This isn’t about his stance on reducing the deficit. Personally I am a bit closer to Ed Balls’ position and was concerned that Alan wasn’t singing from the same hymn sheet as the leader, and that this might have come to a head at some point. My hunch is that voters actually don’t care that much about the nuance of Labour’s positioning on the issue – the difference between the Balls and Johnson views was miniscule compared to the difference between either of them and the government’s policies – but would have cared if we looked divided.
It isn’t even about the personal tragedy of a very significant career of service to the public and the party being truncated by personal problems that should have been private.
It’s about the disappearance from the political front rank of – with the ennoblement of John Prescott – the House of Commons’ highest-ranking MP from an undisputedly working-class background.
We’re not talking faux working class with a mockney accent here, or having a working-class mum and dad, or a granddad who was a miner. Alan is the real deal. He has actually experienced poverty firsthand, left school at 15, been a council tenant, worked in a manual job as a postman and risen up to be general secretary of his union. He is one of only 27 Labour MPs not to have been through higher education – fewer in number than the 30 that went to Oxford!
The fact that he was also from the south doubled his importance – someone who sounded like and was able to communicate with the southern C1 and C2 voters we need to win elections.
With getting on for half the population now going to university, and the old unionised mass heavy industries destroyed by Thatcher, the PLP isn’t going to ever have the prevalence of non-graduates from manual jobs that it had in the immediate postwar era.
Nor is this an attack on middle-class intellectuals becoming Labour MPs – the party did rather well out of promoting Clem Attlee (Haileybury and Oxford), Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford) and Tony Blair (Fettes and Oxford).
There’s a BBC2 programme tackling this issue on tonight at 9pm, entitled ‘Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain’. I’m glad the issue is being looked at.
The response to the programme in the Daily Telegraph predictably claims that this situation was caused by the abolition of grammar schools. This doesn’t explain why a comprehensive school pupil has risen to lead Labour, or how the products of secondary modern schools who had been branded failures by the 11+ system were often in the past Labour MPs.
The real problem is that with very occasional exceptions like Tory chief whip Patrick McLoughlin MP, the only party that will ever have a volume of MPs from working-class backgrounds is going to be Labour. This is inevitable because of the class composition of our core support and because our mission, our raison d’être, is the representation and economic emancipation of working people. So if we don’t actively bring on working-class candidates, there won’t be working-class representation: the purpose for which we were set up.
That we haven’t got a decent flow of objectively working-class MPs coming through any more is bad for working-class people in this country as it means their voices and concerns are not as loudly heard as they should be. It is also bad for the Labour party electorally – we are not as in-touch with people who should be our voters as we should be, and we don’t appear to be fully representative of the communities we seek to serve. No wonder our C2 support went down from 40 per cent to 29 per cent in 2010, and our DE support from 48 per cent to 40 per cent.
This isn’t a plea for a move to the left. Far from it. I think having more working class MPs, and thus ensuring we are closely aligned with the concerns of working class communities, would involve us having robustly moderate, common-sense stances on issues like crime, defence, welfare reform and tax. Lurches to the left in Labour history have been driven by out-of-touch middle-class activists, not our core vote.
We need to be working with the unions – particularly the ones with non-graduate memberships – to help identify and bring into public life as councillors and parliamentary candidates the brightest and best of their members. We need strategies for recruiting to Labour and the unions workers in non-unionised workplaces who might otherwise be missed. Where the NEC has input into shortlists for by-elections or late selections we need to give a chance to working-class candidates as well as women and BME candidates – better still let’s try to help working-class women and working-class BME candidates.
If we don’t address this there won’t be any more Alan Johnsons in parliament and that will be Labour’s loss. We could justifiably be done under the Trades Descriptions Act for continuing to call ourselves ‘Labour’. In the meantime I hope Alan is able to sort out his current troubles in private and is soon brought back to a frontbench role. He is a great asset to Labour and we need him back.
“Lurches to the left in Labour history have been driven by out-of-touch middle-class activists, not our core vote.” Oh dear, that old inaccurate cliché. Please back up your assertions. George Lansbury Nye Bevan Jennie Lee Eric Heffer Pat Wall John McDonnell or Hugh Dalton Hugh Gaitskell Peter Mandelson Charles Clarke Patricia Hewitt ?
A problem is that people aspire to becoming MPs so young these days (writes an old curmudgeon). Voters and selection committees seem to prefer their candidates young. With a few exceptions such as Virendra Sharma, most new MPs of all parties are nowadys too young to have had any experience of working in the allegedly real world. And an awful lot of them seem to come from the ranks of political researchers and/or assistants. Given all that, it’s regrettably inevitable that our politicians will seem to be increasingly remote from the rest of us. Can’t see a bill proposing a minimum age for MPs getting much support…
Isn’t the reason for this trend, Luke, related to the procedure for getting selected? It is not so much any more about putting across commitment and ideas, but relentless self-promotion, which is a more palatable prospect to those with the confidence that comes from private education or being “well-connected”. OMOV was a hard-won principle, but the reality of how it is used gives advantages to some, who do not necessarily go on to be the best MPs. There are important exceptions to this I grant you.
Luke – Whilst Labour is being run by a middle class, Inheritance Tax fiddling, property millionaire who hasn’t done a single days work in his life, it is unlikely that change will work the way you desire. Without large numbers of blue collar jobs any more, the traditional route to power would be via the unions but even that’s gone now. Can there be any Labour supporter who doesn’t look at the NUS leader Aaron Porter and wonder who it is that he actually represents? Because as sure as eggs is eggs that unrepresentative individual will end up as a Labour MP spouting the party line. Whilst local party members would like to elect local working class people the control freaks running Labour just want to have a party of clones. The days of Dennis Skinner and (as useless as he is) John Prescott are long gone…
yes it must be hard to drop the act that controlled Labour into Government for 13 years,give them a minute and we’ll see. Are you a blue collar worker who would like to be elected? if so why do you shy from using your name?
I know quite a few “bright as a button” and capable working class teenagers who have aspirations to be an MP one day. Because they are “bright as a button” the chances are they will go to university (funds for tuition fees permitting) which means that, before they become MPs they are more likely to have middle class then working class jobs (job market permitting). It’s one of the better consequences of having Labour governments since 1945. Bright kids with aspirations can go on to achieve great things.