‘Why smashing the class ceiling should be key to Starmer’s conference speech’

I am happy to admit that I wasn’t convinced by the “class ceiling” phrase when Keir Starmer unveiled his “opportunity mission” in early summer. I wasn’t at all sure if voters would be comfortable with the reference to class, and I wasn’t at all sure that they’d get that it was a pun (of sorts) on the idea of a “glass ceiling”.

But my reservations were wrong, apparently. I understand that Labour strategists are now so convinced that it resonates with normal voters that it will likely be one of the central frames of this year’s leader’s conference speech.

Having spent way too many evenings in the last three years running focus groups, I’ve been giving some thought as to why I was mistaken – and why the phrase goes down well.

Primarily, I suspect it speaks to a sense of injustice. Life is tough and getting tougher for ordinary families. There is an incredibly strong feeling that opportunities that were once there to do well, and to build a better life, are not there for this generation or those that are to come. I’m not talking about going to Oxbridge and becoming a corporate lawyer. I’m talking about things like access to an apprenticeship, access to the local housing market and access to decent jobs.

Both focus groups and polling tell us that parents no longer think their kids will necessarily have a better quality of life than they have enjoyed. This is a cap on aspiration. Or a class ceiling, if you will.

It is also interesting that Starmer – and those who write his speeches and articles – are increasingly framing this idea as about communities. In focus groups, participants will often refer to the place they live in as a “working class town”, which is something to be admired. It signals a place where people strive, indeed where they *work*, to look after their families and those around them. Starmer’s choice of words talks to the sense of despair you hear in such communities today – that there is nothing that can be done to deliver on a communal aspiration to reverse decades of civic decline.

Contrast the emphasis on class, injustice and the everyday challenges of normal people in Britain in 2023 with that of Rishi Sunak’s speech last week. Which somehow, incredibly, contrived not to mention the cost-of-living crisis once. It was, more broadly, weirdly technocratic and extraordinarily out of touch.

Finally, I also think “class ceiling” talks to the general sense of rage and hopelessness ordinary people feel about their lives and the lives of their families right now. Through no fault of their own, day-to-day life is a huge struggle – and that is not about to change. They do not feel there is anything they can do to improve their situation. And they are very, very cross about it.

Framing political speeches as about class could seem rather archaic in 2023, but to normal voters, it’s very likely more tangible than the technocracy of Sunak or the optimism of Tony Blair’s “things can only get better”, which in the Angry Britain of today feels like it belongs in a completely different era. It’s certainly better than my alternative: “Things can only get marginally less shit.”

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