After the 2024 election, the British parliament looks very different, with a large Labour majority for the first time in more than a decade. While we don’t yet have a full analysis of the socioeconomic background of the new crop of MPs, the Sutton Trust calculated that 23% were privately educated, a record low in almost 50 years of monitoring. Several cabinet ministers come from working-class backgrounds, including the prime minister, deputy prime minister and foreign secretary. What impact will the upbringing of this new parliament have on the way Britain is governed?
In the fourth part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, we examine the link between representation and political change and ask will Britain’s new look parliament herald meaningful reform?
David Hanson says what got him into politics was his background. The former Labour MP held several governmnet positions during the New Labour years. In July, he was made Baron Hanson of Flint and now sits as a Home Office minister in Keir Starmer’s government. Hanson grew up on a council estate in Winsford in Cheshire.
I was surrounded by people who faced great poverty. I would see the real impacts of people who were working in factories. Sometimes you’d wake up in the morning and the neighbour across the road had left the house overnight and done what we used to call a moonlight flip: they’d gone because of poverty and debts chasing them.
Hanson’s mother had only survived a serious attack of tuberculosis, she told him, because of the treatment she got free on the NHS. So he says when he got to parliament in 1992, these experiences meant the issues which mattered to him were the minimum wage, regeneration, the health service and community cohesion.
An MP’s background shapes what they do when they get elected, according to Vladimir Bortun, a postdoctoral fellow in politics at the University of Oxford. He recently spent hours interviewing 24 former MPs from working class backgrounds. Just as in Hanson’s case, Bortun found that a person’s class origin very much shaped their political outlook.
We found out that it’s not just a parental direct influence, which is usually assumed as the class origins, but also the broader family network. It’s also the local community, especially for working class MPs who grew up on council estates in working class communities, where everybody knew everybody and many people work in the same place together. There was this strong, collective bond and community spirit.
Muddle class
In 1945, roughly a quarter of MPs had a working-class background, assessed by their occupation before entering parliament. By 2019, this was only 7%. This shift has been accompanied by a marked increase in the number of MPs, regardless of their background, who have a university degree. Rosie Campbell, professor of politics at King’s College London, believes this is significant:
Even if they do think of themselves as coming from a working-class background, by the time they’ve entered politics, they have had quite a different life experience from the average working class person in this country.
Hanson and some of his cohort of MPs who entered parliament in the early 1990s had a term for it: muddle class. This refers to a working class kid who went on to university and worked for a decade or so in a middle-class profession before becoming an MP.
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Angela Rayner, the new deputy prime minister, is a working-class woman who came up through the unions and refuses to stop talking about class. For Campbell, having more people with Rayner’s type of experience in politics can only be a good thing.
You’re going to have empathy and understanding of the experiences of other people going through similar life chances … my view is it’s about diversity of experience, diversity of employed experience, diversity of childhood experiences.
For more analysis on how these experiences influence the way MPs govern and the choices they make, listen to the full episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics on The Conversation Documentaries. It also includes an interview with newly elected Labour MP Jeevun Sandher.
A transcript is available on Apple Podcasts.
Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics is produced and mixed by Anouk Millet for The Conversation. It’s supported by the National Centre for Social Research.
Newsclips in the episode from Guardian News, BBC News, Bloomberg Television, Sky News, AP Archive, BBC, 5News and Angela Rayner on Facebook.
Listen to The Conversation Documentaries via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.
Vladimir Bortun does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Rosie Campbell receives funding from the ESRC, the UKRI andThe Leverhulme Trust.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
