Lessons from 1945: Labour, class and the politics of experience at the 1945 and 2024 general elections

A surge in anti-Tory sentiment. Conservative allegations that voters’ savings will not be safe under a Labour government. Labour politicians’ emphasis on their readiness for the job, not shrinking from the immensity of the task at hand. A series of world events bringing about a remarkable swing in British politics, unforeseeable a few years before. 

There is much about the 1945 general election campaign that resonates today. As voters across Britain go to the polls, this post traces one less obvious, or perhaps less expected, line of continuity between now and then: the politics of class-based experience and feeling.

Labour and class, then and now

Recent commentary in the press has focused on the class composition of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, their ‘class consciousness’, and claims to be the most ‘working-class cabinet’ in history.^[1] It is important to historicize these questions, placing the significance of class to Labour’s platform today in the context of an earlier election which saw – as commentators believe this election will also produce – a considerable Labour landslide.

There are, of course, key differences to recognise between the politics of the 1940s and today. The 1990s saw a wave of revisionism in accounts of the 1945 general election. Historians writing at this time sought to reframe the Labour landslide of that year as ultimately rooted in apathy, downplaying the extent of popular enthusiasm for Labour’s programme.^[2] Yet what is particularly striking, when considering voter testimony in 1945 from a contemporary perspective, is the extent of partisan feeling. Yes, anti-Tory sentiment was rife, apparent in the heckling in Conservative meetings at that election, yet more often than not this appears to have underlined a strongly held Labour identity.

It might be easy to blame Starmer’s Labour Party for the apparent lack of enthusiasm at this election. But this would be misleading and perhaps a little unfair. As political scientists Geoffrey Stoker, Jonathan Moss, Nick Clarke and Will Jennings have shown, while voters in the 1940s might have criticised particular political representatives and candidates, they possessed a degree of faith in and respect for (some might say deference towards) the political system itself, which our present climate lacks.^[3]

Nevertheless, one of the key themes at the 1945 general election was that of trust. The degree of similarity between the various party programmes in 1945 is well recognised among historians, most notably their shared commitment to at least some level of post-war reform, including the recommendations of the Beveridge Report. 

Accordingly, Labour challenged the credibility of the Conservatives’ promises, pointing to their poor record on social reform in the interwar decades, for much of which they had been in power. But beyond criticising their opponents along these lines, Labour politicians set out to prove why they were better trusted to enact these reforms. Where much of this outlined programme of reform centred on delivering economic security, improving workers’ working and living conditions, one way in which Labour politicians sought to achieve this was by shoring up their working class credentials.

Leading Labour figure Ernest Bevin, for example, recounted the ‘condition of the working man today’ when he traveled around constituencies as part of the campaign. His description of the struggle of the working-class breadwinner to provide for his family, after the demands of rent, traveling costs, income tax and insurance had been accounted for, was met by heartfelt ‘hear hears’ by working-class audience members, ‘as if it seemed to hit home’.^[4] In turn, in campaign literature and party-political broadcasts, Bevin recounted his personal experience of ‘the hard core of unemployment’.^[5]

Admittedly, not all Labour figures at this time could claim, or rather crediblyclaim knowledge of such experiences. Michael Stewart, Labour’s candidate for East Fulham in 1945, was described by the local party chairman as having been born to ‘humble parents’, attended an ‘ordinary’ elementary school before receiving scholarships to both grammar school and Oxford. Such claims met with a mixed reception. While one audience member described Stewart as a ‘self-made man’, another referred to him as an ‘Eton snob’. After one Labour meeting in Fulham, an attendee was overheard suggesting that Stewart was ‘an honest man, but to my mind he’s not quite ‘uman [sic]. He doesn’t get people like Edith does’. 

This assessment of Stewart, framed in relation to his fellow Labour candidate and incumbent MP in the neighbouring seat of West Fulham, Edith Summerskill, is telling in so far as it reveals that a shared class background was not the only means by which politicians could establish a connection with voters. Summerskill (who had grown up in a middle-class household with servants) invoked gendered, rather than explicitly class-based, experiences, particularly those of the married housewife, and more generally was described as using a ‘strong emotional rhetoric’.^[6] 

Such evidence is indicative of the degree to which appealing to emotion and experience mattered in 1945, offering a key means by which Labour politicians sought to prove they were in touch with the ‘ordinary’ realities of voters.

