Social Democracy Upside Down

As he stepped into political oblivion, Keir Starmer sought to reassure himself. He told the country and his successor that he had ‘saved’ Labour; that he had taken a ‘politically, financially, and morally bankrupt’ party and restored it to power. MPs and pundits nodded along.

No special insight is required to see that this is brazenly wrong. Labour was in rude financial health under Corbyn and the party has rarely been more politically unpopular than it is today, to take just two aspects. But we should now move above these commonplaces and start trying to grasp the deeper causes of Labour’s decline. That means focusing on the class origins of the party’s struggles, their connection to the disintegration of the party system, and how that process might be intervened in. 

In 1920, Lenin designated Labour a party of workers that was nonetheless ‘thoroughly bourgeois.’ The formula captured a contradiction at the heart of 20th century Social Democracy: a political form that sought to reconcile working class demands for reform with the entrenched class relations of capitalist society. 

This was not merely a weakness threatening collapse or a problem to be solved. Like many contradictions, it also generated social power for its bearers. In the latter part of the 20th century, Labour performed important functions in the renewal of British capitalism, particularly after 1945. Through the party’s reforming achievements, a mass workers’ movement could be integrated into post-war British capitalism. Yet conflict could not be wished away. It inhered in the process, and by the 1970s this settlement was coming apart. 

Returning from its wilderness years under the leadership of Tony Blair, Labour quickly shed its working-class voting profile. Research by Professors Oliver Heath and Humphrey Southall has shown that between 1992 and 2010, the difference between Labour support in the most working class and most middle class constituencies fell from 31 percent to 24 percent. It then collapsed to just 12 percent by the 2024 election. Still thoroughly bourgeois, but not so much a party of workers.

This process of class dealignment was mirrored in the withdrawal of principally working class voters from electoral participation. In the 1992 election, voter turnout was 77.7 percent. In 2024, it was just 59.7 percent. By this point, the list of constituencies recording votes under 45 percent maps to those with the worst deprivation rankings: Birmingham Ladywood, 2 of 543; Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, 8; Blackley and Middleton South, 9. Dozens of working class seats now turn out less than half of eligible voters at general elections. 

Yet even then, these figures understate the extent of electoral erosion among the working class. According to the Electoral Commission, somewhere between 7-8 million voters are missing from the roles, and these are disproportionately workers.

This pattern was not sustainably reversed by the Corbyn years. The adoption of the second referendum position dealt a hammer blow to the remarkable Labour recovery of 2017, severing again the party’s connection to large chunks of the working class vote. Of the 54 English and Welsh seats Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019, 52 voted Leave. The places where Labour lost the biggest vote share were solidly Leave-voting.

Starmer’s election against an exhausted and reviled Tory party in 2024 did not reverse this damage, either. Though Labour returned in many seats it had lost and achieved an overall majority, it did so by winning just 35 percent of voters on a low turnout; a share just 1.4 percent up on 2019 and 5 percent lower than Labour’s 2017 narrow defeat. Few were shocked, therefore, when the same voters quickly turned on Starmer as he unveiled cuts and failed to meet working class concerns over inflation.

Today, the traditional contradiction at the heart of social democracy has been largely displaced, as most fractions of the working class find themselves outside the tent. This means the Labour Party’s old function of systemic stabilisation through class mediation is not only limited but increasingly upturned. Labour and the wider party-political system have become sources of instability, manifesting a widespread mood of dissatisfaction and directing public anger at a point near the top of the state.

The ‘union link’, always highly bureaucratised, reflects relations between a party machine and union leaderships which are by and large even more insulated from working class organisation and insurgency today than in decades past.

The old connection between the working class and Labour still manifests spasmodically. Corbyn increased Labour’s vote among workers in 2017 (though not as much as he did among the young and formally educated). Andy Burnham romped home in the Makerfield by-election by signalling a return to old Labourist values while largely excluding the party brand from his campaign. But these flashes of muscle memory are reducing in frequency and potency.

Now under Burnham, the hollowed-out shell of social democracy will be expected to carry out the main tasks of British capitalism today, such as reducing welfare spending and ramping up militarism. Winning consent for this programme will be a tall order for Labour, given the decades of its class base eroding.

We can expect confrontations to brutally shake Burnham, as they did Starmer. The question is now whether working class anger can be harnessed to resist this drive to war and against working class interests, or whether it will form the backdrop for fresh assaults from the right.