How the British Left Traded Solidarity for Virtue Signalling, and Why the Working Class Is No Longer Listening
There is a speech circulating in left-wing circles in Dublin that ought to unsettle every socialist in Britain. Not the kind of unsettling that produces a conference resolution or a letter to the Guardian. The kind that keeps you awake at three in the morning. The kind that names a thing you have been half-knowing for years but have lacked the honesty, or the courage, to say aloud.
The speech was delivered by László Molnárfi, President of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union, at an event organised by the Socialist Workers Network. It is, in the truest sense of the word, a reckoning. Molnárfi names what many on the left have known for years but have been too comfortable, or too afraid, to say: the socialist left has lost the working class. Not because the working class has turned fascist. But because the left abandoned it first.
He describes a scene from April 2025. An anti-immigration march of ten thousand people down O’Connell Street. A counter-protest of two hundred left-wing activists. The class disparity was unmistakable. On one side stood working-class people, expressing a deep and complex dissatisfaction that no serious observer could reduce to simple racism. On the other stood leftists, primarily students and self-styled thought activists, shouting “Nazi scum” at the very people they claimed to represent.
“The Socialist left rushes to defend the system, but this defends neither asylum seekers nor the working class. In fact, it defends the government.” — László Molnárfi, TCD Students’ Union
He was speaking about Ireland. He might just as well have been speaking about Britain.
Today, as this article is published, the Together Alliance is marching through London from Park Lane to Whitehall. The organisers announced from the stage that half a million people had gathered. The Metropolitan Police put the figure closer to fifty thousand. The gap between those two numbers tells you something about a movement’s relationship with reality that no opinion poll could. A left that cannot accurately count itself is a left that has prioritised how it feels over what it is actually doing.
But here is the deeper point. The people who have walked farthest from the left are not in London today. They are in Scunthorpe, where only this week Reform UK took the Brumby ward by-election from Labour on a turnout of seventeen per cent. The Greens polled one hundred and thirty-three votes. The march in London will not speak to a single one of the four thousand five hundred people in Brumby who did not vote at all. And it is those four thousand five hundred, the silent and the exhausted, whose absence should terrify the left far more than the eight hundred who voted for Reform.
The problem is not the march. The problem is treating the march as sufficient. Those are not the same thing, and the failure to distinguish between them is precisely what this article is about.
The British Left: A Study in Abandonment
The story of how the British left lost its working-class base is not a sudden rupture. It is the slow accumulation of choices, each one small, each one dressed in the language of progress. But it is worth being precise about what happened and, crucially, where it came from.
The displacement of class by identity as the left’s organising principle was not an organic development of British socialist thought. It was an import. It arrived from American campuses in the 1980s, carried in academic journals and absorbed first by those whose primary contact with the working class was theoretical. The language of intersectionality, the hierarchy of oppressed identities, the elevation of symbolic recognition over material conditions: all of these were, in their intellectual origins, American products. They were transplanted into the British left at precisely the moment when Thatcherism was dismantling the industrial and trade union base that had given class politics its practical grounding. The timing was not coincidental. The effect was catastrophic.
Revolutionary organisations like Class War and Red Action emerged specifically to resist this drift. They argued, loudly and at times uncomfortably, for the primacy of class. They were defeated. The cultural left won. And the working class began, quietly and without fanfare, to walk.
By 2019, the traditional link between working-class occupation and voting Labour had effectively disappeared. The party of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan now draws more support from the professional and managerial classes than from the workers it was founded to represent. In the 2024 general election, Labour won office on barely thirty-five per cent of the vote, the lowest share ever recorded by a party forming a majority government. A YouGov survey of over thirty-five thousand voters found almost no meaningful difference between Labour’s support among ABC1 and C2DE voters. The professional middle class and the working class voted for the same party in roughly equal measure. That is not a coalition of class solidarity. It is a statistical accident dressed up as a mandate.
Age, education, and position on the culture war now determine how Britain votes. The job a person does barely registers.
And that absence masks a still more damning truth. The British Election Study shows that the class gap in voter turnout has grown to sixteen percentage points between working-class and middle-class voters, up from less than five in 1964. The working class has not abandoned the left so much as it has abandoned the entire exercise. Millions have concluded that politics is something done to them, not for them. On that, they are largely correct.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
— George Orwell
The polling that surrounds today’s march confirms how far the collapse has gone. Ipsos records Labour at eighteen per cent, matching the lowest the party has registered since records began in 1976. YouGov earlier this month placed Labour and the Conservatives level on sixteen per cent, with Reform UK on twenty-three and the Greens surging to twenty-one.
Electoral Calculus modelling projects that in an election held today, Labour would finish in sixth place, behind the Greens and the SNP. Keir Starmer’s personal satisfaction rating stands at minus sixty-six, the worst recorded for any Prime Minister since Ipsos began tracking in 1977, worse than John Major at his nadir and worse than Rishi Sunak in the weeks before he lost everything.
