The precariat election: Ignoring class and insecurity imperils Labour

The precariat has just spoken, and the commentariat did not notice. Rather, the political establishment views today’s mass ‘working class’ – defined by its insecure work, unstable incomes, and an increasingly fragile relationship with the state itself – as a ‘dangerous’ class; not because it is inherently extremist, but because it does not support traditional political norms. Failing to understand this class’s character is at the heart of the failure of all centre-left political parties to mobilise support from it.

Very briefly, consider the three dimensions that make the precariat a class. First, but not most importantly, those in the precariat have to endure unstable labour, including unpaid labour and work-for-labour off workplaces and outside of designated labour time. They also lack an occupational or organisational narrative to give to their lives, and are the first working class in history that, as a norm, has a level of schooling above what is really required for the type of job they can obtain.

Second, they have to rely almost solely on money wages, which are low, stagnant, volatile and uncertain. They typically lack non-wage benefits and entitlements, quite unlike the old proletariat. They are also systematically exploited by debt. Least appreciated, their living standards have been eroded by the loss of all forms of commons, including free libraries, free parks, allotments, free or subsidised legal institutions, and free or subsidised education.

Third, this is the first mass class that is systematically losing the rights of citizenship, or what the French call les droits acquis . This is the essence of precarity , which stems from the Latin to mean ‘to obtain by prayer’. This is the most important factor. The precariat feels like supplicants , relying on discretionary decisions from figures in positions of authority, be they landlords, employers, bureaucrats, parents or ‘colleagues’.

None of these three dimensions corresponds to the journalistic notion of ‘left behind’. But a crucial point is that the precariat has been a class-in-the-making, not yet a class-for-itself . What this means, put crudely, is that those in it are more united about a politics of grievance, centred on chronic insecurity, than about a preferred politics of hope. This is changing, partly because many more people are in or near being in the precariat, and more do not feel ashamed about that, recognising that there are structural causes of their shared insecurity.

However, the precariat still consists of three factions, which I call Atavists, Nostalgics and Progressives, each of which has traditionally voted for Labour, but all of which deserted the party at the English local elections and the Scottish and Welsh national elections on 7 May – although with different reasons and outcomes. It is how these three factions reacted that made it the First Precariat Election. They shaped its outcome.

The Atavists – basically, the relatively uneducated who have entered the precariat by falling out of old working-class households or communities – decisively voted for Reform, the populist right. By contrast, the Nostalgics – basically, migrants and racial minorities, who yearn for a home, for a present – voted Green, or for some independent candidate or just did not vote.  And perhaps most revealingly, the Progressives – basically, the young, relatively educated – largely voted Green

In each case, there should be two questions. Why did they desert Labour? And why did they vote for a specific alternative? The answers to both questions are actually pretty clear. And they do not offer Labour much hope of recovery before the next General Election, given Labour’s history and the road of ‘change’ on which the current leadership is embarked. The suggestion should be that, contrary to former health secretary Wes Streeting’s claim in his resignation letter in the aftermath of the election, Keir Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have had a vision and a strategy, but both are such as to be unappealing to the British electorate, particularly to all factions of the precariat.

That was flagged very clearly in Reeves’ Mais Lecture of March 2024, entitled ‘Economic Growth in an Age of Insecurity’ , as she fought to become chancellor of the Exchequer. In spite of its signature word ‘securonomics’, drawing on the ill-fated ‘Bidenomics’, it was a lecture that any senior Treasury or Bank of England official would have liked to make. The vision and strategy were to entice US finance and direct investment to the UK to boost GDP growth, from which British living standards would, it was presumed, rise for everybody. Securonomics was ‘modern supply side economics’, and the same strategy was reiterated in Reeves’ Mais Lecture of March 2026, and underpins the well-advertised deregulatory moves made since 2024.

Reeves used the word ‘security’ 17 times in that first Mais Lecture. But on every occasion, it was about guaranteeing security for capital, a…