1. Age of upheaval

A few decades ago, as the wall dividing Germany came down, it was commonplace to hear analysts claim liberal democracy had advanced to a superior stage of human evolution through the dominance of the market—it had secured the end of history. In general, mainstream conservative, liberal and social-democratic thinking failed to challenge such assumptions. These arguments have not aged well.

Today there is more talk of building walls than pulling them down. The political philosophy, which asserted competition, was the guiding principle of human activity and the only guarantor of true liberty appears instead to have incubated sinister forms of authoritarian populism across both the left and right. Not unrelated, support for democracy looks to be in retreat.

Researchers recently concluded, having analysed global datasets covering four million people compiled in 3500 surveys across 154 countries, that dissatisfaction with democracy amongst the developed countries to be at its highest levels for almost 25 years, and they suggested the rise of populism was not so much a cause but symptom of this dissatisfaction (Foa et al., Reference Foa, Klassen, Slade, Rand and Collins2020). In the UK 2019 dissatisfaction levels were the highest ever recorded. Another recent study of long-term shifts in public attitudes suggested growing UK disenchantment, declining confidence in parliamentary traditions and a willingness to embrace authoritarian ideas that ‘challenge core tenets of our democracy’ (Hansard Society, 2019).

It should be noted, however, that the most recent study by the same Cambridge academics into how the pandemic has reset global politics suggests support for populism appears to be in decline. Drawing on surveys of more 750,000 people across 109 countries, they found support for populist parties, agreement with populist attitudes and the approval ratings of populist leaders had fallen since the emergence of the coronavirus. A perception that populist leaders had mismanaged the spread of the disease was a potential explanation and that the pandemic has been a ‘unifying event’ that has soothed political tribalism.

In June 2020, approval of government handling of the pandemic was 11 percentage points lower, on average, in countries with populist leaders than in those with more centrist governments. By the end of 2020 this gap had widened to 16 points. Electoral support also fell for populist parties between 2019 and 2021, a trend seen most clearly in Europe, where the proportion of people intending to vote for one declined by an average of 11 points, to 27 per cent. Populist leaders have had, on average, a 10-percentage point drop in approval ratings since the World Health Organisation formally declared a pandemic in March 2020.

Ratings for non-populists were, on average, roughly unchanged. Support for Europe’s opposition populist parties also fell during the pandemic, whilst support increased for more mainstream opposition groups. Yet faith in the democratic processes remains fragile. In the US, for example, the share of people who consider democracy a ‘bad’ way to run the country more than doubled, from 10.5 per cent in late 2019 to 25.8 per cent in late 2021 (Blakely, Reference Blakely2022).

The material basis for this dramatic 30-year transformation of attitudes towards democracy and authoritarianism appears to be that capitalism is unable to secure the material wellbeing of a critical mass of its citizens, with disastrous consequences. Even before a global pandemic, it was leading to what Pankaj Mishra described as ‘mass disillusion, anger and disorientation caused by an increasingly unequal and unstable economy’ (Mishra, Reference Mishra2017, p. 330) with implications for the ordering of society and how we live together.

The financial crisis brought with it a decade of flat growth and austerity, consolidating an already visible wage crash whilst deepening a housing crisis, leading to indentured insecurity and anxiety. Social mobility is in reverse, and poverty and inequality are intensifying. Meanwhile the social contract is under immense pressure due to the pace of demographic change with heightened tensions and cultural contests over inclusivity in modern societies where contributory social insurance schemes form the basis for national solidarities.

Something new is required, yet further economic contraction will likely see austerity re-emerge. In 2007–2008 after the bankers crashed the financial system politicians absolved the sector and imposed austerity on the backs of the poor. The public rightly identified the bailout as breaching the laws of natural justice when forced to pay for it in shrinking incomes and service cuts. Such immorality inspired the populist revolt, yet the same cycle is in danger of reappearing. Renewed austerity looks to be both economically inevitable and yet politically impossible.

