I have been away from Britain this week. I returned to read that the Tories were branding themselves as the workers’ party, complete with speeches from working-class hero Sir John Major and that pound shop Tony Blair lookalike, Grant Shapps.

My first reaction was to be sad I missed the hilarity and annoyance at the innate ridiculousness of the idea. I’m guessing people tweeted Bullingdon club pictures, and I bet we got contemptuous press releases from Labour frontbenchers with ‘proper’ working-class credentials.

I was too late for this fun. So instead, I wondered why the Tories would think this was worth doing, and a Billy Bragg song popped into my mind.

Bragg fans might recognise my headline reference. It comes from ‘Talking with the taxman about poetry’, an album now three decades old. The album ends with ‘The home front’, a satire of the ‘anything for a quiet life’ mentality of the English working class, where paradise is simply ‘cheap beer and overtime’, and ‘the scrawl on the wall asks “what about the workers”, and the voice of the people says “more salt please”.’

For Bragg, this is a failing – an unwillingness to look beyond home, hearth and family to see what is really going on. This 1980s portrait of a narrow-minded, self-interested, short-sighted working class reflected the left’s puzzlement of how so many of what used to be called the ‘respectable’ working class (and is now called ‘aspirational’, or a ‘hard-working family’) ended up voting for Margaret Thatcher.

Yet these people are workers too, and I wonder if we on the left are neglecting them a little, giving the Tories an opportunity they do not deserve.

For most of us on the left, the defining quality of being a ‘worker’ is a mix of class and culture. Being ‘a worker’ means ‘not being a capitalist’ but it also means being part of the culture of the Labour movement, and of the wider traditions of the British working class. It is why we think the party of the workers and the party of labour are interchangeable terms.

That is how prosperous columnists can write non-ironically about the inauthenticity of Tory posturing. It is why that old guacamole joke about Peter Mandelson was funny. It spoke of a ‘Labour man’ not being properly ‘working class’.

It is also why, for many on the left, ‘Benefits Street’ and the ilk represents a sustained attack on ‘the working class’, whether or not the members of that class are or are not working (Let’s leave aside the point about how working-age social security benefits mostly go to working families).

Yet that is not how others might see it.

For the Tories, the divide could be about the workers as the contributors, the wage-earners, those who struggle and scrimp and save and feel that their efforts are undermined by support given to those who make no such effort, who are coddled by an out-of-touch elite who do not understand what life is really like. The divide could be between the ‘workers’ and those who don’t value work, or, as Lynton Crosby might put it, the grafters and the bludgers.

Yes, this is based on a misrepresentation, but it is not that alone. There is a cultural element too. Because, if there is a working-class tradition that is based in the Labour movement, in mushy peas and union cards, there is an alternative working-class identity as well, one that does not get celebrated much – those who ‘want to get on’, those who possess the sort of working-class identity mocked by Bragg in the song I began with.

It is worth remembering that trade union membership was never universal amongst workers, that a lot of the electorate did want ‘more salt please’, just as they wanted to own their home, buy a car, work for themselves and keep more of their wages. It is to those people the Tories wish to speak.

The problem for the modern Tories is that they largely lost their desire, and perhaps the ability, to appeal to this group. Once they had cut their taxes, sold them council housing, and given them shares in privatised utilities, they then spiked their interest rates and spent a good decade or so banging on about anything except making them better-off.

Now they want to try again. Their offer should be relatively straightforward. Lower taxes for middle income families, and more jobs, delivered by an economy founded on lower debt. Good schools, with teaching values driven by parents. Strong measures on crime and disorder. Higher wages, especially for those on low incomes. More homes being built, and help to buy them. This is the sort of agenda sketched out by the likes of Robert Halfon and others.

The challenge for the Tories is not so much what their ‘agenda for workers’ should be, but whether anyone will believe this government cares about it. That is why they had to wheel out John Major to make their argument, and why the 50p tax cut and the Buller are so damaging.

For Labour the challenge is different. There is no doubt people believe Labour care about ‘the workers’ or that we have a policy agenda that would offer them real practical help. The challenge is if we really want to focus on these, or if we would rather talk about things that do not concern them but do bother us.

Because the truth is that ‘the workers’ are more like Billy Bragg’s picture of straitened suburban discomfort than ever.

As the Tories cut housing benefits, and attack unions, we might forget that in the private sector, union membership is now a rarity, with just one in seven people in a union. Nor does it stop there:  people in ‘elementary’ occupations are much less likely to be union members than ‘professionals’ and if you draw a line from the Wash to the Severn, less than a quarter of all workers below it are union members.

What is more, when we defend the public sector, do we remember that public sector workers earn more, are better educated, and work shorter hours than those in the private sector? To which workers do we appeal most loudly? Who do we praise most often?

Further, in housing, nine times as many ‘workers’ own their home than rent socially (over seven million full-time employees, compared to 800,000 in the social or council sector). Do we make these people our focus?

So are these the ‘workers’ we picture for ourselves? Less likely to be union members, more likely to own homes, less likely to be in the public sector?

If the question for the Tories is ‘Who could ever believe their promises?’ the question for us is more whether we really want to make representing the interests of these people the core of our political position, or if we are more comfortable talking about issues that are vital for us, but tangential to them.

The danger, however ridiculous the Tory offer, is that, if they’re the only ones talking to to the ‘more salt, please’ classes, they might win support by default.

The good news is that we have a credible agenda to offer. From attacks on the cost of living, coupled with better childcare, backing the minimum wage and the jobs guarantee, all of which represent a practical benefit to ‘working families’.

Yet the argument could and should be broader.

Labour’s position on pensions, on rights at work, on social care, on homebuilding, on economic responsibility, on public service changes, on welfare reform and contribution, could all be explicitly be pitched as an entire political agenda designed for the working man or woman who does not count themselves as part of the Labour tradition.

The question is whether we really want to make that case explicitly.

So far, it is not clear we do.

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Hopi Sen is a Labour blogger who writes here, is a contributing editor to Progress, and writes a fortnightly column for ProgressOnline here

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Photo: sheffield.gov.uk