“I’m not working class any more,” Keir Starmer told LBC’s Nick Ferrari this week. Of course that’s the case. As the Daily Mail rushed to point out, he has just paid off his mortgage on a £2m house, and earned a lot as a barrister and as the director of public prosecutions. The right loves to probe the hypocrisies and the “champagne socialism” of Labour people. The Bollinger Bullingdon Club members, meanwhile, are just fine as they don’t pretend to do good.
Tool-maker father, nurse mother, a childhood in which at times they struggled to pay bills – this we know about Starmer. Politicians do need to talk about their origins because it tells us where they’re coming from, in every sense. Why else were those infamous Bullingdon photos suppressed that displayed those young masters of the universe David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, among other luminaries, at their arrogant worst? Class origins matter.
This cabinet is the most working-class in history, with some from backgrounds of grinding hardship. Wes Streeting’s remarkable autobiography tells of a family where neglect and crime were commonplace. He came up via good teachers pushing him to go to a summer school at Cambridge and there was no looking back from there. Angela Rayner’s story is harsher: a single mother at 16 in Stockport, no qualifications, she worked as a carer before rising up through the trade union movement. Bridget Phillipson’s single mother was poor in Sunderland. David Lammy and Steve Reed came up the hard way. And so on.
Roughly 46% of the cabinet had parents with working-class occupations – well above the average for the rest of the working population, according to sociologists Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s new book, Born to Rule: the Making and Remaking of the British Elite. According to the Sutton Trust, only 4% were educated privately, which is significantly lower than previous Labour cabinets and in another world to Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, of which 63% were privately educated.
But no, of course they aren’t working-class now: MPs earn £91,346 and cabinet ministers an extra £67,505, while the national median wage is £35,000. But where they come from matters a lot. Looking at the latest Who’s Who – a catalogue of the most influential people in Britain – Reeves and Freidman examined 3,000 of its entrants and found “British elites from working-class backgrounds tend to tilt to the left politically and socially” and “are more likely to favour increasing taxes on the rich, to emphasise reducing poverty, and to think Britain is a racist country”.
These days, among the successful there is often a hankering to inflate your authentic working-class roots. I enjoyed a recent LSE survey of those in professional or senior managerial jobs that found an astonishing 47% of this well-paid cadre call themselves working class. Starmer is right to avoid that trap. A quarter of those in the survey actually had parents in middle-class occupations yet they still called themselves working class, referring back to grandparents or even great-grandparents’ occupations. The reason they feel they need that good working-class origin story is to prove they have earned their privilege. The right approach is to recognise that very large numbers of us in good jobs had a great boost, financially and educationally, because of our childhood backgrounds.
Admitting to being middle class can be embarrassing. That’s why I have tried in my memoir, An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals, to be honest about how privilege is passed down the generations, benefiting from the self-confidence, the security, and the second and third chances if you mess up. My family of successful professionals have all been on the left, and were all confounded by the question of how to square their advantages with their beliefs; always painfully aware of falling short, and the remedies sought were sometimes comical. It’s painful to fess up to a background of every advantage: I searched for a working-class ancestor, but found not a twig of the family tree with which to claim I had earned my place. I watch with amusement others who have academics or doctors for parents who affect working-classness. Everyone wants to show they have the merit to deserve their status.
This cabinet takes over a country in which social mobility has gone backwards and the gap between rich and poor keeps widening. People are less likely to escape their roots than when I was born. Starmer and all of the new government talk earnestly of opportunity and fulfilment for every child, and they mean it. Every Labour government improves the lot of the poor, of children and pensioners: undoubtedly, this one will too. By how much, we don’t know.
Against an onslaught from the Tories and their pliant press, they have said they will take VAT relief from private schools, when no other Labour government dared touch them for fear of being accused of “the politics of envy”. The seriousness of their intent is beyond doubt and their backgrounds mean they know exactly what an extra £20 a week on benefits means to families on the edge, because they’ve seen it themselves. That is the £20 uplift that Sunak would later whip away after Covid, a man whose only disadvantage he could think of was that he went without Sky TV in his Winchester childhood. Best not to claim, as Kemi Badenoch foolishly did, that she of middle-class background “became working class” when she worked as a student at McDonald’s.
The Tories and their press will continue to slam Labour people over class. Rayner gets it non-stop: whether for going to the opera or for dancing in Ibiza, she can’t seem to win. Mostly, they seek out hypocrisy, which makes it essential that anyone on the left is absolutely honest about their background. Never pretend. The working-class background of this cabinet is likely to do more for the people and places of their past than they have dared propose so far.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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