It appears increasingly apparent that the main political parties remain brittle coalitions of factions, interests, and ideologies; incoherent and ill-equipped to navigate this age of upheaval. Because of such instability both Labour and Conservative traditions appear to be in search of safe spaces and likely to revisit earlier successful iterations within their histories. Guardian columnist Julian Coman has recently identified this possibility: ‘following the disorientating years of disruption, a restoration movement is gathering steam on both the Labour and Conservative sides of the parliamentary aisle’ (Coman, Reference Coman2021). The Tories post-Johnson look to be heading towards a neo-Thatcherite hybrid of a domestic small-state, low-tax strategy alongside an underfunded and underwhelming ‘levelling up’ agenda bolted onto deregulatory free trade deals which level down employment and environmental standards.

On the left, a New Labour-lite agenda is re-emerging seeking to bank an unearned poll lead by surrendering economic radicalism for restraint and competence; a pale imitation of a dynamic 1990s political project (Although it should be noted in recent months a slight upturn in the performance of social democracy with the surprise triumph of Costa’s Socialist Party in early 2022 following autumn 2021 wins by Germany’s SPD and Norway’s Labour Party). Such restorations appear the default response because both parties lack the resources to confront the drivers of our discontent.

To add to this sense of crisis the nature of the public conversation is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Within a post-truth world rationality and evidence-based policy making are endangered by fake news and conspiratorial group think. Social media has exacerbated polarisation and acrimony within echo chambers where we hear only what we want to. This technology has amplified more radical—not necessarily benign—voices and ideas and allowed them to enter the mainstream. Today talk tends to focus not on the superiority of liberal democracy but its very survival. History has not ended; it has been upended.

Given this upheaval what is extraordinary is the limited time spent by politicians discussing and dissecting these threats to democracy. Instead, we tend to remain overconcerned with policy detail, day-to-day tactics and campaign strategy. It is this truncated conversation that arguably accounts for the desire for a political restoration of earlier projects associated with Thatcher and Blair; projects deemed successful in periods less volatile. The effect is that politicians can appear in denial; the democratic challenges appear too big for the domestic political conversation as presently framed. In this article two recent contributions are considered that might help rectify this and offer political insight into some of the populist elements informing both the political right and left with specific reference to labour market concerns and questions of class realignment.

It begins with an argument developed in 2018 by Michael Sandel, one he has returned to and expanded in his most recent book The Tranny of Merit (Sandel, Reference Sandel2020). It is a useful departure point not least because Sandel has emerged as a key influence on the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz in his diagnosis of the challenges facing his country and routes to renew progressive politics and stabilise liberal democracies (NYT, 2021; Oltermann, Reference Oltermann2021). In turn, the analysis of Scholtz is being closely watched and discussed within the UK Labour leadership and Keir Starmer’s 2022 New Year message of ‘security, prosperity and respect’ borrows heavily from the recent successful SPD campaign.

The second part of the article turns to an emerging populist left wing response being canvassed by the post-Corbyn left, which assumes the emergence of new political cleavages primarily based on asset ownership and age, rather than traditional concerns with work and class, and the political consequences of this reorientation for the left and concludes by predicting the likely strategic direction of the Labour leadership.

2. Right wing populism

Sandel offers an elegant answer to what is fuelling authoritarian populist upheavals. He lays the blame at the stale character of contemporary social democracy. For Sandel, progressive politics must rediscover its essential moral purpose or risk marginalisation at the expense of these authoritarian forces evolving across the right. This challenge goes far beyond questions of material justice: it is one of historic proportions, nothing less than the need to build a new public philosophy for progressive politics. In the face of escalating authoritarianism, Sandel suggests that the way we react should be disciplined by an ‘economy of outrage’ so that energy is channelled into the creation of a rigorous political response.

Such a response would be one that moves beyond—quite understandable—forms of protest and resistance. It remains the outstanding political test of our time. To be successful such a response demands an appreciation and diagnosis of the forces driving today’s bewildering political changes. He argues that before we can formulate a response however, it is necessary to understand the fundamental failure of progressive politics which long ago lost its ethical grip and collapsed into forms of technocratic administration.

