IF ONE character has been more prominent than many in political titles published in 2022, it is the gate-crasher UK parties struggle to evict from their comfort zones: the working class.

This hoary, troublesome vagrant just keeps inveigling its way into politics as the spectre no-one dares name, whether this be during the toxic discourse of Tory extremists or the rambling deliberation of Keir Starmer’s new New Labour.
 
Yet several books published this year sense the zeitgeist by acknowledging this unwelcome guest at the party forever on the verge of spoiling the complacent liberal democratic chatter with its crude curses.

In some titles, our party pooper turns up in fancy dress, not immediately identifiable but roaming the host’s house nonetheless. It is there, if concealed, in Adrian Bingham’s United Kingdom (Polity), a thematic history that traces the secular decline of a country badly failed by its political establishment.

While Bingham does not dwell directly on factors of class, it is conspicuous by its absence in the failures of elites to fashion a compelling narrative about a collective future that can transcend our self-evident divisions.

The author notes that the historian Hugh Thomas, who in 1959 published The Establishment despairing of how Britain was stuck in the past, “... would be bemused to find that 60 years after his scathing critique, the UK elected an Etonian prime minister, steeped in Classics and the language of Churchill, sceptical of Europe, and full of the glories of Global Britain.”

Class dynamics also lurk in the background of Phil Tinline’s The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares (Hurst), a fascinating analysis of the bad dreams that have fashioned Britain’s dominant narratives.

At times since the 1930s, the country’s conflicting nightmares have been shaped along class lines, and the choreography of both main parties in recent years suggests they respond to a dialectic pitting antagonistic forces against each other.

A more direct recognition of class as history’s engine is evident throughout Work Work Work: Labour, Alienation, and Class Struggle by Michael Yates (Monthly Review Press), an unapologetic consideration of the division of labour under late-stage capitalism.

Yates offers a timely restatement of Marxist principles at a moment in which the cruel drubbing of workers by crises not of their making is waking up so many from their long right-wing nightmare to the power of collective action.
 
A textbook battlefield that has claimed its fair share of victims in this struggle is described by Emma Dent Coad in One Kensington: Inside the Most Unequal Borough in Britain (Quercus).

Dent exposes the rot at the heart of the Tory fiefdom of Kensington and Chelsea, a London borough routinely described as the most unequal in the country where the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 claimed 72 mostly council tenants.

Such a deadly reminder of how class status continues to determine life chances in modern Britain should be more than enough to clarify the meaning of socialism, but as Martin Beveridge notes in The Socialist Ideal in the Labour Party: From Attlee to Corbyn (Merlin Press), this idea remains contested.

Fortunately, Beveridge gives socialists cause for hope in the more pessimistic climate engineered by Starmer by reminding them of their radical history and pointing to the “new politics” pursued by his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

The continuing appeal of Corbynism reminds us that many on the left still welcome the class gate-crasher to the party with open arms—whether the host likes it or not.