How Labour Lost The Working Class

May 8, 2021 Hunter Wallace Alt-Center, Britain, Culture, PC, Politics, Populists, Progressives, Woke Supremacy, World 12

I’m experiencing déjà vu.

It is almost like we are talking about the same class of people who have taken over the Democratic Party in this country and who are steadily transforming it into what used to be the old Republican Party.

Alexei Arora:

“As council elections take place in the UK, one by-election in a Parliament seat has caught everyone’s eye. Hartlepool, a working-class Red Wall constituency that has never voted Conservative, elected a Conservative candidate for the first time. For those that have been following UK politics at least since the Corbyn era, if not before, this result was certainly interesting, but it wasn’t shocking.

Ever since the election of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Labour has witnessed a decline in the share of working-class voters. While those in the far-left of the party may mock current leader Keir Starmer, and those on the center to right of the party may mock Corbynites, the fact is that this trend is structural and long in the making. Every single leader from Tony Blair to Keir Starmer is to blame.

To understand this trend, let’s look at how Tony Blair won in 1997 after an 18-year Conservative party spell. …

This sentiment reflected a growing schism between Labour’s professional-class voters and working-class voters —who had diametrically opposing cultural views— which was only to accelerate. Nonetheless, David Cameron’s Conservative party won 306 seats and formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats as Labour was out of power after 13 years. Below is a map of Labour’s performance from 2001 to 2010. Pay special attention to the Red Wall working-class constituencies highlighted with a crimson rectangle …

The Labour Party is no longer the party of the working-class. It must first accept this fact before it charts out a path forward. Currently, Labour’s voter base consists of socially liberal, college-educated and professional-class urban voters who hate their country. They consider themselves global citizens rather than British citizens; their cultural policies are at odds with lower and middle-class Brits, and their economic policies assert their class dominance while at best throwing crumbs at workers. …

The picture is actually much more simple than what people might want you to think: you cannot win the votes of the working-class, or the British people, if you vocally despise both. …

In sum, the Labour Party is must radically change to appeal to the cultural and economic policies of the working-class instead of the professional class, or it will fade away into irrelevance. Either the party can be saved one last time, or it must be abolished to create a new one. Regardless, the status quo only paves the way for its demise.”

The “far right” in both countries are the same people: largely working class voters who were traditional Democrat or Labour voters who have socially conservative values and who were alienated by the extreme antiracism, cosmopolitanism and modernism of the PMCs who hijacked those parties.

Breitbart:

“Not surprisingly, as Labour’s geography has shifted, so, too, has its ideology: away away from workers and classes, and toward the trendier lefty categories of race and gender.  The Labour Party has, in a word, become “woke.” 

So we might pause to hear the voice of Paul Embery, a trade unionist and disillusioned Labourite, who earlier this year published a book about what’s wrong with his party, bluntly entitled, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. In Embery’s telling, Labour has forsaken its communitarian and socially conservative roots and focuses now instead on a “poisonous brew” of wokedom and political correctness.  Furthermore, it’s bulked up with “middle-class, Guardian-reading bohemians and pseudo-intellectuals … pursuing an uber-liberal, youth-obsessed, London-centric agenda.” 

In other words, today’s Labour offers no home—and perhaps only contempt—for Embrey-type working stiffs.  These are the men and women who seek home, place, family, relationships, and work.  As Embery writes, “We are social and parochial beings with a profound attachment to place and a desire to belong. . . . Working class people seek to revive the politics of belonging, place and community as an antidote to galloping globalization.”

How the Americans Can Do It

So if we could earlier see parallels between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, we can now see plenty of parallels between leftists, there and here.  

You see, the Democrats, too, have forsaken their origins as the party of laborers, farmers, artisans, and mechanics. And so the old Democratic coalition of our seventh president, Andrew Jackson—that combination of Southern Protestants and Northern Catholics that boosted Democrats for the better part of two centuries—has fallen apart.  More precisely, the old Jacksonian coalition is now the new Republican coalition.  

In the meantime, as happened to Labour in the U.K., the U.S. Democrats have become the party of the cities—blue dots, we call them. These new Democrats are on the left, and yet, as we know, it’s a wokey kind of leftism; as James Carville would say, too many of today’s Democrats are more snobbish than anything else.  

Yet Republicans will only start to win big when they, too, can discern the angel in marble—that is, they can see the inner conservatism in working people of all races and genders—and shape it into electoral success.  