The hallmark of post-war social democracy was the moral desire to confront capital through the creation of the welfare state and wider strategies to contain and regulate the market. Yet the project became stale. Its concerns contracted towards the technocratic, often ineffective, administration of growth. The ethical energy of social democracy evaporated and was by the late 1970s effectively challenged by a resurgent New Right. The centre-left politicians who succeeded Thatcher and Reagan—such as Blair, Clinton and Schröder—left unchallenged the essential market orthodoxies that preceded them. Obama, once in office, succumbed to the same forces at the expense of his moral clarity when running as an insurgent candidate.

Today’s populist uprisings reflect a backlash against this soulless managerialism. They offer an ‘angry verdict’ on a long-term liberal compact with capital that has entrenched economic and democratic inequalities and rolled back genuine social mobility. To rethink the very purpose of progressive politics, as we must necessarily do, requires that we move beyond acknowledging economic grievance and enduring inequality. It requires a very different conversation: one that addresses moral and cultural questions regarding the lives we wish to live, and how the current disparity between that ideal and reality can find painful and often angry political expression through resentment and humiliation—key drivers that underscore todays populist politics.

Sandel suggests politics requires a new telos, a new public philosophy, to respond to this epic populist challenge and suggests four themes it might address to respond to the authoritarian threat.

First, there is the need for an economic strategy to engineer inclusive growth, one that confronts the escalating inequality which feeds today’s authoritarian impulses. Critically such redesign must rethink wealth creation and distribution including that created by and apportioned to human labour. Yet this is at odds with modern political orthodoxy which has grown accustomed to a language of supply-side reform and equality of opportunity to combat inequality. This offers diminishing returns; a more radical response to the distribution of rewards between capital and labour appears necessary.

Second, what he describes as ‘meritocratic hubris’ directly flows from the mainstream political language of opportunity and removing barriers to success. Meritocracy, a term initially coined in the UK as an ironic description to justify inaction over inequality, has further entrenched elite privilege. Sandel urges us to challenge the harsh judgements that liberals and progressives impose on those who are viewed as ‘unsuccessful’ in a meritocracy—not least due to the resentment this builds, fuelling the populist backlash. It adds to a sense of cultural detachment in politics and a disrespect for the work performed by many of our fellow citizens and their achievements.

The third theme relates to the meaning and dignity of work. What role will work play in the future and in the lives we wish to lead? For Tony Blair and New Labour, knowledge work signalled the end of the post-war economy and traditional Labour values. The working class was on the ‘wrong side of history’. Knowledge work was the future, and the famous slogan ‘education, education, education’ captured an economic policy which was focused on human capital. This false nirvana is resurrected today by utopian progressive ‘post-work’ theorists who embrace Universal Basic Income (UBI) and it informs an approach that can suggest disdain for jobs not considered worthwhile within this intellectual schema. At a minimum, the data in support of the end of work through AI, automation and distributed production can be disputed. At worst, this agenda can reinforce the detachment of progressive thinking and help build the forces driving authoritarian populism. In the UK UBI is often embraced by those who believe we are transitioning towards a post-capitalist technological utopia—assumptions that need to be treated with healthy suspicion.

The biggest challenge provided by Sandel concerns the moral significance of national boundaries. Progressive thinking has tended to embrace a cosmopolitanism that asserts a privileged global citizenship over other forms of society, attachment or fidelity. Yet politicians seek a mandate from a specific piece of territory—a constituency or a nation. Does the progressive politician have a set of moral obligations to that particular electorate over and above an imagined global responsibility? Much modern progressive thinking suggest that they do not. The rise of the populist right is inseparable from the politics of English identity.

This is not a question of political expediency or of pandering to the populist right. Politicians in difficult times have a duty to explain how they hope to build resilient, stable communities—ones that share the sacrifices, risks and rewards in a difficult world. These are complicated spaces for modern progressive thinking. Does a detached cosmopolitanism fail to counter the arguments of the populist right and simply avoid questions of belonging, community and nation, all of which are significant in the eyes of the people? Arguably today the most difficult task for progressive thinking has been to challenge the story of dispossession and abandonment offered by the populist right and offer a positive, optimistic re-imagination of nationhood. To do so, however, we must believe they do not have to retain reactionary exclusive associations. This challenge is far from resolved.

