Return of the Working Class?

Andy Burnham’s new premiership was launched with the bold declaration that ‘this country does not work for working-class communities like the city of my birth’. The northerner casts himself as a champion of former industrial communities which have suffered the worst effects of manufacturing and mining job losses as well as diminishing union power. He has committed to overturning ‘four decades of neoliberalism’, defined by a series of entwined disasters: ‘political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised, austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this.’

This rhetorical radicalism is all the more notable in that it comes from someone who was once a thoroughly conventional New Labour politician. Burnham became a special advisor in the Blair government at a young age before getting elected as an MP and serving as Health Secretary under Gordon Brown. His 2015 leadership campaign tried to replay the optimism of 1997. Initially the frontrunner, he crashed and burned after he abstained on the Cameron government’s punitive Welfare Reform bill. His apparent political conversion has been told as the story of a politician who left Westminster to become the mayor of Greater Manchester. Yet it is more helpful to view it as a reflection of shifts in British society.

Class has now returned to politics after being pronounced dead in the closing decades of the twentieth century. One powerful indication was the brief but intense popularity enjoyed by Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the National Union of Rail and Maritime Transport Workers, during the ‘strike wave’ of 2022–23, which saw annual days lost to walkouts by workers reach levels not seen since the 1980s. Lynch declared at the time that ‘the working class is back’. He gave a broader political outlook to a series of disputes involving railway and postal workers and teachers, along with strikes by other workers in the private sector ranging from North Sea oil platforms to Amazon warehouses. His arguments raised public support for the strikers and helped advance an argument that working people shouldn’t pay for economic crises not of their making. Yet any such appeal to ‘the working class’ in the 2020s raises at least as many questions as it answers: Who are the working class? How do they mobilise? Who represents them politically?

My new book, An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class, explores how the return of class in this decade maps onto the disappearance of its once powerful predecessor. Unlike today, the decades after WWII did not leave much room for ambiguity about who the working class is, how it organises or what its political affiliations are. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, most manual workers voted Labour at general elections, and they were likely to be members of Labour-affiliated trade unions. Council housing tenancies created strong bonds between municipal authorities and working-class constituencies, along with moments of conflict and mobilisation. In Scotland, most workers and their families were council tenants in the early 1980s, before the introduction of Right to Buy. By the late 1970s, council housing was the most common tenancy form for English and Welsh workers classified as unskilled and semi-skilled.

Affiliations between occupation, place and class consciousness acted as a foundation for solidarities which reverberated from localities to the national level. This was the working class of the NHS, the National Coal Board and the British Energy Authority. Whilst regional and national distinctions were important, political identity overwhelmingly meant a unitary Britishness. It was also a working class which was central to new forms of modernising national culture such as television — from dramatic Coronation Street storylines to Morecambe and Wise’s variety act — even as the tenements, miners’ rows and Working Men’s Clubs were increasingly giving way to more privatised forms of living.

New appeals to class are by no means confined to the Labour Party or even the broadly defined political left. Following the crushing defeats suffered by organised labour and by other redoubts of collectivist politics in the 1980s, such as the left in municipal government, class has become increasingly unmoored from its Labourist traditions. In part this is a result of a prolonged period where class politics was actively reviled and rejected by the institutions which had formerly claimed to speak for the working class. Most stridently, this was the case under New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s. In his first term as Prime Minister, Tony Blair went as far as to declare that ‘the class war is over’ when he addressed the Labour Party conference in 1999. New Labour ideologues argued that socialism belonged among the embarrassing residues of the past during a period where history had ended and Britain could restore a progressive liberal tradition which rejected class conflict.

It was in fact these certainties which proved to be work of hackneyed ideologues. In the aftermath of Brexit, the claim to speak for ‘the left behind’ regions of England and Wales who had strongly supported leaving the European Union became politically potent. Given the prominent role of Thatcherism in the marginalisation and defeat of the left and the labour movement, it is notable that the next prime minister who would boldly claim to speak for the working class was in fact another Conservative. In 2016, Theresa May announced that she would champion ‘ordinary, working-class families’ who had been failed by her predecessors, Labour and Tory alike. May’s attempt at a populist appeal was founded on rejecting the mores of polite society: ‘a lot of people don’t like to admit it’, the prime minister told the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, but to, ‘someone who finds themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration, life simply doesn’t seem fair’.

