https://thecritic.co.uk/a-last-chance-at-class/

Of those chosen to be Labour MPs so far, only a handful have lived the unremarkable working class lives that were once common in parliament. While former nurses, train drivers or shop workers were common on the Labour benches even during Blair’s tenure, they make up only a handful of Labour’s candidates in 2024. In the few constituencies where a blue collar worker of the type that Labour was founded to represent has stood, Labour’s membership and internal democracy has resoundingly rejected them in favour of elite professionals. Labour has become a party made up solely of upwardly mobile winners, blandly uniform high achievers united not by any particular political conviction but by the survivorship bias of their remarkably similar but unrepresentative life stories.

Instead, Labour has found successful high status professional ‘returnees’ — the type to talk fondly of a place of birth that they left as quickly as they could, usually for London, where Labour’s power networks are concentrated, in a mirror of Britain’s incredibly South East centred economics.

The party has made a point of parachuting candidates who were professionally involved in the Remain campaign and the Second Referendum campaign into some of the most heavily leave-voting seats in the country- gambling that the divide that split its traditional working class voters from its new metropolitan city constituencies is a thing of the past. A populist folly that, in electing Labour, the country will quietly offer a mea culpa for. In an era of rapidly changing political allegiances and widespread downward mobility, this seems a bold assumption.