Overall, Sandel’s argument is subtle and contains profound philosophical questions we cannot indefinitely avoid. On the one hand, he suggests that progressive thinking has been concerned with allocating resources and material justice, too technocratic and blinkered in terms of its understanding of the lives people wish to live. On the other, he suggests we recoil from moral questions because of our insistence on liberal neutrality. In doing so, we disengage from the fundamental issues that feed the populist right: questions of worth, esteem, resentment and humiliation. In contrast, we inhabit a world detached from the everyday concerns of the people we purport to represent, using a language of rights, opportunity and fairness that ‘flattens questions of meaning, identity and purpose’ (Sandel, Reference Sandel2018).

In this way, Sandel offers a devastating critique of progressive thinking. First, for its culpability in terms of the rise of the populist right given the way social democracy succumbed to the neoliberal transformation. Second, it is not just the way we handed over ethical questions to the market: it is the way that, even today, our continued belief in liberal procedural justice has removed moral questions from public discussion and allowed authoritarian voices to monopolise this terrain.

3. Left wing populism

Given the diagnosis of philosophers such as Sandel, Labour’s disconnection from significant parts of the electorate appears long-standing. Under Keir Starmer, the party has to date failed to establish a clear ideological framework, overall narrative, and strategic direction. This is not surprising given the scale of the defeat in 2019 and longer-term electoral realignments. A successful strategy that builds a viable electoral coalition in an age of upheaval and also dissects and offers coherent remedies to our escalating democratic, economic, and social challenges requires substantial thought and effort. Fortunately, advice is available; not least from amongst sections of the post Corbyn radical left (Cruddas et al., Reference Cruddas, Thompson, Pitts and Ingold2021; Pitts et al., Reference Pitts, Thompson, Cruddas and Ingold2022; Thompson et al., Reference Thompson, Pitts, Ingold and Cruddas2022).

A fashionable option detectable on the contemporary left is to assume the emergence of new political divides based primarily on patterns of age and asset ownership which offer possibilities for a new populist radical politics (Beckett, Reference Beckett2021; Earle, Reference Earle2021; Milburn, Reference Milburn2019). Such an approach has evolved out of a specific understanding of financialised capitalism and the nature of the modern asset economy. It is one that assumes modern capitalism is increasingly dependent on capital market activity whereby even non-financial corporations increasingly make their money from the accrual of rent and the monopolisation of access to assets rather than long-term investments in human and physical capital. Such rentierism with an endemic short termism is considered the cause of our productive malaise, rather than being symptomatic of long-term productive weaknesses, and contrasts sharply with the ‘knowledge economy’ optimism and meritocratic supply-side concerns of the last Labour government. Compared to the approach of analysts such as Sandel in their request for a new politics anchored around work, this alternative tends to assume personal wealth to be increasingly based on asset ownership rather than derived from employment. A politics of work is therefore considered to be of declining political significance. Indeed, such advocates increasingly define themselves as part of the ‘post work left’ (Mason, Reference Mason2021).

Consequently, advocates of the latter approach point to the emergence of a ‘new dispossessed’ consisting largely of younger, insecure, asset-poor, gig economy and service sector workers in the labour market and renters in the housing market. Locked out of access to assets, security and mobility, this becomes a ‘generation rent’ and presents itself as a new coherent asset-based class cleavage and political constituency—a new base for progressive politics.

For this emerging generational divide to politically cohere it requires the construction of an opposite category—a friend/enemy distinction foundational to populist politics. Older voters are considered the ‘other’. They are understood to be asset-rich, comfortable and conservative, owing to, amongst other advantages, homeownership and occupational pensions. But critically it is not just the old who are seen as the populist ‘other’. Security in housing and jobs is now also considered characteristic of parts of the ‘traditional’ working class. Indeed, according to recent research from the think tank Autonomy, homeowners can no longer meaningfully be considered to belong to the working class as conventionally considered at all (Khurana et al., Reference Khurana, Jones and Kellam2021).

One critical inference drawn from this approach is that any focus on recapturing the so-called ‘Red Wall’ ex-Labour voters is strategically misplaced. Such voters are beneficiaries of the asset-based cleavages, notably homeownership, which render many immune to any electoral alternative to the Tories. They also remain attracted to nativist sentiments and fall prey to cultural divides that are ethically challenging for the left.