The party is not in crisis. It is in freefall…
A New Bottle for Old Wine
Zack Polanski is on a stage in Whitehall today, addressing the Together Alliance rally. It is a fitting image. Not because opposing the far right is wrong, but because it captures, with almost cinematic precision, what the contemporary left has become: a movement most comfortable when it is performing its values to an audience that already agrees with them.
Polanski is the dominant figure of this left at this moment and deserves direct assessment. We have written about him at length in these pages. What matters here is his structural role in the argument. His eco-populism has delivered a genuine membership surge and a by-election victory in Gorton and Denton. He is media-fluent and energetic. But his politics are not original, and he is not a conviction politician in any meaningful sense. He is a performer who has found his role.
His pitch is the same product Tony Benn offered in the 1970s and 1980s: tax the rich, end the arms trade, renationalise the commanding heights, speak truth to power. Jeremy Corbyn repackaged it for a generation that had never seen it before and produced, in 2017, the closest the left had come to real power in a generation, before the contradictions consumed it. Polanski has repackaged Corbyn’s repackaging, with extremely sleek media operation.
Each iteration produces genuine excitement among the graduate left. Each produces a membership boom. Each eventually confronts the same structural problem: the working class, whose support is indispensable to any socialist project, was not the constituency that drove the surge in the first place.
Polanski is Benn via Corbyn, repackaged for the streaming age. The pitch is identical. Only the presenter has changed.
The numbers make this uncomfortable to dispute. Green voters remain overwhelmingly younger, better-educated, and more likely to work in the public sector than the electorate at large. The party’s rural seats were won partly on opposition to housing development and energy infrastructure, to the applause of wealthy homeowners who object to turbines spoiling their view. Its urban support comes from gentrifying enclaves where the graduate class signals its values from behind a laptop. Polanski has announced his intention to stand in North London, in Hackney or its surroundings. He will not be standing in Scunthorpe.
At his first conference speech as leader, Polanski admitted he had been asked “dozens and dozens of times” whether the Green Party was an environmental movement or a social justice movement.
That the question needed answering at all tells you something important.
The climate crisis, the thing that gives the party its name and its moral claim on the electorate, has become secondary to a broader portfolio of liberal concerns:
Gaza, gender identity, anti-racism as symbolic performance. The Greens are not socialists. They are liberals who have discovered that left-wing rhetoric polls well among the laptop classes. In Brumby this week, they polled a hundred and thirty-three votes. That is not a Green wave. That is a party still too liberal for the working class of the council estates.
The Migration Question the Left Will Not Answer
Molnárfi was blunt about migration. When the socialist left rushes to defend a system that serves neither asylum seekers nor working-class communities, it ends up defending the government. It defends the very power it claims to oppose. The same dynamic operates in Britain, and has done so for years.
When working-class communities raise concerns about the pressures of mass migration on housing, on wages, on public services already stripped to the bone, the left responds not with analysis but with moral instruction. It calls people racists. It shouts at their protests. It treats material concern as moral deficiency. It does so, in part, because to engage seriously with the argument would require confronting an ideological commitment the liberal left has held as sacred for decades: the commitment to open borders as a progressive position, regardless of who pays the price.
It is worth recalling that not every significant voice on the left has been willing to perform this evasion. Bernie Sanders, speaking in 2015, was asked whether the United States should have open borders.
His answer was unambiguous. Open borders, he said, was a Koch Brothers proposal. A right-wing policy. The effect would be to flood the labour market with cheap workers, driving down wages for the people already at the bottom, while the costs of that displacement fell on the communities least able to absorb them. It served capital and harmed labour. He was right. He was also condemned by the liberal-left for saying it. The British left, a decade later, still cannot say it aloud without being called a fascist.
Sanders called open borders a right-wing policy in 2015. The British left still cannot say it without being called a fascist in 2026.
In Britain, the same argument was made, with remarkable prescience and at considerable personal cost, by Eddie Dempsey. At a left-wing, pro-Brexit event in 2019, Dempsey, then senior assistant general secretary of the RMT, said something that needed saying. He observed that the people who turned up to Tommy Robinson demonstrations were united, above all, by their hatred of the liberal left. And then he said, plainly: they are right to hate them.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
— George Orwell
That statement was not an endorsement of Tommy Robinson. It was a diagnosis. Dempsey was describing the precise mechanism by which the liberal left’s contempt for the working class was creating the conditions for far-right recruitment. He was warning that treating working-class people as suspects, as moral inferiors whose concerns about immigration, deindustrialisation, and the betrayal of Brexit needed to be dismissed as bigotry, was not anti-fascism. It was fascism’s most reliable recruitment officer.
The response was everything his argument had predicted. Middle-class Remainers and prominent voices of the liberal-left took the clip, stripped it of context, and circulated it online as evidence that Dempsey was a racist and a fascist. The video was reshared for years afterwards, each time presented as a gotcha, each time deployed as a warning to anyone who might contemplate making the same argument. The message to the left’s working-class base was plain: there are thoughts you are not permitted to think, and if you think them aloud, we will end you.
The liberal left did not refute Dempsey’s argument. It tried to destroy the man who made it. That is not politics. That is a protection racket for the comfortable.
