Despised by Paul Embery Review: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class
Paul Embery is not a right-wing provocateur. He is a self-proclaimed socialist with twenty years’ experience in trade union activism. Despite the title of his book – Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class – he seeks a constructive dialogue with the Left and a reckoning with the working class it once sought to represent.
It’s a fashionable and worthwhile sentiment. In last year’s election the Conservatives appealed to working-class Labour supporters in “Red Wall” seats such as Blythe Valley and Sedgefield. Labour has for years bled votes to parties including the BNP, UKIP and the SNP. A long-awaited shift in the foundation of two-party politics is underway, and Labour must recognise that the hearts and minds of the “left behind” can no longer be ignored if it is to survive as an effective alternative, says Embery.
That basic message, unfortunately, comes rather late. Writers like Claire Ainsley and David Goodhart have already offered detailed autopsies of Britain’s “populist” backlash. Embery can do little more than repeat these in under 200 pages: including the impact of globalisation on working-class communities, and a recognition that, due to unprecedented levels of social segregation in our cities, the elites cozied up in the pleasanter parts of town have quite easily dismissed any such complaints as “xenophobic”; austerity and the loss of dignified work in deprived areas; and the sense that democratic accountability within national institutions has been sold to big business and technocrats. These have all become key chapters in the sociologist’s “what went wrong” textbook.
Despised does, however, succeed in capturing a sense of Britain’s “traditional working class” – as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy did for the American “left behind”. The big difference, and one Embery emphasises, is that the community he describes is multi-ethnic. It is the working class “as the man on the Clapham omnibus or in the Red Lion understands it” – in manual, retail or public services; who own little in property or wealth; and who live in the grittier parts of Britain. It is a broad enough definition – but causes trouble downstream in what is otherwise a righteous and necessary manifesto for modern left-conservatism.
Despised is a desperate tale of betrayal and abandonment, a story of how “a solid, stable, blue-collar, working-class community had been torn apart, its people betrayed”, and with few among the elites“the slightest bit bothered”. It offers what the sociological facts alone cannot – the anger of a life’s testament to unprecedented economic and cultural change.
Embery seems to hail from a forgotten age in politics. Growing up on a council estate in post-war Dagenham in Essex, he rose through the ranks of the Fire Brigades Union to its National Executive Committee over a twenty-year career. His is a professional achievement that testifies to the possibilities of working-class political leadership in what has otherwise become an elite profession.
But his ousting from the Union in 2019, following a speech he made in support of respecting the Leave vote, made him as an outcast from the mainstream movement. Indeed, in his support for immigration control, his defence of the nuclear family, and his appeal to Britain’s “deep roots” in Christianity and patriotism, Embery’s Left is that of the 19th-century Chartists rather than modern-day Corbynites.
And while he trots familiar ground on Culture War issues like political correctness, Embery’s analysis of the role of family and community in shaping working-class outlooks owes as much to Burke as to Attlee. “We are social and parochial beings”, he writes, and “feel a heavier pull towards home, community and place” than those elites for whom national borders and local neighbourhoods are mere hitching posts on the high road of professional advancement. The Labour movement of his dreams – springing forth from the “little platoons” of local faith groups and grass-roots charities – is as admirable in its idealism as it is removed from the realities of the institutional Left.
Embery is robust in defending left-conservative attitudes on immigration and civil culture too. He calls out the liberal Left’s often perverse logic in attempting to discredit opponents of open borders through disingenuous language games like “dogwhistling”; and its failure to confront the role of the police in prosecuting working-class people for “hate crimes”, while rioters for racial justice are permitted a license to deface public property.
The truth, of course, is that these cultural tensions do not fit into the polarised language of Left and Right, despite the efforts of partisans. As David Goodhart has argued, the conflict between the cosmopolitan “Anywheres” and the conservative “Somewheres” transcends partisan boundaries. Embery’s working class is “patriotic”, “communitarian” and “rooted”, epithets he positions against the acquisitive, individualistic, progressive ethos of the governing elites.
How that division might fit within parliamentary politics, however, is problematic. Embery is too optimistic that the Labour Party “remains the only show in town when it comes to organisations of the Left that have the potential to secure enough support to… improve the lives of working people”, if only because the institutionalisation of middle-class progressivism is now so firmly entrenched. What place will a respect for “Christian values” or “the nuclear family” or “the view that a person with a penis cannot be a woman” have in modern Labour?
Nor is the divide Embery posits between a progressive liberal elite and a traditional working class fully convincing. Brexit is significant here, for he sees it as a lost opportunity for Labour to seize the initiative on the moral direction of the country; “Socialism before Brexit is impossible. It must be the other way around.” Yet, here he suffers, I think, from a naïve view of how community and the state interact in modern Britain. The pandemic has laid bare the extent to which community organisation has been stripped of both its institutional and moral capacity. The widespread compliance to central control over the pandemic response belies Embery’s dream of a “more patriotic, communitarian politics.” It leaves his “traditional working class” deprived of their supposed moral content.
This leads to some glaring contradictions in Emery’s proposed policies. He suggests that a future Labour government could offer a Singapore-style “family tax credit” to incentivise families to stick together, halting the fragmentation of stable family units. Yet one of Embery’s key claims is that, in contrast to the supposed tyranny of the liberal elite’s individualistic ethos, his working class fundamentally rejects “any notion that their lives should be dominated by a rapacious market, or an overbearing state.” Embery nonetheless relies on massive state action – extending to a full-scale Keynesian takeover of the economy – to fit the working class into the “patriotic and communitarian” mould he has created for them. The uncomfortable truth may be that Embery’s “communitarian” working class is at least partly complicit in its lack of political agency.
Figures on the Left and the Right uniting around common themes – such as community cohesion; a patriotic civic culture; and the dignity of work – sounds superficially like a way of breaking through the boilerplate of Left-Right politics. In Despised, Embery is rightly angry at the callousness and elitism exhibited by the party he and millions of others once called home.
But the demands Embery makes of the Left go far beyond a reformation of the Labour Party. He is asking a lot. In Despised he not only demands a radical change in direction from Britain’s ruling elites as a whole – in the media, business and politics. He also demands something of the working class itself: that it live up to the principles of community and continuity which Embery believes define the basis of its political outlook. Resentment of the cosmopolitan elites, however cathartic in the short-term, will not be enough.
Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class by Paul Embery is published by Polity Press (£15.99).