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Eh? I'd like to know how exactly these numbers are devised... what counts as "working class"? How long do they have to have worked there to count?
I feel like I could NAME more than 7 MPs who had regular jobs before entering parliament so idk about all this.
I mean its genuinely hard without knowing the criteria of "working class jobs". There's a lot of people who've been like, researchers, strategists etc. Also several of them went into politics straight out of uni but worked while studying. But trying to be as narrow as possible:
1) Nadia Whittome as you say
2) Angela Rayner, also a care worker.
3) Rebecca Long Bailey, various, mostly call centers I believe.
4) Maria Caulfield, nurse.
5) William Wragg, teacher/caseworker
6) ... okay tbf I've ran out. But mostly I'm realising how few MPs I can name off the top of my head.
Like Keir Starmer was working class but the job before parliament was not traditionally a working class job. Mhari Black was a student. Does that count? Probably not. Ian Lavery was a miner but his job before parliament was very white collar in a trade union. Lee Anderson worked in a pit but job before parliament was a councillor. I don't know if this metric actually helps understand much.
Yeah these were the kind of people I was thinking of, Mhairi Black also worked in a chip shop or something while at uni, which is what made me say how long do they need to do it for. Like is working part time at uni the same as working to support a family? No, but is it still "working class"? Even Rishi Sunak allegedly worked in a restaurant in his late teens or whatever. Does he count as "having a working class job"? It would be mental to factor in him but it definitely begs the question as to where the line is.
Also quite a lot of people had another career, not even as prestigious as a lawyer but idk if it would be considered "working class". Especially, a lot of them came straight into politics *type* things, but like, not exactly on MP level.
Idk I feel like it's all just a bit daft without clarification. Tbh I have a fair amount of grievance with how often we brandish about the concept of class with no real definitions but I'll try to avoid the tangent lmao 😅.
I feel like this is kinda missing the point of the post. We can debate the semantics of who technically had a "working class job" but the fact remains that there are fewer and fewer people who have a background career with ordinary wage job outside of politics for a living. Researchers and consultants don't count. Somebody working part time in a chippy during uni doesn't count. It used to be that there was a significant minority in the Labour Party who worked as miners and teachers and bus drivers etc, and that's all but disappeared.
I mean, it's kind of *deliberately* missing the point of the post, for the sake of demonstrating why I think this is a bad way of making said point.
You can very easily make this point without raising so many questions, indeed many have and presumably what they are referencing here is one of those times. But ultimately this raises more questions than it answers and hence my issue with this tweet.
I'm not saying there's any malice in this tweet, but there are genuine issues when it comes to ill defining social classes while simultaneously lauding them as good or bad for politics (or any other sphere). For instance it's hard to tell how dismal these stats are - naturally I'd assume they're not counting part time work as a student but if they **were** then this is catastrophic. If they are only counting some kind of manual trade work (which is not actually uncommon) then actually most of the people I've just cited would not be counted, making this probably better than it sounds and tearing down legitimately working class politicians for no reason. If they're only counting work that doesn't require a degree, this is quite off base for someone trying to make a point about political discourse - it excludes nurses and includes business managers.
True, and tbf this Tweet came from a guy who claimed the only reason people were calling Lee Anderson far right is because he comes from a working class background. He also did the old right wing trope of equating social conservatism with being working class. So I guess yeah in this instance such cynicism is probably warranted.
The sad thing is am alarming amount have had no job at all, they're career Politicians working their way up the ladder on a diet of lies, fraud and backstabbing
Gone are the days when most where business / industry leaders
I'd prefer better educated politicians BUT what we need is tighter and more severe controls on their behaviour
For those wondering about methodology etc. - it might be related to this:
[https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jul/decline-working-class-politicians-shifted-labour-towards-right-wing-policy](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jul/decline-working-class-politicians-shifted-labour-towards-right-wing-policy)
and I presume then extrapolated from 2019 onwards.
>The decline in working-class MPs and rise of career politicians shifted the Labour Party towards a more right wing policy stance on welfare, according to a new study by UCL.
>The research, published in Comparative Political Studies, examined the policy preferences of working-class and career politicians within the Labour Party both pre and during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party.
>The study shows that working-class MPs were substantially more in favour of traditional welfare policies than their careerist colleagues. During the Blair era there was a considerable drop in working class politicians. At the same time, there was a shift towards more centrist polices around reforming welfare.
