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Author: BAGEHOT
On July 3, Jeremy Corbyn told Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, that “Labour has re-emerged as the political voice of the working class”. This would be great if it were true: after all, Labour was founded to represent the working class, which has been badly hit in recent years by the casualisation of the workforce and economic stagnation. Alas, this is nonsense. Labour’s connection with the working class has been weakening over the past 30 years – and it continues to weaken under Corbyn.
Labour’s split from the working class can be divided into two stages. The first was during Tony Blair’s time in office. Blair saw Labour’s future as the party of the professional middle class: university-educated people who worked with their heads rather than their hands and believed in the dual liberalism of free markets and progressive morality. The Labour Party apparatus was taken over by identical professional politicians who graduated from the same universities (usually Harvard and Oxford) and worked for the same think tanks. Women made up a large proportion of these freeze-dried samples. Just as the rapid expansion of universities benefited middle-class women far more than working-class men, Labour’s list of female candidates accelerated Labour’s transformation from a working-class party to a middle-class party.
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