Remember me
Labour’s problem is the numbers. In 1974, 65 per cent of the British electorate were working class (C2DE) and the remaining 35 per cent upper and middle (ABC1). In that year’s October general election, over 50 per cent of the working class voted Labour, against 19 per cent of the better off. By 2024, C2DEs made up around 43 per cent of the population, and only about a third of them voted Labour, whereas the middle and upper class accounted for 57 per cent – of whom 36 per cent were Labour voters.
The decline of the working-class Labour vote is deeply concerning to the party but the substantial increase in its middle-class vote is necessary and proper – as long as it doesn’t strip Labour of what makes it Labour. Those keen to prevent that would do well to read Geoff Andrews’s erudite, acute and powerful book Radicals: The Working Classes and the Making of Modern Britain.
Andrews’s starting point is that Labour has always been a coalition between the working class and the progressive middle class, but the history of its working-class base has been misunderstood. Conventional wisdom has it that Labour’s appeal to the working class is primarily economic – public ownership, redistribution, the welfare state, the Attlee agenda – while its middle-class supporters are attracted by its commitment to social and cultural change, inspired by the liberal reforms of the Wilson governments (on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, women’s rights, race relations and censorship). Andrews challenges this binary. He locates the origins of the labour movement not just in the trade unions but in the widespread and myriad networks of self-help organisations that working people created in the 19th century – friendly societies, mutual-assurance initiatives, cooperatives – alongside institutions of education, from the university extension movement (founded in 1873), Ruskin Hall then College (1899), the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA, 1903) via the wartime Army Bureau of Current Affairs, to the influential working-class thinkers and teachers of the 1950s and 1960s (including Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart) and the Open University. At one point in the 1920s, more students were studying with the WEA than at all universities combined.
Andrews avoids romanticising these institutions: the university extension movement didn’t always reach the people for whom it was intended, as the Open University appealed primarily to teachers. The 1909 student/staff strike at Ruskin split those favouring a specifically working-class education from others trying to open the traditional literary canon up to working-class people, into which faction Andrews hints that he falls. He is deeply suspicious of the largely middle-class ideologues of top-down reform (notably the Fabians), and devotes a whole chapter to a not unpersuasive critique of Robert Tressell’s hugely influential Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), with its “conception of socialism as a faith brought to the workers from the outside by an enlightened few who hold the key to a socialist future”. For Andrews, the power of the movement always lay not in a set of doctrines but in an ethos of “fraternity, mutuality, fair treatment and individual self-fulfilment” which, crucially, comprises both proletarian and universal values, promising a better future for “all classes” and, indeed, all of “civilised society”. In this, the central figures are not just trade unionists and politicians “but also writers, adult educators, dramatists and feminists”.
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This perspective allows Andrews, when he gets on to the 1960s and 1970s, to pay an unusual and refreshing amount of attention to the extra-parliamentary left and its genealogies. The communist historian Eric Hobsbawm supervised feminist Sheila Rowbotham’s thesis on the university extension movement; Rowbotham was a key figure in the seminal 1970 Women’s Liberation Conference, which was held at Ruskin. Hobsbawm contributed frequently to Marxism Today: his analysis of “Labour’s lost millions” in the 1983 general election posing the question to which, for some, New Labour was the answer. For Andrews, Blairism allowed an increasingly exclusive meritocracy to emerge. (The author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, Michael Young, “expected the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down” by Tony Blair, as indeed they were.) Peter Mandelson’s intensely relaxed attitude to the filthy rich defied the Labour ethos of fairness, and Blair’s government presided over a precipitous decline in the number, reach and activities of adult education institutions.
There are wings of the Labour movement which emerged in the 1970s that Andrews doesn’t discuss in detail, but which add weight to his case. He dismisses the student/left revolt which climaxed in 1968 as being led by “a small, privileged university elite” and downplays its influence on the upsurge of industrial militancy of 1970-74. But one of the first major disputes of the Edward Heath years, the work-in to save Upper Clyde shipbuilders, was clearly inspired by student sit-ins. Students were active in support of the 1972 miners’ strike, whose creative deployment of flying pickets was, according to Phil Tinline in his Death of Consensus (2022), “of a piece with the upheavals of 1968”, a revolt “driven by improvised, do-it-yourself, smash-the-old thinking”. Rowbotham and fellow socialist-feminists were active in organising night cleaners and nurseries. But although he talks about the Grunwick strike of 1976-78 (led by Asian women workers) he doesn’t discuss the wider struggles by black and Asian workers in Yorkshire, London and especially the East Midlands, in the 1970s, or, indeed, the role of trade unions in the Anti-Nazi League, which stopped the National Front in its tracks in 1978-79.
The racial lens is particularly important in assessing the Winter of Discontent, the upsurge of industrial militancy that was seen to have enabled Thatcher’s 1979 victory. Andrews supports the 1974-79 Labour government’s social contract, under which the unions agreed to wage restraint in exchange for a “distinctively left-wing” socialist agenda (including feminist-inspired measures against sex discrimination and for equal pay). This deal was effectively smashed by the 1978-79 strikes, which Andrews cites as evidence of sectarianism by powerful groups of workers, and thus is far from the radical phenomenon the left makes then out to be.
There is, however, an alternative reading of the Winter of Discontent, detailed by Tara Martin López in a 2017 book overseen by Rowbotham, in which the strikes by carers in the NHS and local government represented an upsurge of militancy by badly paid, largely black, Asian and female workers, against the background of a 13 per cent real wage cut for all workers from 1975 to 1980. In her memoir Daring to Hope (2022) Rowbotham expressed her outrage that women in the public sector were being rebuked in hysterical headlines by lavishly paid journalists rather than receiving “belated respect, apologies and thanks for the vital work they had been doing”.
This is not to challenge Andrews’s thesis about the Labour ethos of fairness and solidarity, but to add to his roster of disputes that express it, from the General Strike of 1926 to the miners’ strike of 1984-85. The latter represented both “a defence of… community under threat” but also “a moment of change and renewal” for the progressive movements (feminist, LGBT and anti-racist) who campaigned in solidarity.
The defeat of the strike severely diminished the powers of the unions and split the alliance between them and the increasingly influential social movements. Despite his insistence that the politics of identity had “added a new dimension” to the movement, Andrews spurns the idea that “middle-class progressives” know more about labour values than the autodidact workers who defined them.
Nonetheless, it is not a terrible thing that a growing number of well-off and well-educated people are voting – against their narrow economic self-interest – for equality and social justice (and defecting to the Greens if Labour is not seen as promoting them). A 21st-century labour movement with no concern for women or sexual or ethnic minorities would rightly be rejected. But if Labour is to recapture its new lost millions, the universalist values of the 19th- and 20th-century labour movement – “fraternity, mutuality, fair treatment and individual self-fulfilment” – are not, as Geoff Andrews argues, a bad place to start.
Radicals: The Working Classes and the Making of Modern Britain
Geoff Andrews
Yale University Press, 304pp, £25
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[Further reading: Ben Lerner has taken autofiction somewhere new]
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This article appears in the 29 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The cover-up?