“A working class hero is something to be,” sang John Lennon. The 1970 song, an ironic protest against classism, was banned from several US radio stations and censored in Australia, because the sentiment is expressed through coarse language, and that’s not fucking acceptable. But, of course, Lennon had nothing to say about working-class heroines. In fact he declared of the song, “I hope it’s for workers and not for tarts and fags.” Working-class struggles, we are given to understand, are male. Frankly, not that much has changed since Lennon’s day.
Working-class women are damned by the impossible dichotomy of the lowest expectations and the highest standards. The ruling classes will scrutinise and judge us for signs that we are no better than we ought to be, while our own will turn on us if we show any sign of ambition. Far be it from us to want to be heroines.
To thrive against these odds, and to have any hope of getting by, there are two things working-class girls shouldn’t do. The first is to leave school without any qualifications. The second is to get pregnant at 16. Angela Rayner did both. And she defied Lennon. Rather than getting stuck in a council house with a menial job, as happens to so many, she rose to become one of the most powerful women in Britain. Until yesterday, that is.
“Rayner was the rarest of representations in a party that has badly lost its way.”
But to me, Rayner is the epitome of a working-class heroine. The odds were stacked against her, economically and culturally. She grew up on a council estate in Stockport in poverty: her mother suffered from bipolar disorder, and her grandmother worked three jobs to keep the family afloat. She worked in social care, and later entered politics not via the Oxford Union, but through union activism. She has a Northern accent, uses coarse language, and she’s a woman who doesn’t know her place.
Class, though, is not a protected characteristic and Rayner’s origins have been the easiest and laziest tool for her critics. She vapes, they gasp; she wears green trousers and leopard print, the Daily Mail howls. She’s been called “thick as mince”, criticised for drinking vodka, and has been the subject of endless abuse. And yet, she’s never tried to hide her background. She leaned all the way in, defying critics by wearing what she wanted, dancing and drinking, and instructing Hansard transcribers not to correct her grammar.
And she was useful to her party. Rayner was the rarest of representations in a party that has badly lost its way. She was a politician of a type so scarce her background had to be part of every conversation, because it is staggeringly rare for an MP to emerge from her demographic. In the Seventies, Labour could boast around one-in-three working-class MPs; in 2023, it was just one in 10. As a result, the party used her as a human lamppost flag at every opportunity, even to the last. Keir Starmer, responding to the controversy, said he was proud to sit alongside a deputy PM from a working-class background (putting his hand on her shoulder in a way I’m not sure he’d have done with a man).
Of course, Starmer was never going to be able to save her — her sin was too grave. But the irony is that she was never going to be enough to save Labour. Working-class voters don’t like Starmer; his party isn’t for them any more. A YouGov poll earlier this year found that 31% of those living in households with an income of more than £70,000 a year intend to vote for Labour, compared with 19% of those in households earning less than £20,000. It’s all a gift to Nigel Farage, who couldn’t be more delighted to declare Reform the “party of the working class” — despite being a privately-educated former banker.
Another gift to Farage has been the defection of the suddenly working-class politician Nadine Dorries. And the comparison is telling. The novelist and former Tory MP defected to Reform this week and ran her working-class credentials up the flag-pole in the Daily Mail, reminiscing fondly about her Dickensian childhood. “My father, a bus driver,” she wrote, “suffered from Raynaud’s disease, an agonising circulatory disorder that led to the amputation of his toes. It limited his ability to work. There were many times when I would be dragged under the kitchen sink to hide from the rent man as he banged on the front door or peered in through the window.” In the excitement that followed Nadine’s conversion to Nigel, few remembered that Dorries herself had been entangled in financial controversy not so long ago. But luckily for Dorries, she was the right sort of working class. She talks the right way, wears the right clothes, and doesn’t wear her class on her Boden sleeve (unless it suits her).
Yet only a year ago, Dorries had the gall to attack Rayner for “weaponising her working class roots”. To me, this is the most frustrating insult of all: the one that comes from inside the house. It goes to the heart of the working-class woman’s paradox. Rayner has betrayed circumstances she didn’t choose in favour of those she did, and that is treachery. “She’s worse than a hypocrite, she’s a working class traitor”, insisted Lisa McKenzie, an anarchist and lecturer, during a recent LBC interview. McKenzie doesn’t believe in social mobility, saying it’s “essentially cherry picking individuals and allowing them into the middle class from the working class”.
Obviously, I too, would like to live in a country in which there are ample opportunities for everyone regardless of birth circumstance; but surely those opportunities are allowed to include things such as “becoming a politician”, “earning money” and “buying property”, ambitions no one much minds when they’re chosen by someone who went to private school and is in line for a nice inheritance. It’s what’s expected, the natural order of things. But Rayner is an aberration.
The real test then, will be how Labour treats Rayner going forward. When Peter Mandelson resigned in 1998, following a furore over a £373,000 loan to buy a home, he was out for just 10 months before triumphantly returning — only to resign again in 2001 after being accused of interfering in a passport application. He then enjoyed a lucrative tenure as a European Commissioner before returning to government in 2008 as business secretary and the warm welcome of a peerage. He’s now happily hobnobbing with Donald Trump in another addition to his portfolio: a fancy mansion in Washington. The chances of Rayner following are non-existent; there is little chance of redemption, regardless of atonement — she simply doesn’t fit the mould.
Rayner’s opponents have long had it in for her, and she foolishly handed them the weapon. Sure, we could blame the complexity of our tax laws, but the truth is her stamp-duty downfall this week was quite simply the sort of mistake a working-class woman cannot afford to make.
