Labour must remember that the ‘traditional working class’ includes minorities too
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Version 0 of 1. Talk of the party’s ‘heartlands’ only seems to include white voters. But throwing minorities under the bus will spell the end of Labour, says gal-dem columnist Kimberly McIntosh For a country that supposedly voted for “straight-talking” politics, the post-election hot-take factory has been churning out an assembly line of convoluted language and odd platitudes. Last week, Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at the University of Kent, appeared on Newsnight to provide a post-election postmortem. Analysing Labour’s defeat, he claimed that the party is “breaking into three” entities: first, white-collar, liberal, highly educated professionals who are pro-remain; second, traditionally working-class, socially conservative, patriotic workers; and finally, an “awkward alliance” of students and ethnic minorities who were making Labour “structurally unsound”. As a highly educated pro-remain white-collar professional – who is also black and from a working-class background – there is no space for me in Goodwin’s analysis. Am I part of the “awkward alliance” or the pro-remain metropolitan elite? Or am I just a misshapen, black puzzle piece that doesn’t have a space on the board and is disrupting the game of electing a Labour government? Ethnic minorities make up a decent chunk of the student population, so the setting up of minorities and students as “awkward” acquaintances would be bizarre if it wasn’t clearly a rhetorical device. Labour’s loss of a large swath of its seats in the north, Midlands and Wales has created a vacuum that politicians and commentators have quickly filled with euphemised nostalgia. Whether you say “Labour heartlands” or “left behind” or “the traditional working class”, the meaning is the same: these are white voters, and the unspoken implication is that Labour has lost the white working class specifically because it has pandered to the multiethnic “metropolitan elite” in London and other cities. But the initial picture of how people voted doesn’t quite bear this out. After the 2017 election, academic research found that poverty was the most important positive predictor of support for Labour. The early data for last week’s election suggests this is still the case. Lord Ashcroft’s post-vote poll found that age had a big impact on voting behaviour, with 57% of 18 to 24-year-olds voting Labour last Thursday, versus only 18% of over 65-year-olds. Areas such as Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Islington, which are also “Labour heartlands”, have some of the highest child poverty rates in the country. If 50% of children in your local authority living in poverty doesn’t count as being “left-behind”, then what does? But the narrative that emphasises Labour’s problems with “traditional working class” – white – voters is being fervently pushed by former MPs, columnists, and the promoters of “Blue Labour”, a pressure group that has long-advocated for a “socially conservative” form of Labour. They are moving their tanks from the wings of the wilderness in hopes of conquering Labour’s centre ground. They argue that the election result has vindicated their prescriptions – and that Labour needs to “rediscover its conservative socialist traditions rooted in the lives of ordinary people”. Not all of what they propose is bad. They call for listening to the needs of communities, anchoring politics in the local and recognising people’s attachment to place – their town, their high street, their neighbourhood. The Conservatives did well in towns with ageing populations so it makes sense for the Labour party to soul-search about why that is. But their call for “cultural conservatism” is dog-whistle racism. Read between the lines of their past pieces and it is clear that they want the left to suppress calls for gender and racial equality in favour of industrial sentimentality and imperial nostalgia. Their language, which has never been subtle to the minorities it aims to discuss, appears to be gaining traction, and this should worry us. This rhetoric purposefully places ethnic minorities outside of the nation. As rumours circulated that David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, might run for the Labour leadership, Goodwin tweeted that he wasn’t sure Lammy was the right person to “reconnect with [Labour’s] left behind, socially conservative and patriotic heartlands”. In the Blue Labour imagination, Lammy, the capital city and even blackness itself are implicitly placed in opposition to some “authentic” or “real” Britain out there. It is possible to call for a new kind of political and economic settlement in northern towns without throwing minorities under the bus. An attachment to place and locality is something that unites us. The roadmap of my family – from St Ann, Jamaica to Reading East in the embers of the empire – forms the story of not just who I am, but what Britain is. Whether it fits Blue Labour’s narrative or not, minorities make up a large chunk of Labour’s “heartlands” too, and erasing our experiences for political clout is not only amoral but shortsighted. Ethnic minorities are more likely to be in precarious work and were hit the hardest by austerity, and as a result are just as entitled to the badge of “working class” as white people. Labour needs to dig deep and find what unites the working class in its entirety – it must emphasise what is shared. This is essential for ethnic minorities’ survival, but also for Labour’s. Alienating minorities for short-term political gain is a risky strategy; in the 2017 election, ethnic minority voters made up one in five of Labour voters, but only one in 20 of Conservative voters. Punting a new socialism with a side of “legitimate concerns about immigration” could hit Labour at the next election and the one after that. Demographic change will bring more minorities into the electorate and they do not owe Labour their vote. The question is what Labour does with this new reality. Is it willing to abandon its values – and our communities – in a futile attempt to recapture the past? • Kimberly McIntosh is a columnist at gal-dem |