There are 109 paid members of the government (there’d be more if the figure wasn’t limited by law), and, as we’ve come to learn, each has their own definition of what constitutes “working people”.
This includes non-definition definitions, such as the one most recently offered by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves: “I don’t think we need to define more than that, really. We made a commitment in our manifesto to not increase those taxes. We didn’t last year. It remains our commitment for this parliament.”
To be fair, she was referring back to her party’s well-known manifesto commitment (“income tax, VAT and national insurance are the key taxes that working people pay”). And that’s undeniable to the point of truism. But what this fails to acknowledge is that lots of the idle rich pay considerable sums in VAT every time they buy a private jet, or dine out at a fancy restaurant. Should we consider them to be “working people”?
Reeves’s deputy, Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, has been a bit more specific of late, stating that the term “working people” covers “anyone with a payslip”. That could be extremely broad in the figurative sense of doing paid work for an employer – or very narrow if it literally means you get a physical slip of paper on which your gross and net pay, tax, NI and pension contributions are typed out.
Of course, when she was under less pressure, in those easy, balmy days of opposition, Reeves was more forthcoming – well, somewhat – when she suggested that “working people are people who go out to work and work for their incomes”, adding: “There are people who do have savings, who have been able to save up, and those are working people as well.” How big are their savings, though? No figure has ever been suggested.
The nearest we’ve got was when Keir Starmer said that working people are those “who earn their living, rely on our services, and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble”. That’s not bad, except that even the richest people rely on the council to get their gold-plated bins collected, and on other services too – like if Lord Montagu of Beaulieu had been run over by one of his fine classic cars, and been taken to an NHS hospital in an NHS ambulance and fixed up by an NHS doctor.
More recently still, at the weekend, transport secretary Heidi Alexander had a stab at it, defining working people as folk on “a modest income”.
Then again, Lisa Nandy, culture secretary and professional northerner, conceded that people with six-figure salaries can be “working people” too (which is just as well, seeing as she’s on £159,851 per annum). In her own words: “I mean, if they go to work, obviously they will be working.” Unarguable, but inconsistent with the remarks of some of her colleagues.
Over on education, meanwhile, Bridget Phillipson refused to say whether the self-employed are “working people”, stating only that they are the ones “whose main income arises from the fact that they go out to work every day”. This must surely include small business owners who are, for example, plumbers, window cleaners or pest controllers – those who cannot work from home, and whose only boss is themselves.
I suppose that trying to define “working people” is like the old saying about trying to define an elephant – you know one when you see one.
On that basis, the endless variety of categorisations offered by Labour politicians makes some sense, because nearly everyone works for a living, has worked for a living (pensioners), will work for a living (students), or would work for a living if they could get a job, or, come to think of it, start their own business.
If Labour said that it wouldn’t raise taxes for “working people”, then it meant nearly everyone, and that’s how it got to win the election – because no one thought that any prospective tax hike would affect them. This impression was greatly amplified by the high-profile changes the party did propose – VAT on private school fees, attacking the super-rich non-doms, and ending the use of offshore trusts to avoid tax.
“Working people” was a way of saying “not you” to the floating voter of 2024 who might have been worried about the state taking even more of their income away. It's better than “working class”, which is pejorative, or “middle class”, which would be too exclusive – and besides, we don’t like talking about class these days. It’s a bit divisive.
We can see another reason why Labour relied on such a rubbery concept as “working people”: it was based on the searing experience of previous – lost – elections. Because as soon as a shadow chancellor mentioned anything about who might actually be worse off under a Labour government, the media went mad, and the Tories characterised it as an “attack on aspiration” or labelled it a “tax bombshell”, even though few people would ever have been injured by this legendary socialist missile.
If Labour’s tax and spend plans, intended to revolutionise health and education, were likely to cost anyone as much as a quid a week, the press crucified the hapless party leader of the day. So now they don’t get too specific, and they left much unsaid in 2024, sticking to the equally banal slogan of “change”.
Well, we all know what happened next. And what was a meaningless but useful slogan for the opposition has turned into a terrible burden in government, precisely because every “working person” pays council tax (which is up), and income tax (thresholds frozen, probably for the rest of the decade), has savings and a pension (hit by higher capital gains tax), and, realistically, is affected by the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions.
Starmer and Reeves left themselves no room for manoeuvre even in good times, and were critically vulnerable to making their pledge sound like a sick joke in the bad times. They should never have given the British people the impression that only the richest would have to make a financial sacrifice to put the public finances on a sustainable basis.
But then again, given that the British are a devoutly cakeist people, who think they can enjoy fine public services without paying much for them, Labour would never have won the election if it had told the truth – which is that Brexit, which we voted for, is still costing us dearly.
In the end, it’s all our own fault, and we “working people” have only ourselves to blame. Still, there’s always Reform UK, which is more than happy to tell us we can have our cake and eat it. Irresistible, isn’t it?