In contrast, advocates of this new left populism identify a new Labour coalition: a ‘generation left’ informed by both material divides and the political upheavals that have unfolded since the financial crisis. They are defined as urban, cosmopolitan and degree-educated but locked in precarious, insecure, badly paid jobs and low-quality, high-cost rented housing. This generation emerged after the 2008 financial crash and were active in the 2011 student protests and were critical elements in the movement transported into Labour with the Corbyn campaign and its subsequent leadership. If the analysis that underpins ‘generation left’ is correct, this amounts to an historic turning point in British politics wherein the left has not so much lost the working class as discovered a new one. A clear divide comes into focus, reflected in the concerns of analysts such as Sandel and those of ‘generation rent’ in terms of a future left politics driven by divergent approaches to work and class, age and assets.

Under Corbyn, as part of the post 2008 extra parliamentary transition into Labour, an earlier populist cleavage narrative was appropriated from the Occupy movement, one which counterposed a 99 per cent with a 1 per cent—which later reappeared in the ‘for the “many not the few”’ soundbite deployed in both the 2017 and 2019 elections (although such a phrase was also used to great effect in the 1990s by Tony Blair). Most recently, post-Corbyn, the friend/enemy division central to populist politics has been more clearly defined and numerically reset. The effect is to politically marginalise most homeowners, older voters and large chunks of the so-called ‘traditional’ working class—in political short hand the ‘Red Wall’. It offers a dramatically truncated populist base alongside a burgeoning enemy category when compared to the 99 and 1 per cent divide of a few years ago, and with it a narrower gateway to political success.

The electoral maths is difficult at best. Labour already dominates the big cities, where younger graduates are concentrated. Moreover, such a static generational analysis neglects how voters change, the effect of family inter-generational transfers on asset wealth and wider non-material factors that inform politics. Insecurity is itself a more complicated phenomenon than being confined to the urban, educated youth operating within the gig economy. For example, labour market insecurity in Red Wall seats has recently been found primarily amongst older females juggling two or three casual or part-time roles (Mattinson, Reference Mattinson2020). On the one hand, the ‘rentier’ economy can affect negatively those whose asset ownership puts them on the wrong side of the new cleavages. On the other hand, in more traditional shareholder value-driven business models we can also witness restructuring, insecurity, job losses, pay and pension erosion and work intensification.

4. Where now for politics?

Given a diagnosis of authoritarian populism that pinpoints the need for a renewed politics of work and nationhood, in contrast to a populist left that downgrades work as a source of identity in favour of age and assets divisions to reject any suggestion of national reconciliation, where will politics turn? A definitive answer cannot be provided but certain recent developments are of note, specifically in terms of an emerging political interest in labour market reform to remedy economic and social discontents alongside growing evidence the Labour leadership is rejecting the new left populism. Political debate within both main parties would appear to be at least tacitly accepting the diagnosis of analysts such as Sandel and rejecting the advice of the populist left.

On the right, Boris Johnson has recently begun to argue that Britain needs a new economic model. In his 2021 October Conference speech, the Prime Minister announced it was time to tackle the ‘long-term structural weaknesses’ of the UK economy. After 11 years of conservative government, he now plans a policy overhaul to oversee the journey to a ‘high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy’. In the same speech he said ‘we are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration’. Talk of the UK’s ‘broken’ economic model amounts to a dramatic political reversal. For years, Tory leaders have told us that their ‘long-term economic plan’ was working; that theirs was the only party that could be trusted with the economy, correcting the Labour years which failed to ‘fix the roof when the sun was shining’. Predictably therefore, right wing Thatcherite thinktanks have rejected this new economic thinking. The Adam Smith Institute called Johnson’s speech ‘economically illiterate’ and an ‘agenda for levelling down to a centrally planned, high tax, low productivity economy’.

