What happened to the British working class? E P Thompson dated its ‘making’ to the early 19th century and wrote: ‘working class presence was, in 1832, the most significant factor in British political life.’ But he was really talking about the political activity of quite a small group of men. Later historians focused mainly on a period from the late 19th century to the 1950s, marked by larger-scale industrialisation, mass trade unions and the rise of the Labour Party.

This world has now unravelled. On the simplest level, there are fewer industrial workers. Occasionally, when I used to take my mother to fashionable areas of London, she would peer at a block of loft apartments or a boutique with puzzled curiosity. These buildings had once contained workshops and she had visited them in her capacity as a factory inspector in the 1950s. Trade union membership peaked in the late 1970s but, already, shrewd observers (notably Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote an influential piece for Marxism Today on ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’) could see that unions were changing. They contained more public-sector workers, including an increasing number of white-collar ones. The simplicity of purpose that had existed when large numbers of manual workers confronted a small group of capitalists was gone.

The Labour Party still exists. It has governed, mostly with large parliamentary majorities, for fifteen of the twenty-nine years since 1997 – a success that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of its leaders in the 1930s or the 1950s. But the alliance between the middle-class left-wingers who lead