Workington Man’s Vote is what Matters to Labour
I have not written much this year, owing to a) posting b) podcasts c) I’m not a doctor and thus don’t have any 1,000 word takes on Covid-19. Here I have share my take on the Labour Party in this ~unprecedented~ year.
Call Workington Man:
The main event of the first leg of my 2020 was a wounded leadership contest following Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 general election. I covered this on MarionetteMedia, but it was a fundamentally dull event in which the continuity candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey lost to the consistent polling favourite. Sir Keir Starmer played up his Socialist credentials, after-all, who can forget when Britain had a leftist as Director of Public Prosecutions?
True to form, Starmer began his appeal to socially conservative voters in what the media relentlessly call the ‘red wall’ by hosting his LBC Show ‘Call Keir’ alongside known radio gammon Nick Ferrari.
The red-wall is a term invented in 2019 to describe the former Labour heartlands flipped by the Conservatives. In the ‘red-wall’ lives ‘Workington Man’ — the name given to the demographic which decided the 2019 election, males over 45, who previously voted Labour but voted Leave in 2016. An example of the kind of terrible takes this promotes was The Guardian North of England Editor Helen Prid’s piece on Rishi Sunak’s summer statement.
The working-class voter speaking in the headline is Andrew Twentyman. Twentyman is the kind of Workington Man our Great British media class love; fiery, opinionated and crucially, owns an artisanal pizza restaurant and develops property on the side.
Sir Keir’s attempts to woo the elusive Workington man have so far been foiled, why he would co-host the show with a Tory ideologue remains unclear. He recently found himself amid controversy when a female caller named Gemma (Bride of Workington Man?) told the pair that Britain will be minority white by 2066, this is part of a White Nationalist conspiracy theory called The Great Replacement. Nick passed over to Sir Keir to give him the option to refute this, he opted not to do that.
Spy-Cop Immunity:
I wrote in July for LabourBuzz that Starmer’s big tent sprung a leak on the left. This intensified in October when Labour whipped their MPs to abstain on The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill (SpyCops Bill) which would allow undercover agents to avoid prosecution for some of the worst crimes imaginable. Those affected — often animal rights or anti-war activists — have described the work of these undercover officers as “state-sanctioned rape”. It also allows officers to evade prosecution for murder.
I would not do the heartbreaking testimony of the victims any justice if I was to retell it, but you can check out the details of this horrifying practice here. And please check out the coverage by lifelong activist and spy-cop victim Tom Fowler.
It has been said that abstaining is what Labour must do to win over Workington Man, but when the Conservatives inevitably propose scrapping the Human Rights Act, how will Labour vote? The evidence so far suggests that Human Rights Lawyer Sir Keir Starmer will whip his MPs to abstain. For if he was willing to take a stand on human rights, there is no reason for not doing so in October.
More than the pantomime over Jeremy Corbyn’s membership or voting for Johnson’s Brexit deal, that is why I am no longer a member of the Labour Party. I hope to be proved wrong about the electoral maths of the United Kingdom. Until I am, I will not be voting for a party which takes my vote for granted, only to maintain a union dialling back my human rights.
Have a Happy New Year. And if The Guardian tell you how the working classes in Britain vote, remember that the NRS Social Grades put call-centre employees in the ABC1 category (middle-class) while their skilled manual worker landlords are in the CD2E category (working-class).
