Keir Starmer, if you didn’t know it already, is the son of a toolmaker. It’s a line he has repeated often, reflecting his team’s wider strategy to highlight the Labour leader’s less-privileged roots and appeal to working-class voters. In fact, recent reporting about his camp has revealed a leadership intensely focused on class.
Starmer’s team is acutely aware of the challenge facing Labour after the long process of deindustrialisation – and the reporting suggests they are keen to put Labour back in touch with parts of the working class and other low-income groups. Hence the “toolmaker” line and Starmer’s repeated, if slightly awkward, references to his love of football.
If Labour wins, as looks likely, this strategy will probably be hailed as a masterstroke. But if the party is serious about reconnecting with the working class in the long term, which it needs to do if it wants to actually hold on to power, there is a more complicated reality it must reckon with. Despite their humble origins, Starmer and much of his shadow cabinet are now representatives of a different class entirely – indeed, one that has a fraught relationship with the working class.
In 1977, the US sociologists Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC) to describe the growth and consolidation of a technocratic class of managers and elite professionals. As the writer Kenan Malik has put it: “There had developed, [the Ehrenreichs] argued, a new class of college-educated professionals, from engineers and middle managers to social workers and culture producers, that was distinct from the middle class of old but essential to the functioning of capitalism.” The PMC is distinct from “white-collar workers” because of its specific role in managing the state, the workforce, and indeed capitalism itself, on behalf of the old ruling class. It not only developed and administered the technology that sped up the production process, but as social workers they managed the family and community; as advertisers they sold new goods.
The hope among the militants of the 60s and 70s such as the Ehrenreichs was that the PMC and the working class could join forces to take on growing corporate power. But this didn’t happen, and the class gradually came to believe it could run the state more efficiently and benevolently than the old ruling class, eventually reaching political maturity during the Blair and Clinton era of progressive neoliberalism.
Today, members of the PMC in the UK are clustered in politics and the public sector, media, advertising, law, social work and the third sector. They are concentrated in London, university towns and the home counties, but also form the governments of Wales and Scotland and make up much of the parliamentary Labour party. They are of all colours, genders and sexual orientations, but are united by a distinct ideology and culture: a strongly held belief in technical expertise and the power of education, coupled with an increasingly deep hostility to those who do not sufficiently respect these norms.
Starmer is in many ways the ultimate embodiment of the PMC. While he is evidently uncomfortable talking about himself, the interview in which he has appeared the most at ease, casual and animated, was on the High Performance podcast – on which “high-achieving, successful individuals” are questioned on the secrets of their success. He displayed an evident passion for leadership and management strategies, and a distaste for politicians “describing problems and not fixing them” – as if the job of political change was just a set of problems that can be looked at in isolation and ticked off, one by one. He also has a strongly held belief in tech and AI. His shadow cabinet is fixated on the possibility of “reforming” public service provision, particularly the NHS, for which Starmer has said technology will be used “to overhaul every aspect of delivery”. According to this view, there is little need for more money or investment when problems can be solved by better management and more “innovative” systems.
His fervent belief in education, and that it should primarily be used to facilitate social mobility, is similarly part of PMC gospel. But social mobility, by its very nature, means that inequality will be left untouched, while a chosen few with the “right qualities” will be able to make it. Worse, it implies that the lower orders are something to escape. And herein lies the historic paradox of Labour’s complicated relationship with the working class, an issue that goes much deeper than Starmer himself.
Because it was birthed to manage them, the PMC has always had a contradictory attitude towards the lower orders, whom it views with a blend of romantic paternalism and contempt. Working-class people need to be saved, goes the view, to be helped by us – the experts – because they are incapable of helping themselves. This technocratic paternalism has always been latent in the Labour party through the Fabian Society, a middle-class guild that was deeply suspicious of the working class, and whose vision was of a scientific, rational socialism delivered from above.
The PMC instinct is often to ban, prod and moralise to the working class, rather than empower it. Sure Start is lionised as a New Labour success story – and it produced important outcomes – yet it was accompanied by sanctimonious attacks on single mothers, problem families and asbos, while Labour embraced the Thatcherite economic policies of deindustrialisation and privatisation that partly caused community and family breakdown in the first place. Rachel Reeves has similarly demonised those on benefits, while Liz Kendall has promised to push the long-term sick back into work to boost productivity, while keeping the two-child benefits cap.
Every time Labour has got into power, from Harold Wilson to Tony Blair, enthusiasm for the party has waned among working-class voters. One could attribute this to the natural swings of politics, but it appears there is something far more concrete at play. The truth is that many working-class voters are turned off by the authoritarian paternalism that Labour governments exhibit. The progressive PMC has never really understood this, whereas the right has, and exploits it ruthlessly. Margaret Thatcher was so successful because her ideology of “freedom” was able to tap into a long-held working-class hostility to the state bureaucracy and these paternalistic tendencies. Indeed, the perceived officiousness and illiberalism of the PMC has repeatedly allowed elements of the ruling class to present themselves as outsiders.
Amid the speculation about the policies a Starmer government will actually enact, one thing we can bank on is more moralising and nannying – this is the muscle memory of the class he represents. Nigel Farage must be licking his lips.
Dan Evans is the author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie
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