Stoke was not about the working class but the post-industrial dispossessed

Neither Labour nor Ukip seem to understand that the old labels are useless in the changing economic and social landscape

By the time you read this Jeremy Corbyn may have resigned as Labour leader. But I doubt it. Because in truth, however much the parliamentary party and the old Blairite clique might long for him to go, the party is nowhere near ready to replace him. There is no candidate – let alone a respectable choice of them to offer the membership – who might present an answer to the question: what is Labour for? In Copeland, which should have been impregnable, Labour was smashed by the Conservatives. But even in Stoke-on-Trent, where the party did hang on, the combined Ukip and Tory vote exceeded that for Labour, which meant it was not the choice of the majority.

Most pertinent to the matter at hand is that Ukip thought it was on to a winning theme by offering itself to the voters of Stoke as the “new voice of the working class”. This was obviously intended to equate support for Brexit with class loyalty, and to imply that the current Labour leadership was too immersed in metropolitan received opinion to understand the concerns of its traditional supporters. But Ukip lost: the message did not deliver. Does that mean that Paul Nuttall’s gang were just not plausible as the “voice of the working class”? Or rather, that the whole idea of such a unified voice – and a unified class – is out of date? If it is the latter, then Labour’s win in Stoke is beside the point: they have a much bigger, more cosmic problem than any by-election result would suggest.

“Who speaks for the working class?” is the wrong question altogether. The dilemma for parties of the Left is not that they have lost touch with the old base, but that it does not exist any more. Who exactly are the people we are talking about here? There used to be a clearly visible proletarian class in Britain, with identifiable economic interests that grew out of their conditions of employment. Those interests could be codified in political terms and coherently represented by an organised movement: trade unions in the workplace and the Labour Party in government.

Absolutely central to this way of life was the idea of a cohesive community built around a local workplace: the coal mine, the steel works, the manufacturing plant. This pattern had been the core of working-class existence – and even much professional life, too, because every community had its local doctors and solicitors, who were part of its social fabric – since the Industrial Revolution. That story is largely finished now in the post-industrial wastelands. The societal trauma of this has scarcely been addressed.

Many of those old communities are struggling with a sense of futility and pointlessness that is unprecedented in living memory. They have not just lost the jobs which they would, in earlier generations, have expected to inherit as a birthright: they have lost the identifiable shared idea of who they are and what binds them together.

When Mr Corbyn made clear his distaste for the nuclear industry that provides thousands of jobs in Copeland, and pointedly refused to enthuse over a proposed new nuclear plant that would have provided thousands more, he was exposing his utter incomprehension of the priorities (and desperation) of the ordinary people he claims to stand for. An ideological commitment to the “working class” doesn’t count for much when you are oblivious to the very thing that matters most to the real working people of a region or a constituency.

But equally unsuccessful was Mr Nuttall’s attempt to depict Brexit (and, by implication, resentment of immigrants) as the new defining identity of working-class Britain. It is true that immigration has produced a good deal of anger in places such as Stoke, which voted so heavily for Leave, but this has to be understood as part of a much larger picture of economic despair and social disintegration: these resentful voters do not want to be seen as mindless bigots but as people who have been abandoned by history and their own governing class.

On top of the loss of their industries and the self-belief that went with them, they have been (as they see it) invaded by strangers who do not even share their common memories. So their idea of belonging to a familiar place has been undermined just when they were most vulnerable, without even the dignity that comes with a secure future.

But there is another problem: it is not just the unemployed in the postindustrial desert who are politically orphaned. Struggling tradesmen running their own businesses are unhappy with Labour, too. Socially and culturally, they may still feel “working class”, but they own their own homes and take their holidays abroad. They often employ other people and make use of the sort of professional services – accountancy or legal advice – that were once the province of middle-class professionals.

So where do they fit in the new landscape? They almost all voted for Leave because they see the influx of Eastern European labour as direct competition for work. They resent being labelled as ignorant or xenophobic by Labour politicians such as Gordon Brown (talking to poor Mrs Duffy), or Mr Corbyn speaking from his Islington fastness. Their hard-won economic independence is a matter of great pride and they want to believe that someone in power might appreciate that, instead of despising them – or exploiting their anger, as Ukip appears to do.

Who will speak for them? Which existing political party shows any real comprehension of the enormous social changes that the post-industrial economy and the globalisation of labour are bringing to the lives of ordinary people? Certainly not Labour in its present incarnation – and not Ukip either, if it believes that a purblind rejection of outsiders is all that this is about.

Now what about the outright winner of the hour? Theresa May and the Conservatives are on top of the world. Celebrating alongside Trudy Harrison, the successful Tory candidate in Copeland, the Prime Minister repeated the mantra about wanting to build a government that represents everyone. Sorry to rain on the parade, but this can’t be true: governing parties cannot “represent everyone” any more than opposition parties can. There are differing, and conflicting, economic and social interests within any free society: the employer’s objective to reduce costs conflicts with the employee’s desire to earn as much as possible; the producer’s drive to maximise profits conflicts with the consumer’s preference for paying as little as he can. It is the dynamic of all those conflicts that animates a market economy. Political parties make no sense if they do not, on the whole, identify with one set of interests or another. Elections are the arena in which those contests of interested parties are played out.

So no, attractive as it may sound, no party can speak for everybody at the same time. In its Thatcherite era, when the trade unions left little doubt about how ruthlessly they were prepared to represent the interests of their members, the Conservatives made a stupendously successful overture to aspirational sections of the working class. Maybe that is what Mrs May is emulating.

But the picture is changed now almost beyond recognition. Trade union membership is very largely confined to the public sector – health, education and local councils – or to nominally privatised public services such as the railways. Being a union member does not make you working class, just as running your own business doesn’t automatically make you middle class.

The old labels are useless. Everybody is going to have to find a new way of talking about political reality, and Corbyn may prove the least of Labour’s problems.