Today, plenty of top Republicans—including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio—have spoken fondly of the GOP’s becoming the natural home for workers, and yet it’s fair to say that the process is still ongoing. 

For instance, when another pro-worker GOPer, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana—the new chairman of the House Republican Study Committee—put forth a detailed policy agenda, he was criticized by the third-ranking Republican in the House, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who reportedly described Banks’ document as “neo-Marxist and wrong.” …”

All of this is well and good.

It really hinges though on whether the Republican Party is capable of representing the cultural and economic interests of working class voters and pushing a policy agenda that reflects its values. This new Republican Party would look like and sound like the old Democratic Party of the early 19th century under Andrew Jackson or the early 20th century under William Jennings Bryan.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

11 Comments

  1. “In fact, the war between the two camps is, in many respects, a phoney one. There is far more that unites them than either would care to admit — or even seem to comprehend. Both are imbued with the same bourgeois, metropolitan, globalist worldview. Both aim their pitch at the student, the social activist, the fellow middle-class progressive, at Twitter. Both obsess about identity politics and “diversity”. Both hitch their wagon to every minority crusade and then afford to it an undue level of prominence. Both are largely ignorant — and often contemptuous — of the lives and priorities of those in small-town Britain, of their communitarian impulse, traditional values, desire for belonging and sense of national pride.” – Paul Embery https://unherd.com/2021/05/labour-isnt-working/

    “British jobs for British workers.”

    Hmmmm. Reminds me of the old Labour Party and the BNP.

    • The Northern voter is clearly watching the mess in the US and abandoning the Labour Party over the impendung race stuff. No Spox will say it out loud but this by election wasn’t about Corbyn or Starmer. Its all about race.

    • It’s the exact same thing here and in Britain: the jews convinced the corporate CEOs & other cosmopolitan professionals to shitcan the White working class – with their pesky demands for a fairer distribution of the wealth they created with their own hands – in favor of a new coalition of unappeasable muds, effete urban bohemian snobs & faggot freaks.

      And the solution is the same, too: a return to sane social & cultural policies matched with populist economics that counter the devastating economic war that’s been waged against the people of Flyova by the contemptuous moneyed shitlibs for decades.

  2. And for anyone who likes the to read the Guardian comment section (left wing liberal UK newspaper) the comment section is great:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/08/british-jobs-workers-fascist-government-brexit-plan#comments

    Highest ranked comment from the article: “Your position is ridiculous. Aspiring to put British citizens at the front of the jobs queue is not even racist, let alone fascist. You need to confer with a dictionary and understand what those words actually mean before virtue waving them around in a newspaper article.”

    (it kinda is but people have the the colorblind reactionary deniability imbued with a subconscious nativism. they don’t recognize and champion it overtly. life goes on).

    • Not quite. There’s only 2,500,000 blacks. The US has 45,000,000…doomed? Perhaps if the Scots stlit away.

      • The government and populace won’t even dish out retribution against Paki rape gangs. What’s going to happen when you aren’t even a majority?

  4. From ASIMOV, Isaac, Foundation (originally Doubleday: 1951) Bantam (New York: 2004) hardcover, page 134 (Part III, “The Mayors,” chapter 8)

    A horse having a wolf as a powerful and dangerous enemy lived in constant fear of its life. Being driven to desperation, it occurred to him to seek a strong ally. Whereupon he approached a man and offered an alliance, pointing out that the wolf was likewise an enemy of the man. The man accepted the new partnership at once, and offered to kill the wolf immediately if his new partner would only cooperate by placing his greater speed at the man’s disposal. The horse was willing, and allowed the man to place saddle and bridle upon him. The man mounted, hunted down the wolf, and killed him. The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man and said, “Now that our enemy is dead, remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.” Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, “Never!” and applied the spurs with a will.

    COMMENTARY: Orthodox Marxism postulates the working class collectively as the horse which Marxist intellectuals would ride to State power. Orthodox Marxism is as worshipful of the economy as is any bourgeois. Other departments of life are mere superstructure. More recent spinoffs (heresies?) postulate different segments of society than the working class as their pet change agents, and execrate the working class (‘racism,” anyone? “sexism,” anyone? xenophobia, anyone? etcetera ad infinitum) for not performing the role assigned to it by Marxist theology. (One wonders whether the hatred of American Marxists for Russia, is not the hatred of the believer [even if his belief-system is heretical by orthodox standards] for the apostate.)

    Because the Left has abandoned the working class, a “Labour” Party is a malignant tumor in any Body Politic so unfortunate as to host one.

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