Ordinariness, old and new

Much has changed since 1945. The combined impact of deindustrialisation and the decline of deference has changed the way people think about class, the meanings it holds, particularly in relation to politics.^[7] In turn, these processes have involved a shift in what the working class looks like. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t go too far in suggesting a break with the past.

Now, as then, being in touch with and aware of the realities facing so-called ‘ordinary’ voters is a key criterion and site of contestation between the two major parties. Starmer’s allusion to his father’s occupation as a toolmaker may be lampooned by some, but his anecdotes recounting the family’s inability to undertake simple household repairs, as well as Rachel Reeves’ relaying memories of her mother adding up receipts at the kitchen table, would appear to suggest that an ability to understand and connect to the electorate still matters.

Now, as in 1945, Labour appears more comfortable on this terrain than the Conservatives. In 1945, the efforts of the Conservative Party to prove that they stood for the working man were undermined by the revelation, exposed by an advertisement in the press, that their leader, Winston Churchill, was offering to pay £2 and 15 shillings in weekly wages (just under £100 in today’s money) for a handyman and his wife, willing to serve as cook and housemaid.^[8] 

Similarities might be drawn with Rishi Sunak’s decision to opt for not having had access to Sky TV as a child, as evidence for being ‘in touch’ with the concerns and realities facing ordinary people. Labour’s advantage in this regard might be considered unsurprising, yet the same could not be said of the state of play in 1997, when Labour’s leader, a Fettes- and Oxford-educated lawyer, faced off against the ‘working class kid’ from Brixton, i.e. incumbent Prime Minister John Major.

It is fair to say, however, that circumstances have changed a little since then. With a dramatic rise in the cost of living, and public services in dire straits, an ability to relate to and understand everyday concerns has taken on a greater significance once more. With pollsters predicting a Labour landslide of various proportions, it looks like, as in 1945, Labour stands to gain from this shift in the political terrain.

*

The challenges a (likely) incoming Labour government faces today resemble those facing Attlee’s Labour Party in 1945, with a mounting burden of debt, crumbling national finances and a question mark looming over Britain’s place in the world. Then, as now, the task of delivering material transformation and improvements to voters’ lives will be an immensely difficult one.

Yet, the stakes are arguably even higher this time. The 2024 general election has been fought amid increasing popular disillusionment with politics, and a Starmer-led Labour government has been described by some commentators as ‘centrism’s last chance’.^[9] This disillusionment serves to undercut the leeway such a government might be given. Voters in 1945 seemingly had faith in the political system to deliver, displaying a degree of patience towards the incoming government owing to the monumental task of post-war reconstruction they had to face. 

Such faith is hard to find in today’s political climate. Keir Starmer, if he does form the next government after all the votes are counted tonight, will need all the luck of his forebears.

Rebecca Goldsmith is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, studying the Labour Party and the politics of class in mid-twentieth-century Britain

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/30/could-the-uk-soon-have-the-most-working-class-cabinet-of-all-time; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/30/private-school-politics-tories-labour.

[2] S Fielding, P Thompson, N Tiratsoo, “England Arise!” The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Briain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

[3] J Moss, N Clarke, W Jennings, G Stoker, The Good Politician: Folk Theories, Political interaction and the rise of anti-politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[4] See the account of Bevin’s address to a Labour Town Hall meeting in Fulham at the 1945 General Election in the field-notes from Mass-Observation’s investigation, available online in the Mass-Observation archives: MOA, TC 76/2/A.

[5] Transcript of Bevin’s BBC Broadcast, 23 June 1945, held at Churchill Archives, Cambridge: GBR/0014/BEVN 2/14.

[6] See Mass-Observation’s accounts of Labour meetings in Fulham: MOA, TC 76/2/A.

[7] F Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference in England 1968-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[8] See the reports of audience responses to Churchill’s visit to Fulham in MOA, TC 76/2/D.[9] https://www.ft.com/content/b574f37c-7ff8-4e16-a5e8-88d31fafd0d4.

[9] https://www.ft.com/content/b574f37c-7ff8-4e16-a5e8-88d31fafd0d4.