Labour leadership contenders rich list
THE Chartists were the first mass working-class movement in Britain launched after the 1832 Reform Act failed to give working class people representation in Parliament.
It lasted 30 years, and won praise from the founders of modern Scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels. Its six demands were: 1) Universal suffrage; 2) Secret ballots; 3) Annual Parliaments; 4) Equal-sized Constituencies; 5) Payment of MPs (to enable workers to become MPs); and 6) Abolition of the property qualification to become an MP, then in force and not abolished until 1857.
All but one of these demands – annual Parliaments – has since been enacted into law in Britain.
Nowadays, however, the ‘property qualification’ attached to becoming an MP appears to have resurfaced on both sides of the House Of Commons.
In the new intake of MPs to the House Of Commons, less than three per cent come from working class, manual backgrounds.
The steep decline in MPs of working class origin began in the 1980s under Thatcher and Kinnock, but has gone on uninterruptedly ever since, regardless of 13 years of Labour Government under Blair and Brown from 1997-2010.
When Labour first began to achieve significant representation in the House Of Commons in the 1920s, over 70% of its MPs were from working class backgrounds.
One of the founders of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, was born into abject poverty.
He began work at the age of 10 in Lanarkshire’s coal mines. Compare Hardie’s background and upbringing with that of subsequent Labour leaders and you unlock the key to the puzzle as to why Labour has degenerated into a bourgeois party dominated by the middle classes.
This depressing process reached its nadir under Blair and so-called New Labour, when top Blairite Peter Mandelson said he had no objection to people becoming ‘filthy rich’, by which he meant himself, and fellow Blairites, first and foremost.
More evidence of the gulf between the Labour Party and the working class it purports to speak for is shown in the ‘calibre’ of those standing to replace Corbyn as leader. Both Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry are millionaires.
Unless and until Labour MPs start looking, sounding, and sharing the conditions of life of working-class people in Britain, its disconnection from them will continue, and so will its failure to win elections.