This reorientation was best represented on 2 February 2022 when the Government published its long-awaited ‘Levelling Up’ White Paper. It provided details of twelve ‘new missions’ across four broad areas: boosting productivity and living standards, especially in places that lag behind; spreading opportunities and improving public services, especially where they are weakest; restoring a sense of community, local pride and belonging, and, empowering local leaders and communities, primarily in areas where little exists. It commits to a statutory responsibility on Government to report on their progress and the establishment of a new independent data body, includes details of a new devolution framework, and a new Levelling Up Advisory Council. The report bears the strong imprint of the think tank Onward, with its impressive list of recent reports diagnosing the drivers of populist grievance and in particular the White Paper’s recommendations for change (Blagden et al., Reference Blagden, Fjolla Krasniqi and Tanner2021; O’Shaughnessy et al., Reference O’Shaughnessy, Fjolla Krasniqi, Blagden and Tanner2020).

Such a renewed focus on work, productivity, the social infrastructure and regional equality is welcome. On the question of pay for instance, real average weekly earnings have effectively flatlined since 2008, only recently recovering after the longest sustained decline on record. Before Covid 19 hit the real wages of the lowest income households were effectively the same as 2002. However, the White Paper is in reality a statement suggesting a possible direction of travel and will depend on what survives following battles with the Treasury, assorted departments and ideological tension over the future of conservatism. Not least because the Conservatives have shown a marked reluctance to implement the kind of employment and labour market reforms signalled in the ultimately inadequate Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices commissioned under Theresa May.

Such a right wing rethink should help the Labour opposition, with the Tories implicitly conceding long-standing left-wing concerns regarding the direction of British capitalism and enduring comparative productivity weaknesses and social discontents. However, Labour in general continues to inhabit a post-Brexit stasis, seemingly trapped by the political binaries of age, education, geography, and the effects of the 2016 referendum. Yet over recent months it too has begun to show renewed interest in how labour is deployed and regulated and a wider reappraisal of its approach to national renewal. Such political and intellectual reorientations on both left and right can be interpreted as responses to populist threats. Yet this renewed political interest in work and class cannot be seen in isolation from the effects of the pandemic. Within a few months of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, human labour was politicised in ways thought unimaginable throughout the preceding decades. The market for labour stopped. The role of the state vis-à-vis labour was redefined. A Tory government had to step in and regulate who works, where and under what conditions. Not only that but corporatism reappeared. The TUC re-emerged at the centre of economic life for the first time in over 40 years and helped to forge the most significant labour market intervention of living memory: a state furlough programme covering some 11 million workers.

In the summer of 2021 Labour launched a ‘new deal for working people’ campaign in which Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner pledged to ‘fundamentally change our economy’ and ‘make Britain the best place to work’ based on ‘five principles of good work’. Starmer reinforced the message in a speech to the 2021 TUC Congress 2021 where he again declared a future Labour government would deliver a new deal for workers—in particular in government his party would enforce full rights and protections for all workers from their first day in a job.

Later when opening that year’s Party Conference Rayner promised the ‘driving mission’ of the next Labour government will be to end poverty wages and insecure work that blights lives and holds back our economy’ unveiling a new Green Paper on Employment Rights. She said Labour’s New Deal for Working People will be signed into law within the first 100 days of a Labour government. It would restructure the economy by changing the world of work built on fair pay, job security, dignity and equality to improve productivity and enhance economic opportunity, health and wellbeing. Alluding to a corporatist revival alongside these policy changes suggests a very different approach to the pre-crash supply side concerns of the last Labour governments and echo at least implicitly the themes of recent interventions by Sandel. Such themes can also be detected in the ‘good work’ activities of Sadiq Khan in London and Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, as well as the emerging agenda of Dan Jarvis in South Yorkshire. It can also be seen in both the rhetoric and policy decisions of metropolitan authorities such as Leeds’s support for a ‘compassionate city’ in which to live and work as well as fair work commissions in both Wales and Scotland.

In particular, following the recent New Zealand experience Labour would empower workers to act collectively through Fair Pay Agreements negotiated through sectoral collective bargaining—starting in the adult social care sector. Three quarters of frontline care workers in England—over 600,000 workers—are paid less than the living wage, 375,000 are employed on zero-hours contracts and many are paid less than the legal minimum wage for the hours they work. Worker and employer representatives would be brought together by the government to establish and agree minimum pay, terms and conditions binding on all employers and workers in the sector. The Fair Pay Agreement would then form a ‘floor’ in a sector. As well as Fair Pay Agreements, Labour’s Green Paper on Employment Rights includes:

1. – an immediate increase to the minimum wage to at least £10 per hour for all workers.

