We Don’t Need The Plebs: How the Left Left the Working Class Behind
Yusuf Murray
In your mid- to late-20s, something fundamental changes. Not your political outlook, your approach to situationships or your wardrobe. It’s your back. Your back, which up until this day has always just been there, will one day just decide to stop working for a day or two, and you’ll never trust it quite the same way ever again. When that happens, you’ll need a “back person” in your contacts: a physio, a chiropractor, an osteopath, a random guy with a massage kink from an app. You get the idea.
I was lucky, my Da recommended someone: an old friend of his called Gerry (not his real name) that he’d been going to since his mid-20s. Gerry was an absolute legend: not only a former trade union man who was fantastic at his job, he also was the most affordable osteopath I’ve ever heard of. Gerry was so affordable, I could fly to Birmingham for a weekend, have a session while I was there, and it would still be cheaper than seeing an osteopath in Dublin.
He explained his thinking to me the first time I went for treatment: “I’m a working-class lad, and I know that working-class people need osteopaths too. But they can’t afford to pay £100 in fancy places with art on the wall.” Gerry was then, beyond doubt, not just someone who tweeted core socialist principles—solidarity, class consciousness, mutual aid—but someone who lived them every day. This is a man who, every single session of his working life as an osteopath, sacrificed more than half his potential earnings.
But here’s the weird thing: as he chatted to you while twisting your tech-addled posture back into a human shape, Gerry was angry. He was angry about migrants, angry about Brexit, angry about striking doctors, angry about something to do with the French – although if I’m honest, I can get behind the last one. F*ck Thierry Henry. In short, Gerry was angry about whatever the Daily Mail was angry about.
Plenty of people would shrug this off easily enough: Gerry was a boomer, gammon, irredeemable, just one of millions of dispensable plebs. But that simply doesn’t stand up to analysis: we’ve already established that Gerry lived core left-wing, humanist values every single day of his life. I’d argue more so than many ‘activists’. I had to find out what had happened to Gerry along the way to make him this angry.
It turned out that the left had stopped talking to people like him: working-class folk with working-class accents from working-class neighbourhoods. It wasn’t like Gerry hadn’t been through many progressive moments of his own: working around Birmingham with the Windrush generation meant he had no time for racism, and later on, he’d got behind gay rights: whilst he definitely didn’t want to see “two blokes snogging”, he thought it was mad that we’d once criminalised people for who they love.
But at some point—around the same time that corporate America went woke for a brief decade—the progressive movement decided it didn’t need to carry people like Gerry with them any more. And so it started ignoring them. What was once “Coal Not Dole”, “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay” or just “F*ck Maggie” became discussions so littered with buzzwords you needed a degree to follow. From the moment Two Jags Prescott declared, “We’re all middle-class now”, people like Gerry simply ceased to exist in the eyes of progressive and left-of-centre hacks. For a while, this cost progressive politics nothing: people like Gerry didn’t engage anyway. Until they did: with votes for Brexit, with a cruel witch hunt of Trans people, with wildfire riots on the streets of Southport.
This isn’t just a British phenomenon either: progressive organisations across the globe blindly tread the same path. Under Gilmore and Burton, the Irish Labour Party became one of the most enthusiastic adopters of this model anywhere in the world: passing truly progressive legislation for Trans people and doing the bulk of parliamentary work for marriage equality whilst implementing vicious austerity and cosying up to our ‘guardians of the peace’ as they committed perjury to try and put working-class people behind bars.
Much the same fate has met Sinn Féin—in the twenty-six counties at least—who, after a surge in and following the 2020 General Election, nosedived from an aggregate polling high of 36% in summer 2022 to 19% in the 2024 General Election, and haven’t recovered above an aggregate 23% in polling since. It is no coincidence that Sinn Féin’s dive in the polls began at the time of the first “East Wall Says No” protests, the first in a chain reaction that spread across the state. Although Sinn Féin have shifted policies and messaging since—such as a policy that IPAS centres should not be situated in working-class areas—this has not been rewarded with any significant improvement in polling, and in any case, Sinn Féin have since been outflanked in ‘tough on immigration’ talk by Harris and O’Callaghan in a way that would be impossible to match without haemorrhaging their not insignificant progressive vote.
So apart from fixing my back, what did Gerry teach me? The left needs to get out on the streets of our communities and get talking. Our messaging has to be common sense and free of waffle (Mick Lynch is one of the best examples of this). Our policies have to reflect the material realities of our communities: refugees are welcome here, but we also need to organise to make sure they’re also accompanied by extra GP and school places in areas like Coolock and East Wall. And let’s retire the woke-scold: people’s real concerns, confusion or ignorance deserve real solutions from the left – because the right are not afraid to provide them.
Only a few months into his retirement, Gerry passed away last year after decades of selfless service to his community. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.