way those who had voted leave. Did they manage? The full analysis of the 2024 vote is still ongoing, but the one thing that we do already know about the election was that turnout was one of the lowest in history at just 60%. The politics of Westminster and the politics of the electorate have never been further apart. I mean the outcome of the 2024 election was the most disproportionate ever, but in particular the way it stands out is that we have a government with 412 seats, dominates the House of Commons, majority of 170 are on 35% of the vote in a low turnout election. No previous government has got an overall majority of any kind on less than 35% of the vote. In other words, very few people of any class voted in 2024, if no one turned out then it's fairly obvious that the working class didn't flock back to Labour. So it looks as though at least so far as conservative and Labour is concerned that actually the class division has not re-emerged despite the fact that Labour in particular were hoping to reconnect with working class voters. Now that doesn't mean to say there aren't still some differences. Which parties support is now most concentrated amongst the middle class, it's the Liberal Democrats. They've always tended to be somewhat popular amongst middle class voters than working classwise again because Liberal Democrats have always tended to appeal to sociable voters. The party whose vote is most clearly structured in the opposite direction, well of course it's reform. Whose support, according to these post-election polls, was around twice as high amongst those in working class jobs as it was amongst those in middle class jobs. If there's one thing that shows that class has not left our lives and politics, it's how badly we want to try to understand everything in class terms. A bit after the election I was lurking on ex-formity twitter and ran into some of Paula Surrage's tweets about purported electoral strategy from the Liberal Democrats. I saw an exchange that you had about Gaill's. Could you maybe explain the Gaill's phenomenon in electoral terms? So people have correlated all sorts of things with Brexit vote, party vote and so on. We can come specifically to Gaill's in a minute, but I've seen stuff on pret, which was done just after Brexit, whether or not a constituency had a pret in it. I've seen stuff which looked kind of which was the most prevalent takeaway type to show that where fish and chips was the most prevalent. The Brexit vote was higher. I've seen stuff on pubs. You know people do this all the time and our electoral geography lends itself to it because you only build things for affluent people in places where affluent people live. There's no point building something that costs a lot to go to where people don't have the money to go to it. And then there was Gaill's. It was said that the Liberal Democrats were pursuing a Gaill's based electoral strategy. If you were in a constituency that was home to a branch of the popular and some might say slightly bougie bakery chain, you could expect to see Lib Dem canvases in your neighbourhood looking to mop up the middle class votes. Basically it's one of those kind of coincidences that there happen to be lots of Gaill's in London and the southeast of England because that's where they started and spread out to and there happen to be lots of Liberal Democrat target seats in the southeast of England. The idea that the two go together just seems to me to be. It's kind of one of those silly season stories. Again we see that class is not an electoral strategy but something else. The myth of the Gaill's strategy shows that we just can't help ourselves. I think it really speaks to the way in which British people love to talk about class without talking about class exactly exactly. And our new government sees it too. Jeffrey Evans at Oxford again. We have a prime minister who probably has the strongest working class credentials than any national leader for a very long time because deputy Angela Rainer is very open about her working class identity. And she also experienced being working class as an adult to some degree, unlike the others who had all went A levels and universities. So yes, she's like the modern day John Prescott but actually more credible and more high profile. What's the difference between someone like Kistarma who's born in a working class and family and brought up in a working class community but has since gone on to have very, you know, to be a lawyer and to run the grant prosecution service compared to Angela Rainer who's come up through the unions. What's the difference? I mean you've got your memories of childhood but you're a successful child aren't you? You've left school and done become a superstar successful director of public prosecutions etc. Angela Rainer will have experienced a bit more of what it's like to be an adult in the modern age, not just sort of, you know, fond memories of dad working in this tool maker or something. She does at least for some people give the credibility of actually being authentically experiencing some of the stuff that they have done and I think that's why it's actually important when people who've gone through trade unions as adults go into politics, they're actually representing people directly from a workplace environment quite often at least they used to. And so it's not just a sort of a memory of childhood. In Angela Rainer the UK now has a deputy prime minister who grew up on a council estate left school at 16 pregnant and became a care worker. She speaks proudly of her background and how it informs her ability to represent the country. I love the people I cared for but it was tough at times. I started on casual terms and I wasn't paid for travel. In security at work is the daily reality for so many. Far too many people across our country know that the world of work isn't working for them. So if we see everything in class terms and have a working class prime minister and deputy prime minister depending on how you like to measure these things, why does it all feel so unresolved? Why didn't the working class vote return to labour in 2024? To win the next election many labour strategists would like to know. And to figure it out we're heading back into the past. Margaret Sasha said that her greatest achievement Tony Blair, the thatcher years created a different sort of Labour party. But in Labour, in the Labour narrative, he is now something of a villain for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being, as far as class is concerned, that he was insufficiently concerned with traditional Labour values and traditional Labour policies and much too concerned with appeasing the traditional enemies of the party who eventually they would say consumed him. That's next time on Know Your Place from the Conversation Documentaries. This podcast was written by me Laura Hood and our producer Anuk Miyai. She also mixed the series. Our executive producer is Gemma Weir. If you'd like to get in touch, please email us at [email protected] and do sign up for the conversation's free daily newsletter by clicking on the link in our show notes. This series is a production of the conversation and not-for-profit news organisation working with academics to share their knowledge with the general public. If you like what we do, please consider donating to the conversation by going to donate.theconversation.com. Thank you again to the National Centre for Social Research for supporting this series and thank you for listening. I'm Gemma Weir, host of the Conversation Weekly podcast. Each week I speak to an academic expert about a topic in the news to understand how we got here from global politics. World War 2 has this very long shadow in all of East Asia because there's a lot of unfinished business. 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