Labour must fight to make being working class respectable again

By Adam Wissen

Peter Watt’s latest attempt to say the unsayable – ‘Labour Must Learn to Cheer the Successful’ – got me thinking about the definition of success and how we as a party approach it. Can success be defined purely by the annual income of an individual? Is it more to do with the number of steps up the social ladder an individual has made, the obstacles and adversity they have overcome to get where they are today or just a matter of how ‘self-reliant’ they are?

The charge from Mr Watt is that the Labour Party has a deep rooted hatred for anyone who wants to better themself. Let’s think about what that actually means; we’re against anyone who wants to be self-employed and make a living from doing what they love, we’re against a parent who wants their son or daughter to have the opportunities that they never had, we’re against the employee who wants to get promotion to the next grade. Think about all that for a minute or two and I defy you not to realise what a load of old tosh our former general secretary is talking.

Labour can and must be the party of aspiration but, and there is always a but; we cannot be the party that tells everyone what they want to hear all the time. We want everyone to be the best they can be, but must recognise that in that there is not room at the top for everyone or that everyone will necessarily achieve their ambitions.

Amongst the many discussions I had and hear in the aftermath of the recent riots, one thing that was said to me by a friend of mine struck me more than anything else. ‘There is little or no respect in being the working poor anymore.’ These kids are told that their communities are something which they can (or must) escape through being the next Dizzee Rascal or Wayne Rooney. But for 99% of them this will be little more than a fantasy.

Admitting that it’s okay to be poor risks me being condemned as someone who is happy to see people struggling on low wages. It could see us a party open to accusations of using the tax and benefit systems to ‘trap people’ in low paid work. Both these accusations would be missing the point. It is up to us as a the Labour movement to fight for increased opportunities for people who want to get on, but we should never forget that for every worker who works their way up through the company to management or successfully goes at it alone with their own enterprise, there are and will always be, those still on the shop floor.

We must never forget our duty to fight for those who remain on the shop floor; their pay, terms and conditions, their fair and equitable treatment but also to highlight the important role they successfully play in our society.

Perhaps Peter Watt (who has form for calling for the Labour Party to actually fully embrace the coalition’s cuts programme), should be considering the impact that these cuts will have on people’s aspirations and future success.

If the riots show one thing, it is perhaps that if it takes the violent, the greedy and dispossessed one night to destroy a business that it has taken a family generations to build; we either succeed together as a society or not at all.