In Middlesbrough, one of the most economically deprived towns in England, families on Universal Credit watch as asylum seekers are housed in hotels and given support they cannot themselves access. Gemma Grafton, a mother of three, gave up work because bus fares made employment financially ruinous. She lives in a cramped three-bedroom terrace with five people and has been told no social housing is available. She will vote Reform at the next election. Not because she is a fascist. Because she believes, with considerable evidence, that Labour has forgotten she exists. And because the only people who ever told her that her concerns were reasonable were the people the left told her were monsters.
The latest polling shows Reform UK drawing the support of over fifty per cent of C2DE voters, the skilled and unskilled manual workers who once formed the bedrock of Labour’s electoral coalition. A YouGov poll placed Reform at thirty per cent among that group, with Labour trailing at twenty. The party of the working class is now the third choice of the working class, behind a movement led by a stockbroker from Cheshire who once argued for privatising the NHS. This is what happens when you shout “Nazi scum” at the people you are supposed to represent.
They find someone else who will at least pretend to listen. The far right does not need to offer solutions. It only needs to offer attention. The left, which once had both, now offers neither.
Your Party: The Same Mistakes, Faster
When Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announced the launch of what became Your Party in July 2025, sign-ups reached eight hundred thousand within days. The energy was real. The dissatisfaction it drew upon was genuine. Here, at last, seemed a vehicle for the principled left politics that Labour had long abandoned.
Eight months later, the party’s polling has collapsed to barely one per cent, consumed by exactly the factional warfare that has paralysed the British left for generations. Within weeks of launch, Corbyn and Sultana were publicly at war over internal structures, executive bodies, and membership portals. Sultana complained of being sidelined by a “sexist boys’ club.” Corbyn’s allies accused her of acting unilaterally. The founding conference descended into recrimination. Not over housing policy, or trade union rights, or the cost of living. Over who had authorised a website.
Jacobin magazine captured the underlying failure with precision: rather than defining itself through outward-facing policy and community organising, Your Party spent its first months consumed entirely by process. Who sat on which executive. Who had authorised what. When the conference would be held. The public, Jacobin noted, came second. On the most target-rich political landscape the left has faced in a generation, an exhausted Labour government, a cost-of-living crisis without resolution, mass disillusionment from Scunthorpe to Middlesbrough, Your Party managed to be its own worst enemy before anyone else had the chance.
Your Party is not a tragedy. It is a recurring farce. The British left has a talent for choosing faction over class, process over purpose, and internal purity over the hard work of actually winning.
What is revealing is not that the left has split again. It always splits. What is revealing is how it split: not over strategy for the communities most in need of representation, but over whether Zarah Sultana had the authority to launch a membership portal. Molnárfi could have written the script. He very nearly did, six years earlier, and nobody in a position of power on the British left was listening.
The Road Not Taken
A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is ‘real’ life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only ‘real’ work, that the North is inhabited by ‘real’ people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites.
The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy – that at any rate is the theory.
Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilised man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot.” – George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier
Molnárfi closed his Dublin speech with a challenge that ought to echo in every left-wing meeting room in Britain. Class struggle is at Coolock, at Citywest, at the East Wall, he said. Lead them, or they will be led by right-wing agitators. And if you can no longer lead them, stand aside and let us lead.
Eddie Dempsey made the same argument in 2019, in different words, in a different country. He was not thanked for it. He was attacked, his words stripped of context and weaponised by the very people his warning was about.
We at Labour Heartlands have been making the same argument for years, in these pages, with our names attached. We have received the same response: accusations of racism, of nativism, of giving comfort to the right. The charge is as dishonest now as it was when it was levelled at Dempsey, and we have no more intention of retreating from it than he did. This is not a political position we have arrived at recently. It is the founding conviction of this publication.
The mechanism does not change, because the people operating it have not changed. They are the same people, in the same positions, attending the same marches, counting their crowds in multiples of the actual figure, and they will defend their version of the left against all comers, including the working class it was built to represent.
The working class of Britain is not lost. It has not turned fascist. It has not abandoned its interests or its instincts. It has run out of patience with a left that lectures it, analyses it, marches past it on the way to Whitehall, and never once stops to ask what it actually needs. The four thousand five hundred people who did not vote in Brumby this week are not disengaged. They are exhausted. And exhaustion is not apathy. It is the last thing you feel before you do something irreversible.
The left has a choice. It can continue marching through London for the benefit of those who already agree, performing its values to a crowd that will applaud and then go home. Or it can return, with some humility and considerably more graft, to the communities it was founded to serve: to the hard and unglamorous work of organising rather than the easy comfort of signalling, to the steel towns and the seaside towns and the places where the left’s absence is not an abstraction but a daily lived reality.
If it chooses the former, it will die. It will die admired by its own supporters and irrelevant to everyone else. If it chooses the latter, something larger might be saved along with it.
The working class is not waiting for another leader with a new suit and an old sermon. It is waiting for someone to knock on the door, ask the right question, and actually stay to listen to the answer. That is not a leadership quality. It is a basic requirement. And the left has not met it for thirty years.
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