Blighty newsletter: The great status shuffle

Sir Keir Starmer is making opponents at quite a rate. Those who can claim a grievance against the prime minister include farmers (whose heirs may now pay inheritance tax on their land); older people (who will no longer be eligible for universal winter-heating subsidies); and business owners (subject to a higher rate of national insurance, a payroll levy). This is Sir Keir’s coalition of the discontented.It is partly about money, of course: people rarely like paying more tax or receiving less in benefits. And the government has a clear idea of who should foot the bill for a larger state: the cumulative decisions announced in the budget of October 30th will leave the poorest 90% of households better off, and the richest 10% rather worse off, according to what is known as the Treasury’s distributional analysis.But there is another way, I think, of looking at the government’s opponents: a question less of the redistribution of cash than the redistribution of status. It is not so much about the financial impact of policy decisions, and more an amorphous question of which groups are due respect, deference and a sense of being “seen” by the government of the day. All governments have a sense of “their people”, and the tribe they were put in place to serve. What many of the government’s opponents have in common is a startled discovery that they are not in it.And Sir Keir has a fairly sharp sense of the politics of status, and who his tribe is. In opposition, he would talk of a “respect” agenda, and the absence of it that his father—a toolmaker—felt when asked about his work in polite company. Cleaners, carers, nurses, drivers, cooks, teachers and warehouse workers, he told the Trades Union Congress in September; they were “the backbone of Britain”. His promises to put his government at the service of “working people” is an old-fashioned distinction between income derived from labour rather than capital.Those now left out often complain in terms of slights to their personal identity as much as attacks on their material interests. “Farming isn’t what we do, it’s who we are,” one farmer tells the . “We want—dare I say it—to feel as though the government respects us.” Landlords, too, declared themselves insulted when Sir Keir confirmed that they weren’t included in his definition of “working people”. A higher capital-gains bill is a pain, but to have your identity questioned by the prime minister really stings.This is tricky politics and it’s not obvious that Sir Keir has the skillset for it. The last prime minister to attempt it was Boris Johnson, who reallocated status by the shovel-load. The “forgotten people and left behind towns” of Brexit-voting northern England went on a pedestal; wealthy Remain-voting liberals were taken down a peg or two. It was the triumph of Hartlepool at the expense of Guildford. Of course, in the general election of 2024, the Tories would lose them both.