Targeting the new proletariat

Could middle-class insecurity open the way to a British version of right-wing populism, asks Richard Gott

The working class has completely vanished from the political vocabulary. What was once called "the proletariat" - perceived as an active agent of its own future - has marched off the stage forever.

In old black-and-white movies, you can still get a sense of what the expression used to conjure up: crowds on a grey day outside a football stadium, workers in their hundreds on the picket line at the factory gate. Now it has all dissolved into history.

The people, of course, are still somewhere to be found. There hasn't been a holocaust of the cloth-capped section of the population. At the bottom end, they have simply been renamed, becoming the unemployed, the under-privileged, the poor. These are the code-names for the victims of our times, those no longer seen as actors capable of changing the direction of their own drama.

Higher up the ladder, the senior echelons of the proletariat have been transmogrified into an intriguing and potentially dangerous end-of-century phenomenon, the endlessly expanded middle class - now the chief participant in the unrolling scenarios of all the political parties in the West.

The presence of this populist middle ground, ideologically unattached, is hardly a new phenomenon. In Latin America, huge Catholic parties, such as the Christian Democrats in Chile, once occupied this central position, as did the authoritarian "labourist" movement of General Pern (pictured right) and his successors in Argentina. Such parties embraced a disparate collection of trades and interest groups, familiar in Britain in the composition of the old Liberal Party: small farmers rather than great landowners, small businesses rather than large corporations, and a sprinkling of the professions.

But large chunks of the populist clientele came from the upwardly mobile and unionised working class, as well as from the ranks of the public sector: the teachers, the health workers, the middle management of the great nationalised industries, even the junior officers in the armed forces.

The lineaments of a political phenomenon that once looked absolutely familiar in Latin America can now be traced out in the British landscape. The coalition of forces that the Liberals once called their own has become - vastly expanded - the area to which Labour and Conservatives pay most attention. And with reason, because at the very moment when this group is growing larger and politically ever more significant, it is also becoming dramatically squeezed - by falling incomes and eroded prestige. The old question of the proletarianisation of the middle class is now high up on the political agenda. The Labour Party must be hoping that this ideologically unanchored group in society will move in their direction. Yet it could equally well drift to the extreme right.

Anecdotally, everyone is familiar with the problem. At the very moment when large numbers of people are out of work, those in work have to work twice as hard. Long hours, evenings spilling into weekends, uncertainties about the future, the need to run ever faster to stand in the same place - these are the common experiences of almost every workplace. For women, in particular, the endless juggling of work and home - the family, the school and the shopping centre - creates a sense of oppression undreamt of by earlier generations.

This experience of exploitation and uncertainty forms the background of several recent studies on the culture and oppressions of work. Charles Handy, pioneer of "upside-down thinking", has specifically targeted the employees of large corporations, explaining to them what they already sense - that their world is changing dramatically. "Like the centrally planned economies of the old communist world," he writes in The Age of Unreason, "these centrally planned organisations are also discovering ... that the old ways which worked quite well in the past are no longer cost-effective." They have been obliged to rethink the way they get work done.

Anthony Sampson, in his book on the internal crisis of the corporations, Company Man, published last year, depicts the fate of the victims of reshaped capitalism in tragic tones. The "company man", once upheld as the most significant social creation of the 20th century, is now perceived as "the most vulnerable" member of the middle class, liable to be cast on the scrapheap at any moment - when once he had a job for life.

"Behind all the language of downsizing and reducing head counts," writes Sampson, "were individual human tragedies which received little publicity or sympathy. Dignified figures in the office suddenly found themselves no longer noticed or valued as they were ousted by highly paid young upstarts; they could be asked to clear their desk in a morning, and be shut out from the building which had been their village for half their lifetime."

While the collapse of Communism and of the Soviet Union clearly marked an end to the era of the big state bureaucracies, it also seems to have prefigured, in some strange symbiotic way, the end of the large capitalist corporation as well. Nor is the "company man" alone. His fate has been paralleled within the institutional ruins of the nationalised industries and the welfare state. The serried ranks of Nupe and Nalgo, the ill-paid membership of the public service unions, have undergone similar experiences in the past decade, with very little in terms of a financial cushion.

Middle management has also suffered. There was a time when a job in the state sector brought a certain sense of status - working for the public good, with perhaps a medal at the end to make up for a meagre salary. Now those insubstantial rewards have gone.

The present sense of economic insecurity and social uncertainty among the middle class might in theory lead it towards a progressive politics. Yet its chief characteristic at present is an acute distrust of the political system. Its political alienation is just as likely to fuel a populism of the right. Britain has been relatively protected from the growth of right-wing movements elsewhere, but there is no guarantee that we will not see the emergence of a home-grown Jean-Marie le Pen, or Jorg Haide, or Newt Gingrich.

Any fresh political programme in the post-socialist era will, of course, have to build on popular discontents wherever they are to be found. But if the left does not try to locate them and remedy them - and perceive that both labour and capital are in trouble - the task will certainly fall to the right.