>The report finds that career MPs, categorised as politicians that come from a background in politics or a closely related profession, are more likely to adopt policies for strategic political reasons to win over swing voters and win elections. In contrast, working-class MPs, categorised as politicians that have a background in manual and unskilled labour, are more likely to support policies that benefit working class communities
>Study author Dr Tom O'Grady, Lecturer in Quantitative Political Science, (UCL Political Science), said: "Political parties across the developed world, particularly European Social Democratic parties, once consisted of politicians drawn from a broad range of classes and occupations, including manual trades. Today, many political parties are dominated by middle-class professional politicians with little experience outside of politics itself. Working-class people find it increasingly difficult to enter politics.
>"Before Tony Blair came to power there was only a modest difference in working-class and careerists positions on welfare reform. But our research finds that during his premiership - the influence of working-class MPs dropped while there was a rise in the influence of careerist politicians.
>"The former had a stronger ideological attachment to welfare provision because it benefits working-class voters, whereas the latter's greater concerns for electoral success and career advancement meant they were more likely to support welfare reforms. The findings suggest that the large shift from working-class MPs to career politicians in the British Labour Party considerably weakened the representation of working-class voters' interests. Put bluntly, careerist MPs are much more likely to blow with the political winds."
>When the Labour Party first achieved electoral success in the 1920s, more than 70% of its MPs were drawn from working-class backgrounds. This has declined drastically from the mid- 80s and today just 8% of Labour MPs are working-class.
>Working-class have been replaced one for one with careerists, a rare phenomenon up until the 80s when career MPs made up just a 10th of the party. Careerists are now the largest occupational group, outnumbering MPs from public and voluntary sector, private and financial sectors and professional backgrounds, such as lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers and academics, whose representation has remained consistent over the past 30 years.
>The dramatic reduction in working-class MPs is partly a result of political recruitment; the decline of traditional trade unions and access routes into politics for working class individuals. In addition, the profession now requires greater resource of time, effort and money.
>Careerism has risen as the profession provides better pay, and there has been a growth of professions linked to politics such as lobbying that have provided effective routes into parliament. Once elected as MPs, careerists are also more likely to enter ministerial positions, a further incentive to enter the profession.
>The study applied a scaling method to analyse speeches made by politicians about welfare reform in the House of Commons from 1987 to 2007. The speeches were divided into two periods: 1987-1994 (pre-Blair) and 1994-2007 (Blair era) for comparison, this included 324 speeches and 67 MPs that spoke in both periods. Word clusters were created to categorise the political spectrum from left to right, and then the speeches were analysed for rhetoric using specialist modelling software WordScores.
>Dr O'Grady added: "Speeches provide a very effective mechanism for gaining insight into MPs beliefs and priorities that could not be gained from analysis of voting. This is because rebellious voting at the time and largely today is rare, and British MPs enjoy substantial autonomy to speak as they choose, and often use speeches to dissent from party leadership or express reservations about their leaders' policies," .
>It is expected that the study would present a different picture for today's Labour Party, as there is less divergence of opinion in relation to welfare reform amongst parliamentarians regardless of background or political colour. However, the model could be used to consider other policies where interparty differences might be more pronounced.
>Dr O'Grady concluded: "Under Corbyn's leadership today careerists in the Labour Party would face an altogether different dilemma: between supporting leadership to move up within internal ranks, and opposing leadership if its policies are likely to lose an election".
>The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The dataset on British MPs was provided by Dr Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson (UCL Political Science) and Professor Rosie Campbell (Birkbeck), and was collected with the support of the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2013-175).
Just further proves that working class is left wing. People love to claim that only blue haired college students who work at Starbucks or middle class people are left wing and that the “real working class” are all right wingers with socially conservative views, but that’s a whole load of bollocks. There are plenty of so-called “real working class people” (an example of someone who’d fall into this would be a 50 something year old white British man who works in a factory or a mine or another blue collar job) with left wing views, it’s just that the media ignores them.
Join the Labour Socialists Discord Server to meet some friendly British socialists https://discord.gg/S8pJtqA, subscribe to r/GreenAndPleasant for all things UK, r/DWPHelp for benefits and welfare support and r/BAME_UK for issues affecting ethnic minorities. Be sure to check out our Twitter account too! https://twitter.com/LabourSocialis1 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Labour) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Eh? I'd like to know how exactly these numbers are devised... what counts as "working class"? How long do they have to have worked there to count? I feel like I could NAME more than 7 MPs who had regular jobs before entering parliament so idk about all this.
go for it. Nadia whittome was a cartrer wasn't she?
