Five years ago the trade unionist and political commentator Paul Embery published his book ‘Despised’. This book is a fascinating explanation of how the new Left in the United Kingdom have spent many years nursing and expressing a severe antipathy towards the working classes of Britain. In the book Mr Embery discusses how the obsessions of the new left and the middle class left with globalisation, migration, trans and other identity politics issues has alienated British workers and have failed to address the legitimate concerns of these workers.
I know the area that Mr Embery grew up in, Barking and Dagenham, pretty well as I have lived there for a while and I have had family who have also lived there long term. I recognised from Mr Embery’s writing the demographic changes that have afflicted this area and how the indigenious inhabitants of this area have been sidelined in favour of those whom the middle class Left believe are more important than them. Like Mr Embery I have seen the devastation that deindustrialisation has brought to Barking and Dagenham and how it has affected the lives of all who live or lived there. I also saw how, in desperation at being abandoned by the political party of the working class, Labour, local people turned towards the British National Party in the early part of this century.
To mark five years since ‘Despised’ was published Mr Embery has put out a blogpost on the subject. It is a profoundly depressing article as Mr Embery states that five years on from the publication of his book the gulf between Labour and the working classes is stil there and still growing. Labour still are not prepared to drop the identity politics, pro-migration and globalist obsessions and return to what they should be which is a party of Britain’s working classes.
Mr Embery said:
Five years later, what has changed? Well, there was Labour’s thumping victory in last year’s general election. But as I counselled at the time, the landslide was a loveless one – most voters just wanted rid of the Tories, whatever the alternative – and certainly did not signal a reconciliation between the party and the working class. In fact, post-election data showed that, when compared to the 2019 election, Labour did not increase its share of the vote among the occupational working class at all. And one has only to spend a few minutes in any post-industrial constituency in the north or Midlands to understand that the deep antipathy felt towards the party in such places hasn’t dissipated.
So notwithstanding the general election success, the chasm still exists. If anything, it has grown wider. The cultural divide between, on the one hand, the party’s hyper-progressive representatives and activist base and, on the other, large numbers of working-class voters still imbued with small ‘c’ conservative instincts remains stark.
Mr Embery is correct. Many people voted Labour in 2024 not because they loved the party or believed in their policies or thought that Labour would make the lives of ordinary Britons better, they voted Labour in order to get rid of Tories who had failed in government and also failed to tackle some of the big issues, such as migration, that concern the public. It was pretty obvious quite early on at least to me that Labour would be worse than the Tories on many issues but for many Labour seemed the obvious choice to give the Tories a political kicking. When I look around and see the damage that Labour is doing to the economy, to society, to the constitution, I would not be surprised to find that a feeling of regret is being felt by many about voting Labour.
Labour have completely abandoned Britain’s working classes and these classes know that. This abandonment is in large part why so many formerly Labour strongholds are showing strong polling figures for centre right populist parties like Reform. After all why vote for a party like Labour that hates you when you can take a chance on a party that doesn’t seem to hate you?
The chasm between Labour’s activist class and the traditional voters for Labour is now almost completely unbridgable. As Mr Embery said in his piece barring a revolution from within Labour the idea that Labour is a party for the British working classes is now dead. Labour is the ‘lanyard class’ personified and the interests of that class are often antipathetic to the interests of workers.
If you haven’t read ‘Despised’ then I would strongly counsel that you do so as Mr Embery lays out just how much treachery Labour’s activist class has committed against Britain’s working classes. Sadly in the five years since the book was published nothing has improved within Labour and I doubt that anything will change. Labour in its current configuration is not a working class party and nobody should be pretending that it is.
Link
Mr Embery’s anniversary article on his blog to mark five years since the publication of ‘Despised’.
https://www.paulembery.com/p/still-loathed-but-getting-ever-angrier