May went on to attack employers who chose to hire foreign workers over British ones. In drawing her dividing line between the loyal ‘citizens of somewhere’ and the globally oriented ‘citizens of nowhere’ she was attempting to redraw dominant understandings of the throughlines between class, region and party politics firmly to the right. Boris Johnson, May’s ouster, appeared to have even greater success in pursuing the same broad agenda. He claimed to speak for the overlooked ‘red wall’ of traditionally-Labour voting constituencies in former manufacturing and mining areas of England and Wales. The politics of class interest behind this were always tenuous to put it lightly. They rested on assuming the owners of JCB and the workers at its Staffordshire factories had more in common than they did with liberal minded students or service workers of the larger cities. Nonetheless, along with a promise of realising sovereignty through ‘getting Brexit done’ and ‘levelling up’ struggling regions of the north of England, Johnson formed a briefly powerful electoral coalition. As the Tories have atrophied, the rise of Reform on the far-right has been animated by claims to speak for a disenfranchised ‘white working class’ shut out from a society enthralled to multiculturalism and immigration. Thomas Kerr, a Reform Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Glasgow Region, routinely refers to ‘forgotten working-class communities’ left to rot by smug middle-class liberals who have imposed ills ranging from asylum seekers to a public health approach to drugs on right-thinking men and women.

Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, is another key exponent of straight-talking far-right politics. Anderson became Reform’s first MP when he defected after having the Tory whip withdrawn for claiming Labour leader Keir Starmer and London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, were ‘controlled by Islamists’. Anderson boasts of his credentials as a former miner and proudly stood with Nigel Farage at the unveiling of a memorial to Silverhill colliery in North Nottinghamshire, which was funded by a local Reform supporter. As Sacha Hilhorst explores, Farage dubiously spoke of local miners having lost their jobs after British coal was replaced by Polish competition. He conveniently overlooked the role of privatisation of both electricity production and coal mining as well as the legislative changes the Thatcher government enacted to encourage coal imports to defeat unionised mineworkers. This was not an isolated incident. Farage called for the nationalisation of Scunthorpe steelworks in April 2025 when it was threatened with closure, before Starmer’s government acted. The former City metals trader also donned a boilersuit on a visit to the Grangemouth petrochemicals complex in Scotland this year. Farage declared his solidarity with workers following the refinery closure in 2025 but laid the blame at the feet of the Labour government and green activists rather than the refinery owner, Petroineos, or its unionbusting boss, Jim Ratcliffe.

Conversely, an appeal to a different reading of class animated the surge in support visible for the Greens in English cities at local elections and the Gorton byelection in late 2025. The Green candidate at Gorton, Hannah Spencer, was styled as ‘Hannah the plumber’, which immediately provoked online controversy over the extent to which she was or was not an authentic skilled trades worker. More interestingly, Spencer also profiled herself as a small business owner. This was viewed as a badge of authenticity rather than a marker of difference between employers and employees. As economist James Meadway has highlighted, under left-wing leader Zack Polanski, the English Greens have been keen to profile themselves as a party that speaks for hairdressers and put-upon small local firms. In these terms, the Green voter base and class vision has some approximation to Dan Evans’ perspective on the power of what he terms the old petty bourgeois of small business owners, and the new one made up of downwardly mobile graduates. There is a coalitional logic here which any serious approach to class must take seriously. It poses questions over the extent to which the working class ought to be allied with the professional middle-class as well as small business owners, but is also arguably part of a trend to reduce unions to one of many interested groups. In turn, this risks downplaying the fundamental role of wage labour and workplace organisation in restoring working-class power.

This chaotic landscape is further complicated by constitutional questions which have eroded the coherent sense that there is a British working class to speak for. My book opens with reflections from Jimmy Hood, a Lanarkshire mining engineer who moved to Ollerton in Nottinghamshire in 1968 aged twenty before becoming he later moved back up the road to become the Labour MP for Clydesdale in South Lanarkshire in 1987. Hood was highly involved in both the national coal strikes of the 1970s before becoming a leader of the striking minority of Nottinghamshire miners in 1984–5. I recorded Hood’s reflections in his constituency office in 2014, a few months before the referendum on Scottish independence demonstrated pivotal divides among the voters which had supported Labour in large numbers as recently as 2010. Hood lost his seat a year later as his constituents were convinced the Scottish National Party better represented social democratic politics than a Labour Party tied to London. The refrain that voters hadn’t left Labour, but Labour had left them, was a motif of the 2015 general election. In Wales a similar pattern is now evolving, with Plaid Cymru displacing Labour in the Valleys constituencies to form the first nationalist-led government this spring.

As much as the national framing is integral to the politics of class, the bigger overriding contingency is the material realities of conflicts of interests in workplaces, over housing and public spending. Burnham’s rhetorical commitments to class and even overturning neoliberalism are matched by only meagre commitments when it comes to economic or social change. He has already seemingly retreated from ambitions to take English water into public ownership despite the vast environmental and financial damage incurred under privatisation. Labour’s newfound politics of class appear defensive and motivated by the incoherence of the centrist denouncement of collectivism as inspired by any coherent programme. A viable politics of class can only be made through evidence that collective mobilisation centred on exercising the power of workers, tenants and communities as well as at the ballot box can deliver sustained material improvements. In contrast with the pronounced political death of class in the 1990s and 2000s, the working class is now frequently invoked by a variegated set of political trends who claim to speak for labour. If a working-class politics is to be remade, it must be based on forms of economic and political power that are organised and wielded by workers themselves.