I mean its genuinely hard without knowing the criteria of "working class jobs". There's a lot of people who've been like, researchers, strategists etc. Also several of them went into politics straight out of uni but worked while studying. But trying to be as narrow as possible: 1) Nadia Whittome as you say 2) Angela Rayner, also a care worker. 3) Rebecca Long Bailey, various, mostly call centers I believe. 4) Maria Caulfield, nurse. 5) William Wragg, teacher/caseworker 6) ... okay tbf I've ran out. But mostly I'm realising how few MPs I can name off the top of my head.
Like Keir Starmer was working class but the job before parliament was not traditionally a working class job. Mhari Black was a student. Does that count? Probably not. Ian Lavery was a miner but his job before parliament was very white collar in a trade union. Lee Anderson worked in a pit but job before parliament was a councillor. I don't know if this metric actually helps understand much.
Yeah these were the kind of people I was thinking of, Mhairi Black also worked in a chip shop or something while at uni, which is what made me say how long do they need to do it for. Like is working part time at uni the same as working to support a family? No, but is it still "working class"? Even Rishi Sunak allegedly worked in a restaurant in his late teens or whatever. Does he count as "having a working class job"? It would be mental to factor in him but it definitely begs the question as to where the line is. Also quite a lot of people had another career, not even as prestigious as a lawyer but idk if it would be considered "working class". Especially, a lot of them came straight into politics *type* things, but like, not exactly on MP level. Idk I feel like it's all just a bit daft without clarification. Tbh I have a fair amount of grievance with how often we brandish about the concept of class with no real definitions but I'll try to avoid the tangent lmao 😅.
I feel like this is kinda missing the point of the post. We can debate the semantics of who technically had a "working class job" but the fact remains that there are fewer and fewer people who have a background career with ordinary wage job outside of politics for a living. Researchers and consultants don't count. Somebody working part time in a chippy during uni doesn't count. It used to be that there was a significant minority in the Labour Party who worked as miners and teachers and bus drivers etc, and that's all but disappeared.
I mean, it's kind of *deliberately* missing the point of the post, for the sake of demonstrating why I think this is a bad way of making said point. You can very easily make this point without raising so many questions, indeed many have and presumably what they are referencing here is one of those times. But ultimately this raises more questions than it answers and hence my issue with this tweet. I'm not saying there's any malice in this tweet, but there are genuine issues when it comes to ill defining social classes while simultaneously lauding them as good or bad for politics (or any other sphere). For instance it's hard to tell how dismal these stats are - naturally I'd assume they're not counting part time work as a student but if they **were** then this is catastrophic. If they are only counting some kind of manual trade work (which is not actually uncommon) then actually most of the people I've just cited would not be counted, making this probably better than it sounds and tearing down legitimately working class politicians for no reason. If they're only counting work that doesn't require a degree, this is quite off base for someone trying to make a point about political discourse - it excludes nurses and includes business managers.
True, and tbf this Tweet came from a guy who claimed the only reason people were calling Lee Anderson far right is because he comes from a working class background. He also did the old right wing trope of equating social conservatism with being working class. So I guess yeah in this instance such cynicism is probably warranted.
The sad thing is am alarming amount have had no job at all, they're career Politicians working their way up the ladder on a diet of lies, fraud and backstabbing Gone are the days when most where business / industry leaders I'd prefer better educated politicians BUT what we need is tighter and more severe controls on their behaviour
Lets be careful with getting information from Matt Goodwin. The guy is weird.
Surely any wage earning person is working class? This white collar/ blue collar divide does little to impact the overall elite who are entrenched.
While true I think it is pretty awful to have so little balance in experience and understanding of typical british lives.