2. – the creation of a single status of ‘worker’ for all but the genuinely self-employed so all workers have the same rights and protections, including rights to sick pay, holiday pay, parental leave and protection against unfair dismissal from day one on the job.

3. – the right to flexible working for all workers as a default from day one, alongside the ‘right to switch off’ outside of working hours.

4. – a ban on zero-hours contracts and an end to ‘one-sided flexibility’, with all workers having the right to a regular contract and predictable hours, reasonable notice of any changes in shifts of working hours and wages for cancelled shifts paid in full.

5. – increasing Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) and making it available to all workers, including the self-employed and those on low wages currently excluded by the lower earnings limit for eligibility.

6. – ending fire and rehire.

7. – extending statutory parental leave, introducing the right to bereavement leave, strengthening protections for pregnant women, and reforming the failed Shared Parental Leave system.

8. – updating trade union legislation so it is fit for a modern economy and so working people have strengthened rights and are empowered to organise collectively.

9. – overhauling enforcement of rights and protections by establishing a single enforcement body to enforce workers’ rights, inspect workplaces and bring prosecutions and civil proceedings on behalf of workers against bad employers relating to health and safety, minimum wage, worker exploitation and discriminatory practices.

10. – introducing mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting to mirror gender pay gap reporting.

11. – a new requirement on employers to report and eliminate pay gaps through the implementation of action plans to eradicate inequalities in the workplace.

In a more general sense over and above labour market reform and a renewed focus on the politics of work, within Labour there appears early signs of a more general and dramatic economic rethink given the challenges posed by populist elements on left and right. Possibly of most significance is the recent publication of Labour’s Covenant, the product of papers and discussions spanning two years with contributions from scores of academics, civic leaders, think tank researchers, MPs and activists, many with close links to the leadership (Rutherford, Reference Rutherford2022).

Labour’s Covenant is by far the most ambitious document to emerge since the 2019 election defeat; a substantial attempt to rethink the very purpose of labour and restore domestic public consent for democracy and government authority. Its stated ambition is to reject the divisions integral to populism and instead rebuild a sense of the Common Good; to regain the trust and support of disaffected citizens, without which none of the most intractable problems of the age—from environmental degradation and material inequality and anxiety to social care and levels of chronic ill health—can be resolved. It consciously links their resolution to successfully combatting the populist threat.

The scale of ambition is detected in the way the work prefers the notion of Covenant over any renewed Social Contract to challenge modern populism. It suggests the latter excludes too much. Its original purpose was to secure individual property rights and, preoccupied with questions of economic utility and contractual relations, ignores the social relationships and asymmetries of power between groups, identities and individuals. The meanings of custom and culture elude it as do questions of inter-generational justice, the impact of the economy on the natural world and a breakdown of public trust in authority.

In place of a legalistic contract, it suggests, in common with Sandel, a renewed moral commitment to rethink the national economy—including industrial and competition policy, deepening and extending devolution and democracy, notably in England, electoral and constitutional reform and control over essential strategic manufacturing, services and component parts. Reconstructing the national economy would include amongst other initiatives regional banks, a national system of apprenticeships and vocational colleges, a revived corporatism, the reform of corporate governance and the tax system, including asset wealth.

The Covenant operationalises the idea of the ‘everyday economy’, reasserting the primary purpose of economic relations is securing the supply of basic goods and services that sustain everyday life—including food, housing, energy, and care—employing some 40 per cent of the workforce. They in turn provide the means for restoring the security of family life through new social housing and private rented regulation, alongside land reform, child, adult social and mental health care. It extends into an environmental covenant covering green manufacture, farming and a ‘national nature service’.

To conclude: it would appear in response to the populist challenges the status and significance of human labour has been re-established and relocated at the centre of our political, economic and social life. Today what in the nineteenth century would be described as ‘the labour question’ is again centre stage in emerging debates about ‘levelling up’ and national economic renewal. We will have to see whether such detectable interest survives the turbulence within the Conservative Party or the desire for caution and reassurance within today’s Labour Party. In an age of upheaval and populist uncertainty, the stability of liberal democracy could depend on it.