Most who are interested will know that Keir Starmer’s hirsute father was a toolmaker. Little more detail ever follows and you can find the suggestion on social media that Starmer Senior was a factory owner. In reality he ran a small toolshop, the Oxted Tool Co. as a skilled worker. These were not uncommon when Starmer was young but have mostly passed into history.
Eric Hobsbawm wrote a 1983 essay on Artisans and Labour Aristocrats where he touched on toolmakers.They were to be found in the later nineteenth century in railway workshops. They owned their own tools and had a degree of independence from the employer who, conversely, attempted to find ways to remove the artisanal aspects of the job and turn them into proletarians. Hobsbawm notes that the same was true for car factories in the 1930s. Toolmakers were union men (and it was men) and often politically advanced,
Hobsbawm ends his essay by arguing that the sons of toolmakers were unlikely to seek the dignity and self respect of the trade but rather look to a University education. A process known as going up into the next class which is exactly what Starmer did and also what his policy on social mobility is about
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