Beyond ‘my dad was a toolmaker’: interviews with former politicians reveal what it’s really like to be working class in parliament

Most people following British politics would probably know by now that Labour leader Keir Starmer’s father was a toolmaker. He has talked many times about his working-class background and the way it informs his politics.

Starmer is not alone. Politicians from the other side of the political spectrum have also ramped up the rhetoric around their “blue collar” credentials in recent years. Rishi Sunak clearly recognised the need to make his own attempt when asked in a TV interview if he’s ever had to “go without” anything and responded that he didn’t have Sky TV as a child. Starmer’s own version of this story is that his family’s phone was cut off in his youth.

It’s easy to see why the two party leaders are engaging in this hardship competition. The political alienation of working-class voters over recent decades stems at least in part from a lack of representation. There are a decreasing number of working-class politicians they can relate to in parliament and it makes sense for politicians to fill this void however they can, including by highlighting the “working-class” elements of their biography at every opportunity.

At the same time, there is growing evidence that the class background of political elites does inform their outlook.

It’s for this reason that some believe in the need for descriptive representation – introducing requirements to elect a certain number of working-class MPs in the same way that efforts are made to increase representation of women or minority MPs.

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In recent research, my colleagues and I interviewed 24 politicians who served as MPs at various points during the past 50 years. Bar one, they were no longer active politicians, so they had limited, if any, incentive to mobilise their class backgrounds for electoral purposes.

We found that their class origin – defined as the type of household they grew up in and what jobs their parents did – significantly shaped their political outlook. This was more important in influencing their politics than other factors in their life, such as the job they had done before entering parliament or the education they had received.

The influence of class origins seemed particularly salient in the case of former Labour MPs. As one of them put it:

My grandfather joined the Labour party at its creation in about 1900, a trade unionist. He started work in a pit at the age of 10. And I never forget that…when I looked at developing countries, you could see children like my grandfather.

The MP’s working-class identity stretched beyond his parents, back to his grandparents and beyond into how he saw the rest of the world.

Even those from working-class backgrounds who ended up serving as Conservative MPs presented themselves as more sympathetic to working-class interests than party colleagues from more privileged backgrounds. As recalled by one of them:

Mrs. Thatcher had married a multimillionaire oil family chap, so she’d had nannies for children and all that…my mother used to go to work at 5:30 in the morning, as a cleaner, so she could be back home before we got up for breakfast. I think if you’re from a very wealthy, privileged background, and you entered parliament because your family’s been there for generations too and all the rest of it, there’s no way you can see things in the same light.

In other words, class origin seems to have affected where these politicians placed themselves on the ideological spectrum of their party.

Feeling working class, voting working class?

Things get more complicated when it comes to actual decision making in parliament, however. While some of our interviewees recalled episodes when they defied the party whip to follow their political convictions because they believed it necessary to represent the interests of working-class voters, more often than not, the former would override the latter.

For example, a former Labour MP justified his vote against austerity measures in one instance on the basis of his rootedness in the working-class constituency he was representing at the time:

These weren’t just people that you happened to represent, these were your friends and your neighbours that you were living alongside who were experiencing this. And they knew that I was one of them. … you had people from Eton, from Oxbridge, who really just didn’t care.

It mattered, though, that his party as a whole opposed that measure. When Labour decided to abstain on another austerity measure, the same MP complied with the party whip to vote in the other direction. Doing otherwise, he argued, would have meant being a “virtue-signalling rebel”.

The path from attitudes to action may sometimes also be thwarted by certain personal characteristics that are significantly shaped by class, such as a person’s level of self-confidence. That appears to be particularly the case with MPs from working-class origins, who may fear jeopardising their upward social mobility. This was aptly captured by one of our interviewees, who said:

You are always more risk-averse, I think, coming from not having wealth as much as anything, not having alternatives. I needed my job to pay the mortgage. I didn’t have money to buy special advisers and support…You can’t afford to be a swashbuckling cavalier.

Class origins may be decisive in shaping ideological outlook but not necessarily behaviour once elected, when the party line becomes a factor.

This all suggests that someone like Starmer is in the best possible position to enable politicians to truly represent working-class people. As leader and potentially prime minister, he shapes his party’s line on most issues. He is in a position to ensure that his MPs don’t have to choose between party and ideology.

The signs so far, however, are not good. Starmer has already dropped several pro-working-class pledges while invoking his working-class background in public speeches, which raises some important questions. It may be that dropping those pledges are a pragmatic choice to win over more moderate voters. However, it may also be that it is reflective of his real politics, and that the regular references to his working-class roots amount to little more than an attempt to boost his political legitimacy.

Indeed, as my colleagues write in a forthcoming work, “performing ordinariness”, is now a common feature of contemporary British elites, as we’ve seen in this election. Whether it translates into actions that benefit working-class people is a different matter.

Vladimir Bortun does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.