Despised. Paul Embery

Introduction

      A nation held its breath as the clocks struck ten on the evening of 12 December 2019. Many of my colleagues across the labour movement had been hopeful of a positive result in the general election. Not necessarily an outright victory for the Labour Party (only the most optimistic – or delusional – foresaw that), but certainly a hung parliament leading to a minority Labour government supported perhaps by some kind of arrangement with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. And these days, in labour movement politics, such an outcome would have been considered a victory.

      Some of the more realistic anticipated defeat. A few – such as those who stood in the ‘centrist’ tradition of New Labour and had never reconciled themselves to the Corbynite ascendancy – positively willed it. But hardly anyone expected the annihilation that came to pass and, with it, the devastating loss of so many Labour heartland seats.

And so it was that as the exit poll flashed up on TV screens, forecasting a thumping eighty-six-seat majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, the hopes and dreams of a stunned British Left collapsed. For many of the Left’s foot soldiers, the next few hours would be spent grimly observing the prediction turn into a painful reality – the Tories eventually secured an eighty-seat majority – as the results rolled in and the sheer scale of the wipe-out become apparent. Constituencies that had been Labour for as long as anyone could remember – in some cases, for nearly a century – fell like dominoes: Blyth Valley, Great Grimsby, Bishop Auckland, Leigh, Wakefield, Bassetlaw, Sedgefield, Wrexham, North-West Durham, Bolsover, Don Valley – the roll call was chilling.

      The sense of disorientation felt by many on the Left over the following days was palpable. How could this massacre have happened? Voters had suffered a decade of austerity; Boris Johnson was a clown who had to be hidden away from the public during the campaign; Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, was playing to packed houses everywhere; Labour could lay claim to having more members than any other political party in western Europe; the Brexit saga had proved debilitating, but there was still an energy and optimism across the movement such as hadn’t existed in years. So why had working-class supporters deserted their party in this way?

      For my part, I watched these events unfold with the same deep sense of disappointment but none whatsoever of surprise. I knew this moment had been coming: I had been warning about it inside the labour movement and beyond for long enough. In fact, just four days before the election, I had tweeted:

      Thursday will be a pivotal day in the history of the British labour movement. If our Red Wall crumbles, as some of us have long predicted, it will be a time for serious & honest reflection. If we win, then I really don’t understand politics as much as I thought I did.

The rupture between the Labour Party and the working class was an accident waiting to happen, and one which it didn’t take unique powers of observation or exceptional political wisdom to foresee. It didn’t begin with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader. It had, in fact, been brewing for the greater part of three decades – during which the party had swallowed a poisonous brew of social and economic liberalism – intensifying significantly in the second half of that period. The further the party travelled along the road to the imagined sunlit uplands of cosmopolitan liberalism and global market forces, renouncing much of its history along the way, the more it alienated its working-class base. You needed only to go to the right places and speak to the right people to understand this.

      But so many in the labour movement, including those among its upper echelons, didn’t go to these places or speak to these people – at least not enough. Instead, they mixed in their own exclusive circles comprising only those who thought exactly as they did. Many spent their working lives in professional occupations or the public or voluntary sector, in their spare time moving in the world of trade union committees, Labour Party meetings and assorted protest movements. They were usually rooted in the cities – especially London – and had, in many cases, gone through university. On social media, they would follow or engage with only those who shared their worldview. They confused Twitter with Britain. Some were members or fellow travellers of various far-left groups (though the further they progressed in the labour movement, the more likely they were to hide the fact).

Little wonder, then, that the Left became increasingly detached from those living in working-class communities up and down the country, and ignorant of how they think, what they believe, and why they believe it.

      The handful of us who warned of impending electoral calamity were often written off by others inside the movement as ‘reactionaries’ (or worse) who held a ‘nostalgic’ view of the working class. We were told that today’s working class really did desire the move to a more globalised world, in which such concepts as borders and national sovereignty were of diminished importance, traditional values – such as around family and patriotism – were obsolete, and liberal progressivism enjoyed hegemony. Well, some of them did, no doubt. But, from where I was sitting, most seemed thoroughly ill at ease with such a proposition.

      I would have loved to be proved wrong. I am a democratic socialist. I want the Left to succeed and be able to address the injustices of the world and improve the lives of those it ultimately exists – or at least once did – to represent: the working class. I have always done so. That’s why I joined a trade union aged sixteen in 1991 (when I landed a Saturday job stacking shelves in the Dagenham branch of Asda) and then the Labour Party (of which I am still a member) in 1994; why I became an activist in the Fire Brigades Union when I began my career as a professional firefighter in 1997 (eventually serving on the union’s national executive); why I joined the National Union of Journalists when someone thought my opinions worthy of a column; and why I have spent much of my adult life participating in campaigns and activities across the labour movement.

You might say that this political partisanship was inevitable. I come from a family which, like pretty much every other family in our community, voted Labour. I have a vivid memory of my dad watching the news on TV in the early morning after the 1983 general election and griping about Margaret Thatcher’s victory over Michael Foot. He was a shop steward for the old Transport and General Workers’ Union at his works depot, and my mum, a secretary, later worked for the GMB union. Though I had little idea at the time what this all meant – and while neither of my parents were especially political in any broader sense – I understood from quite early on that Labour and the trade unions were good and Thatcher and the Tories were bad. (I imagine that this was what inspired my twelve-year-old self to stand as the Labour candidate in the mock general election at my comprehensive school in 1987. I won by a landslide – though I’m quite certain this was a consequence of geography rather than any personal qualities!)

      If we are products of our environment, then my politics are shaped immeasurably by the borough of Barking and Dagenham and its people. For it was in this most working-class of places – part of the county of Essex before it was swallowed up by the Greater London conurbation in 1965 – that I lived for the first thirty-five years of my life, most of it on the sprawling Becontree council estate, and which provides the backdrop and inspiration for many of the ideas and opinions expressed in this book. In fact, almost all of what follows in these pages owes itself to what I learned there.

In particular, the convulsions that were experienced in Barking and Dagenham in the first decade of this century – during which it found itself thrust into the centre of a national debate over globalisation and immigration – were instrumental in forming within me an utter certainty that a major schism between the political establishment and the working class was on the cards. For I watched during that period at the closest quarters as the people of the borough were ignored or written off as racist and bigoted by a political and cultural elite who knew nothing of their lives and showed little willingness to learn.

      These were my friends and neighbours. I had lived and grown up alongside them. They were mostly decent, hard-working, tolerant, people – the kind upon whose loyalty