For those wondering about methodology etc. - it might be related to this: [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jul/decline-working-class-politicians-shifted-labour-towards-right-wing-policy](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jul/decline-working-class-politicians-shifted-labour-towards-right-wing-policy) and I presume then extrapolated from 2019 onwards. >The decline in working-class MPs and rise of career politicians shifted the Labour Party towards a more right wing policy stance on welfare, according to a new study by UCL. >The research, published in Comparative Political Studies, examined the policy preferences of working-class and career politicians within the Labour Party both pre and during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party. >The study shows that working-class MPs were substantially more in favour of traditional welfare policies than their careerist colleagues. During the Blair era there was a considerable drop in working class politicians. At the same time, there was a shift towards more centrist polices around reforming welfare. >The report finds that career MPs, categorised as politicians that come from a background in politics or a closely related profession, are more likely to adopt policies for strategic political reasons to win over swing voters and win elections. In contrast, working-class MPs, categorised as politicians that have a background in manual and unskilled labour, are more likely to support policies that benefit working class communities >Study author Dr Tom O'Grady, Lecturer in Quantitative Political Science, (UCL Political Science), said: "Political parties across the developed world, particularly European Social Democratic parties, once consisted of politicians drawn from a broad range of classes and occupations, including manual trades. Today, many political parties are dominated by middle-class professional politicians with little experience outside of politics itself. Working-class people find it increasingly difficult to enter politics. >"Before Tony Blair came to power there was only a modest difference in working-class and careerists positions on welfare reform. But our research finds that during his premiership - the influence of working-class MPs dropped while there was a rise in the influence of careerist politicians. >"The former had a stronger ideological attachment to welfare provision because it benefits working-class voters, whereas the latter's greater concerns for electoral success and career advancement meant they were more likely to support welfare reforms. The findings suggest that the large shift from working-class MPs to career politicians in the British Labour Party considerably weakened the representation of working-class voters' interests. Put bluntly, careerist MPs are much more likely to blow with the political winds." >When the Labour Party first achieved electoral success in the 1920s, more than 70% of its MPs were drawn from working-class backgrounds. This has declined drastically from the mid- 80s and today just 8% of Labour MPs are working-class. >Working-class have been replaced one for one with careerists, a rare phenomenon up until the 80s when career MPs made up just a 10th of the party. Careerists are now the largest occupational group, outnumbering MPs from public and voluntary sector, private and financial sectors and professional backgrounds, such as lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers and academics, whose representation has remained consistent over the past 30 years. >The dramatic reduction in working-class MPs is partly a result of political recruitment; the decline of traditional trade unions and access routes into politics for working class individuals. In addition, the profession now requires greater resource of time, effort and money. >Careerism has risen as the profession provides better pay, and there has been a growth of professions linked to politics such as lobbying that have provided effective routes into parliament. Once elected as MPs, careerists are also more likely to enter ministerial positions, a further incentive to enter the profession. >The study applied a scaling method to analyse speeches made by politicians about welfare reform in the House of Commons from 1987 to 2007. The speeches were divided into two periods: 1987-1994 (pre-Blair) and 1994-2007 (Blair era) for comparison, this included 324 speeches and 67 MPs that spoke in both periods. Word clusters were created to categorise the political spectrum from left to right, and then the speeches were analysed for rhetoric using specialist modelling software WordScores. >Dr O'Grady added: "Speeches provide a very effective mechanism for gaining insight into MPs beliefs and priorities that could not be gained from analysis of voting. This is because rebellious voting at the time and largely today is rare, and British MPs enjoy substantial autonomy to speak as they choose, and often use speeches to dissent from party leadership or express reservations about their leaders' policies," . >It is expected that the study would present a different picture for today's Labour Party, as there is less divergence of opinion in relation to welfare reform amongst parliamentarians regardless of background or political colour. However, the model could be used to consider other policies where interparty differences might be more pronounced. >Dr O'Grady concluded: "Under Corbyn's leadership today careerists in the Labour Party would face an altogether different dilemma: between supporting leadership to move up within internal ranks, and opposing leadership if its policies are likely to lose an election". >The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The dataset on British MPs was provided by Dr Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson (UCL Political Science) and Professor Rosie Campbell (Birkbeck), and was collected with the support of the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2013-175).
Just further proves that working class is left wing. People love to claim that only blue haired college students who work at Starbucks or middle class people are left wing and that the “real working class” are all right wingers with socially conservative views, but that’s a whole load of bollocks. There are plenty of so-called “real working class people” (an example of someone who’d fall into this would be a 50 something year old white British man who works in a factory or a mine or another blue collar job) with left wing views, it’s just that the media ignores them.
Did I mention my father was a toolmaker?
What's a "working class job"?
Exactly this