Keir Starmer v E P Thompson on what is the working class?
Keir Starmer appeared again on the LBC show of hard right presenter Nick Ferrari before Christmas. I sense Ferrari must rather like these occasions. Starmer is the leader of the Labour Party but he is a lawyer not a politician. With a brief he is fine, forensic even. Without a brief he says whatever comes into his head which usually leads to corrections down the line.
Ferrari asked Starmer what he understood by being working class. It was a brief exchange, 90 seconds or so, and you can find it on Twitter. A lot of it consists of Starmer saying ‘Um’. However his view was, or seemed to be, that people wanted their lives to be better and were ambitious for this to happen. Ferrari asked him how this differentiated working class people from middle class people. Starmer didn’t know.
That said Starmer’s view, even if incoherently expressed, is a strand in Labour thinking usually associated with the Fabians. Namely that working people deserve decent education, healthcare, housing. This is to be achieved not by collective organisation and struggle but by voting in a Labour Government and for it to legislate for better. I don’t think this is what Rachel fiscal Reeves has in mind. However in a broader view, if a market economy is performing reasonably in respect of growth, it should on occasion be achievable. In time, often quite a long time, but any progress helps.
There is another implied meaning in Starmer’s view though which is that everyone can get on in life. Call it ‘I’ve got the foreman’s job at last’ syndrome. Of course they can’t as society is currently structured. Society has a system of bosses and workers and there is only so much space around the boardroom table. If there is workers control that can change but I don’t think this is Starmer’s policy.
Meanwhile, although I don’t think this was the reason for Ferrari’s question, it’s the 60th anniversary of the publication of E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.
In the preface he does define what working class is. He writes:
‘I do not see class as a structure nor even as a category but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships’
Indeed Thompson makes the point in the opening line of the Preface
‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time, it was present at its own making’
In other words the working class is not a thing or a category but it is defined by a relationship with and often a struggle against other classes, mainly the ruling class. It would be interesting, perhaps, to hear how Starmer defines bosses.
Thompson saw a relationship,a struggle, a movement. Something to be involved in, not comment on.
‘class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion, not this or that interest, but the friction of interests-the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise‘
Postscript to Paperback Edition, May 1968
There is your answer to Nick Ferrari, Sir Keir
Leave a Reply