‘Respect? Don’t just say it, show it’

There’s something not quite right in British politics and people can feel it.

Patrick Maguire in The Times put it brutally when he said Labour can look like the party of “the London graduate, public sector pension, time off in lieu, Microsoft Teams, out of office reply, wiggling your mouse every half hour”. It is cutting because it lands close to something real. Not that those workers do not deserve decent conditions, they do. The problem is that too many others look on and wonder why those same basics are still out of reach for them.

He’s right. Let’s be blunt. Britain has split into two worlds of work.

In one, you have decent salaries, pensions and the option to shut the laptop at five and pick things up again tomorrow from the kitchen table. In the other, you have nurses run ragged on understaffed wards, care workers rushing from visit to visit, teachers drowning in paperwork, people running a small business, tradespeople and the self-employed never quite sure where the next pay cheque is coming from.

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And that second group, the people who quite literally keep the country going, feel like they are slipping down the political pecking order. That breeds resentment. And Nigel Farage has made a career out of exploiting it. He does not offer solutions. He stirs anger. He pits worker against worker, sneering at those working from home while ignoring the real failure, which is that the proceeds of the changing world have gone to people like him and the people who fund his political party at the expense of people who work hard and at the expense of public services which have been cut to the bone. It is a politics of division, not improvement. It feeds off frustration rather than fixing what caused it in the first place.

The Prime Minister talks about restoring respect for workers. It is the right instinct. But respect is not a line in a speech. It is not a slogan. It is something you can feel in your daily life.

Right now, too many do not.

Start with pay. You cannot claim to value nurses, carers or teachers while they are stretched thin and struggling to get by. In many other countries these are treated as solid, respected middle income jobs. Here they are too often treated as a cost to be squeezed.

And you can’t be the party of people who work hard if your policy for business is higher taxes and more regulations which add costs and squeeze opportunities to grow and create jobs and opportunities in communities across the country.

At the same time, the conversation about flexibility has gone badly off course. Flexibility has become shorthand for working from home. For millions, that is a good thing and it should not be taken away. Working from home has improved lives and made work more humane for many.

But it has also drawn a dividing line.

Because if your job is on a ward, in a classroom, in a shop or pub, on a construction site, in a field, in someone’s home or out on the road, working from home is meaningless. For those workers, flexibility needs to mean something else entirely. It should mean control over shifts, predictable hours, and the ability to balance work with family life without constant disruption.

Respect should not depend on whether you have a laptop.

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What would it actually look like if Labour got serious about this? It would mean safe staffing levels so nurses are not doing the work of three people. It would mean teachers trusted to teach instead of being buried under targets and paperwork. It would mean rotas that are set in advance so care workers and retail staff can plan their lives like everyone else.

Then there are the groups Labour still struggles to speak for properly – the self employed, the business owners and their staff.

Builders, electricians, drivers, freelancers, shop keepers, entrepreneurs. They take risks, work long hours and keep local economies alive. But when things go wrong, they are often left on their own. Not protected like employees working in big businesses. Not given the security which comes with access to lucrative government contracts which invariably go to big corporations.

That is not respect. That is being ignored.

In a modern economy, basic security should not vanish the moment someone goes to work for themselves. Whether it is pensions, sick cover or a safety net when work dries up, people need something to fall back on.

And if there is one area where all of this comes together, it is social care.

If you want to know whether a government truly values working people, look at how it treats care workers. These are some of the toughest jobs in the country. Low paid, high pressure, emotionally demanding and absolutely essential. Yet they remain underpaid, overstretched and too often invisible.

You cannot talk about respect while leaving that untouched.

And, as those who work hard have seen living standards stagnate, the ultra wealthy have cleaned up. Local council budgets were slashed and communities were neglected in too many places, the signs of decline are all too apparent with potholes, weeds and fly tipping becoming a sign of the times. And while the Labour government has reversed some of the cuts, it’s too often far from enough to restore a sense of pride in where we live. Contrast the experience of many with the way that a few have made hay. We saw the profiteering during Covid but it goes much further than that.

The uncomfortable truth for Labour is this. People can see who gets flexibility and who does not. Who has security at work and who does not. These are the new dividing lines. 

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If Labour wants to win back trust and take away the grounds for Reform’s politics of grievance, it has to shift its focus back to the people it was created to represent. Not by taking anything away from those who already have good conditions, but by extending dignity, security and flexibility to those who do not.

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