Introduction

Politics in the UK took an unexpected detour towards the end of 2009. Following 12 years during which the notion of class was effectively banished from official political discourse and poverty was presented as an issue of social exclusion rather than of income inequality, New Labour rediscovered class.

The rediscovery began in November of that year with Chancellor Alistair Darling's imposition of a windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses. It continued with a well-prepared, and much publicised, jibe by Gordon Brown during Prime Minister's Question Time about the Conservatives’ economic policies having been ‘dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton’. And it culminated in Equalities Minister Harriet Harman's response to the publication in January 2010 of a major government-commissioned report on equality when she declared that ‘persistent inequality of socio-economic status – of class – overarches the discrimination or disadvantage that can come from your gender, race or disability’ (The Guardian, 20 January, 2010).

Despite the predictable outrage of the Conservative front bench and right-wing tabloid press at what they portrayed as a return to ‘class war’ politics, those who hoped that this development might presage a rejection of the neoliberal principles which had informed the social and economic policies of New Labour governments since 1997 were to be disappointed. Within weeks of his attack on the class background of the Tory leadership, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had gone out of his way to counter the attack from the Right by emphasising New Labour's mission as a party not of the working class but of the middle class, committed above all to social mobility and the encouragement of social aspiration.

In truth, few were surprised by this rapid retreat to conventional Third Way politics. As most people recognised, the Party's rediscovery of class owed less to some change of heart on the part of the leadership and more to the imminence of a general election and the perceived need to address two very different sorts of electoral considerations.