As a Covid class war seethes, Labour is now backing the new bourgeoisie

The Opposition has put its money on a world that pits broke entrepreneurs against smug ‘working-from-homes’

In Manchester, a Labour mayor vociferously protests against a Tory Government’s threat to impose measures which, he says, would shut down much of his city’s economy and destroy local jobs. Whatever you might think of Andy Burnham’s showboating, that seemed to me to be a respectable political position. What is more, it is consistent with the historical tradition of his party which is to defend ordinary working people from what can be seen as bourgeois arrogance and contempt.

By contrast, in London, another Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, positively demands tighter restrictions on his city which would also shut down swathes of its economy and destroy jobs. Is that an equally plausible political position?

Attempting to answer that question involves asking what precisely the Labour Party is for now (by which I mean what purpose it serves, not just what it stands for) and the even wider issue of relations between social classes and what effect this Covid crisis is likely to have on them.

There is no mystery about the logic of the Burnham argument.

He is standing up for what earlier generations of Labour politicians would have called the working class – although that definition is misleading since so many of those running the endangered businesses, and the people employed in them, are not proletarian either by background or occupation.

What these enterprises mostly have in common is that they require the bodily presence and hands-on skills of their staff who are generally (but not always) less highly educated than that other category of employees who can work digitally from home.

So the Manchester mayor appeared to have a strong loyalty to his constituents and a great sympathy for their concerns. Whereas the London mayor wanted to sell his city’s population down the river for the sake of a moment’s star billing in the national debate.

They both sought, and received, lots of media attention. Burnham became something of a local hero – and, as I write, he has won his battle with the Prime Minister at least for the moment. But Khan’s behaviour – even though it turned out to be consistent with his party leader’s sudden conversion to lockdown mania – seemed so perverse as to be bizarre.

And he, alas, won his gamble too, in that London was indeed moved on to Tier 2 restrictions. Khan could easily have made a hugely powerful case for London remaining as unrestricted as possible – given that it is the economic engine of the country. But he didn’t.

Instead he pleaded for the city to be put in shackles. What on earth was he thinking? Was he thinking at all – or just shooting his mouth off in front of a television camera? Or could it be that, in fact, he knows that a great many of his constituents can manage perfectly well under the repressive measures that he encouraged the Government to inflict on them? Is the real truth about London that it and its environs are teeming with members of a new smugly complacent class of happy-towork-from-home (or not-work-muchbut-stay-at-home if they are in the public sector) professionals, and that in its ruthless new guise, it is these voters whom Labour is choosing to court?

If that is true, or even verging on being true, we are in a totally different political ballpark from the one that prevailed a decade, let alone a generation, ago. The new class war is not going to be between capitalist owners and exploited workers with their appointed representatives calling all the shots and bargaining with elected governments.

It is going to be between entrepreneurial ventures and their small workforces who must, by the nature of their economic activity, be personally involved with the workplace, as opposed to highly qualified, professionally versatile, digitally independent masters of the universe who will be freed from the constraints of location and the need for personal involvement with an office.

Perhaps you think this picture is too surreal to be credible. A year ago, I might have thought so too. For all the evidence that dependence on digital capability was growing, and that its possibilities might exceed our expectations, I would always have assumed that certain human inclinations – for collegiate companionship at work and the creativity it stimulates, for the welcome contrast between domestic life and paid employment – would persist: that very few people would willingly choose the isolation and social limitations of home working.

But it seems that the Labour Party – if Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer are any indication – are putting their money on this new reality and, furthermore, that the faction they have decided to back in the class conflict is the new bourgeoisie.

This is much more than the well-documented Islingtonisation of the party. It is turning the whole ideological justification for its existence – and the role that it plays in British national life – on its head. But even leaving the matter of which party stands for what – and for whom – politics is shifting on its axis in a way that no one seems to have anticipated.

That new class of entrepreneurs with their little platoons of staff can be disregarded – or victimised – so easily because they cannot organise like the old working classes could. Virtually by definition, they cannot form unions of similar enterprises because they are in competition with one another.

True, their workers could become unionised. But that would just unite them against their employers which is not what most of them would want. What they need is for the businesses that employ them to survive and to prosper.

So we might be about to enter an economic and social world in which the most disadvantaged in the power game are small capitalist ventures who have no leverage – for whom going on strike would mean going out of business.

Against them will be a whole sector of financial services peddlers, public sector operatives and technical communications whizz kids who will hold the management of pretty much everything in their hands.

And they will do that from home – or anywhere in the world they choose. If you thought that the last class war was bitter, just wait till you see the next one.

Even leaving the matter of which party stands for what, politics is shifting on its axis in a way no one seems to have anticipated