Starmer wants to break the ‘class ceiling’. Nice line – but not very clever

The Labour leader wants to champion the workers and take the rich down a peg or two, writes John Rentoul. But he’s made a stupid mistake (one his new best friend Tony Blair would never have) – he’s forgotten the middle classes

Keir Starmer’s class politics is a backward step that will limit Labour’s appeal (PA)

The leader of the opposition has written an article to accompany his 945th visit to Scotland since the Scottish National Party’s future disappeared into a police tent outside Nicola Sturgeon’s house.

Writing for The Scotsman, Keir Starmer revealed that the wishy-washy phrase he has been using for a couple of years, “working people”, really is what we thought it was all along, namely code for “the working class”. He uses the “c” word nine times in the article, declaring: “My political project is to return Labour to the service of working people and working-class communities.”

It is interesting that he thinks this more explicit class politics is a way for Labour to regain the support it lost to the SNP. The article appeals to what he admits is the “slightly old-fashioned” idea of “the Scotland that the solidarity of working people built; that the Labour movement built” after the Second World War. “This marks us out from the Tories, but also from the SNP,” he said.

Unless he is engaged in unusual market segmentation for a politician, however, the class message is also one that he wants to sell in the rest of the UK. He has recently inserted references to wanting to break the “class ceiling” into speeches he has made outside Scotland.

It is a clever phrase, but it is one that Tony Blair would never have used. Which makes it seem as if Starmer wants to use his love-in with the former prime minister at the Blairfest last month as a way of triangulating a middle way for himself, between New Labour and Old. Starmer’s language seems to see British society as divided between class interests, with the working class held back and the rich enjoying undeserved privileges. And the middle class, oddly, written out of the picture altogether.

It is a view of the world that Blair rejected, claiming in his memoir that the problem with “intellectual types” is that they “wanted to celebrate the working class, not make them middle class – but middle class was precisely what your average worker wanted himself or his kids to be”.

Maybe things have changed since Blair was forming his opinions about the “patronising”, “correct but somehow incomprehending” phrase, “the working class”. It is true that 62 per cent of British people – in research carried out by Blair’s own institute last year – described themselves, if asked, as working class rather than middle class or upper class. But only if asked. It probably doesn’t occur to most people to think of themselves as belonging to a social class at all, most of the time.

It seems to me that the language of class is needlessly divisive.

It is not just a matter of language, but of policy. Blair would never have proposed VAT on school fees, or the abolition of non-dom tax status. Indeed, neither he nor Gordon Brown did them. Their language was inclusive and their policies were of redistribution by stealth.

And yet Blair was more successful than any Labour leader both in restoring support for Labour among the working class, and in delivering for people in manual occupations. It was Jeremy Corbyn, whose politics venerated the working class, who did more than anyone to make Labour a party of the middle class, for the middle class and proposing huge subsidies to the middle class.

I don’t think that Starmer is wise to triangulate with that sort of politics. The problem is that it implies a zero-sum game of class war, in which the gains by one class are matched by the losses of another. That is no way to build a successful electoral coalition, either in Scotland or in the UK.

Especially when it bears such a distant relationship to actual economic interests, in that the majority of the population, 57 per cent, is (or was before retirement) in white-collar jobs, so most people are objectively middle class. The majority working-class identity is largely based on people’s parents’ class, as in Starmer’s case. He describes himself as working class on the basis of his father being a toolmaker. “This is personal,” he writes. “We were just an ordinary working class family.”

Well, maybe. But this is one instance where it would be better to keep the personal and the political apart. A divisive politics of false working-class consciousness is not what the country needs.