Despised. Paul Embery

Yet, as the full impact of the new global market began to take hold, and as their lives and community were subjected to rapid and unprecedented economic and demographic change, their expressions of anxiety and discontent fell on deaf ears. They soon came to realise that not only was much of the liberal establishment impervious to their plight, it actively despised them.

      Everything they had ever known was suddenly transforming around them. The cheerleaders for globalisation told them it was all for their own good. They said it would bring improved GDP and cultural enrichment. But the people of Barking and Dagenham felt no better for it financially, culturally or spiritually. It wasn’t change per se that they opposed; it was the sheer pace and scale of it. And if I – a young left-wing activist and member of the Anti-Nazi League who had marched against the National Front – could understand this (as I came to eventually), why couldn’t the politicians who had been around for much longer?

So it came as no surprise, at least not to those of us living in the borough, when the far-right British National Party (BNP) moved in and took advantage, coming from nowhere to win a dozen seats on the local council in 2006 – the party’s best ever result in local government. Just a few years previous, such an event would have been unimaginable in Barking and Dagenham. When, though, the BNP proved ultimately to be no solution to their woes, tens of thousands of locals, their patience exhausted, simply moved away. For them, the place was no longer home. They left behind a borough scarred by atomisation and resentment. Where there was once an enduring harmony, there now existed discord. A solid, stable, blue-collar, working-class community had been torn apart, its people betrayed, and few with any kind of power or influence seemed in the slightest bit bothered about the fact. As I often said to friends and neighbours afterwards, ‘Someone really ought to write a book about what happened here.’

      Hundreds of working-class communities similar to Barking and Dagenham can speak of their own experiences of having been neglected by our political class in recent times. These places – inhabited by proud citizens who place a high value on social solidarity, belonging and rootedness, and are often imbued with what many among the political and cultural elites deem to be outdated and uncultivated views – have become the new frontier in British politics. The quiet – and, more latterly, not so quiet – rebellion that has been fomenting in these areas is what gave us Brexit. It’s what gave us the evisceration of the Labour Party in 2019. It’s what has created a challenge to the dominance of cosmopolitan liberalism, which its advocates were certain represented the end point of social progress.

      The people in these places cried out to those in power to heed their concerns. But for years these cries went unheard. That Labour – the party towards which so many working-class voters had for decades shown so much loyalty – was complicit in this disregard of them was inexcusable and ought never to be forgotten.

Labour was certain that it knew better than those who had supported and sustained it for over a century. The party tried to tell them what was good for them and it brooked no dissent. If the working class couldn’t see the virtues of global liberal progressivism, then it was wilfully ignorant.

      This mindset owes itself to the fact that there has existed for some time on the Left a disturbing level of group-think, the consequence of which is that key planks of ideology are rarely challenged and the certainty of partisans in their own moral rightness is mutually reinforced. By extension, those who dare to think or argue differently – especially if they do so from within the movement – are marginalised and abused.

      This, in turn, has created a culture on the Left – one which in recent years has begun to infect public life generally – in which freedom of expression is nominally defended but is, in reality, under attack as never before. Honest debate and disagreement, particularly around contentious issues, are becoming increasingly precious. In their place, a rigid and oppressive conformity is demanded. Opinions that are still common currency across large parts of our nation have been delegitimised and effectively banished from the public square.

      We have a new national religion – liberal wokedom – and anyone who blasphemes against it can expect to be vilified by its high priests and followers. Those who hold positions of prominence or influence had better be especially careful, for they risk seeing their livelihoods or reputations destroyed if they dare express dissent.

These days, arguments are frequently shut down simply by one party in the dispute claiming to have been ‘offended’. Giving offence – even unintentionally and regardless of the merits of what has been said or done – is itself now seen as a sin worthy of punishment. Where we once placed a high premium on reasoned and respectful debate permitting the expression of a range of diverse and competing views, we now have echo chambers, ‘safe spaces’ and draconian hate legislation, all of which serve the purpose of supressing unwelcome opinions and enforcing an official orthodoxy from which nobody can expect to depart without repercussions.

      It is no coincidence that at the same time as acting as the driver for this suffocating new reality, the Left has increasingly immersed itself in the destructive creed of identity politics, in which minorities are divided into discrete categories according to their race or religion or sexuality, and classified as inherent victims who must be protected from an oppressive and ‘privileged’ majority. This entire approach has, in practice, gone far beyond the laudable objective of defending people against prejudice, and has sought instead to promote the separateness and unique characteristics of these groups as virtuous in their own right, and the groups themselves as thereby worthy of favourable political treatment. Needless to say, all of this serves only to fragment the working class and undermine what should be the primary goal of developing common bonds and building the maximum unity required to defend its interests.

The modern Left and the working class currently inhabit separate worlds and are motivated by conflicting priorities. The fact that at the 2019 general election – after nearly a decade of Tory-imposed austerity – so many working-class voters were willing to place their faith in a Tory party led by an old Etonian instead of the party that was considered to be their ‘natural home’ is a stark reflection of the extent of this estrangement. Whether the Tories are able to hold on to these voters will depend on whether they improve their lives and communities in a tangible and lasting way, providing them with hope, investment and opportunity. If they do, Labour’s problems will only deepen, for there is no route back to power that does not pass through these places and win back the hearts and minds of those who live in them.

      There is a chance, of course, that Labour has lost for ever much of its one-time core vote. That’s why it would be a fatal error for the party to assume that things could not get even worse. An organisation whose members, activists and representatives have so little in common with so many working-class voters – neither speaking their language, nor sharing their interests or priorities – can hardly hope to maintain their support. In today’s Labour Party, it is the liberal left and, to a lesser degree, the far-left that hold sway – two camps whose adherents are often at loggerheads with each other in the battle for supremacy, but neither of which ultimately has the capacity to reconnect the party with its old heartlands. The party is now an organisation comprised largely of urban middle-class liberals, students and social activists; it is no surprise, therefore, that it is towards this constituency that its policies and pronouncements are most overtly aimed.

      Labour has a mountain to climb if it is to be a serious electoral force again. And if it proves unequal to the task, it will relegate itself to being a party of permanent protest. In everything it says and does over the coming years, Labour must consider as a first concern what the impact will be in its old working-class heartlands. All policy development must be geared to this end. This will mean a sharp rebalancing of its priorities – focusing less on topics that do not command mass appeal or interest, and more on the doorstep issues that voters see as relevant to their everyday lives.

The party needs to combine the goal of creating a fairer and more egalitarian economy with a social programme that speaks to the instincts of millions of working-class voters. It must rediscover a part of its history of which so many of its activists today are ignorant: the early Labour tradition that spoke to the patriotic and communitarian instincts of the working class and understood that we are social and