Any doubt about Philip Collins’s insistence that the old party system is dying can be banished by a glance at the bookies’ odds for the Gorton and Denton byelection. Labour, which won an outright majority of support there just 18 months ago, is—as I write—a 5/1 outsider. The only battle the Tories are in is to save their deposit. We must await the result, but the pundits see the real fight being between two upstarts: Reform UK and the Greens. In his recent essay, Collins provides a long view on the demise of the old duopoly that has brought us to this point. The grip of traditional class politics, he argues, began to falter almost from the moment it was fully established. He is right although, I think, with an important twist.
The most-quoted line in postwar psephology came from Peter Pulzer, an Austrian-born Oxford professor, who wrote: “Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” The apogee of this idea came in 1951 when, as Collins writes, “more than 60 per cent of manual workers voted Labour, while more than 70 per cent of the middle class voted Tory,” and the two class-based parties shared 97 per cent of the overall ballot. Even by the late 1950s, a mini-Liberal revival was evident and, on a tide of refrigerators and TVs, some workers began identifying more as consumers than producers, becoming floating voters in the process. Fast forward through deindustrialisation and Margaret Thatcher’s heist of skilled manual votes and you end up in 2019, when job-based class was essentially irrelevant to predicting whether voters preferred Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. The 2024 election reconfirmed that the political power of class as traditionally understood was dead. Labour's vote share, Focaldata’s post-campaign analysis found, was within a point or two across all the occupational grades.
Note those words, however—“as traditionally understood”. That means class as defined at the workplace, through the distinction between manual and non-manual labour or between earners of weekly wage-packets and the “salariat”. Pivot away from what people earn and instead examine what they own, and everything changes. Focaldata found that renters were fully 17 percentage points more likely to back Labour in 2024 than were outright homeowners, who tend to be wealthier and more Conservative-leaning. The same analysis underlines an extraordinary divide between young and old: Keir Starmer notched up nearly half of under-35s (around 48 per cent), more than double the score he managed among the over-65s. This, too, can be understood as a split between the cohorts that, by and large, own properties and meaningful pension pots, and the rising generations who, by and large, don’t. Wealth now seems to be reducing all else to “embellishment and detail”.
It’s class, then, but not as we know it—less about white or blue collars at work than whether people own property. So how should the parties respond? Even within this revised class framing, there are no easy options for either party. When the proportion of millennials who were buying a house by the age of 30 is only about half the proportion of baby boomers who did so at the same stage, and more under-35s are either renting or stuck at home with their parents, a Tory party championing homeowners and forgetting everyone else would resign itself to a rapidly greying support base. That is a risky bet against the future.
The structural dilemma for Labour is even more painful. Over recent decades “capital” has, as Thomas Piketty famously emphasised, swollen relative to earnings, and burgeoning evidence suggests that assets and debts are bearing heavily on life chances. An increasing proportion of people are stuck on the wrong side of a wealth divide—including those weighed down by student debt. Today these voters, whom Labour successfully courted in 2017 and even 2019, are tempted by the Greens. Zack Polanski’s party is making full-throated demands for rent controls. This is a policy that Labour had second thoughts about on its journey to the centre-ground. Why? Because rallying the “own-nots” ended in a mild Labour defeat in 2017, and a spectacular one in 2019.
When society is increasingly divided by wealth, there will be a constituency of voters on the left in favour of strident redistributive policies. A Labour government that shrinks from championing these is bound to bleed support to forces that will. But at the same time, most adults—and particularly most actual voters—do have something in the way of property or pensions. In the housing context, the balance is still roughly 60:40 in favour of the “own-somethings” over the “own-nothings”. Yes, the potential tenant’s vote looms larger than it used to, but it is still mostly fated to be a minority cause. The Greens are free to be—in Collins’s term—“coherent” on questions of wealth in a way that Labour, while it still harbours any hopes of being a majority force, is not. And yet a party that seeks to straddle the wealth divide can easily end up alienating all sides.
So regardless of whether class politics has simply disappeared or instead been redefined around wealth, it is indeed looking impossible to put the old parties back together again. Parties must somehow, as Collins says, find a way to work with others in the same broad “blocs” who can give voice to different social constituencies. Paying close attention to taxes and other policies affecting wealth—of the sort discussed by Gabriel Zucman in the new edition of Prospect and aired in these pages by Collins himself back in 2024—is profoundly important, but more for social than electoral reasons. Decaying political parties should not delude themselves into thinking that either doggedly defending wealth holders—or radically challenging them—will translate into easy ballot box wins.
