What Does “Working Class” Actually Mean in 2025?

Earlier this year the Labour government found itself unable to define working class. Ministers ducked it. Commentators argued about it. And the whole thing quietly dissolved into the usual noise about income thresholds, accent, and whether your parents went to university.

Nobody asked the more interesting question. Not “what is working class” but “why can’t we define it anymore” – and whether the term still means anything at all in the UK in 2025.

It Was Never About Money

The mistake everyone makes in these debates is to reach straight for income as the defining characteristic. Working class means you earn below a certain threshold. Or you do manual work. Or you didn’t go to university. These definitions all miss the point.

Working class Britain was not primarily an income category. It was a structural community.

Men worked the same pit or the same factory floor. They started at the same time, finished at the same time, drank in the same pubs on a Friday, worried about the same gaffer, went on strike together when it came to it. Their wives navigated the same domestic arithmetic. Their kids went to the same schools. The threat of redundancy or injury was shared. So was the pride in the work.

Working class was not a label people wore. It was the shape of a life that most people around you were also living.

The shared economics produced shared culture, shared politics, shared humour, and shared grievance. It was, in the truest sense, a community – not because people chose to identify with each other, but because the structure of their working lives made the connection unavoidable.

What Killed It

The short answer is deindustrialisation. The mines went. The shipyards went. The steel works went. The textile mills went. Not gradually – in many parts of the UK, within a decade.

What replaced those industries was a fragmented service economy where everyone earns differently, works different hours, commutes different distances, and has no structural reason to know anything meaningful about the person in the next role. A warehouse operative in Coventry and a delivery driver in Wolverhampton may earn similar wages but they have no shared workplace, no shared shift, no shared canteen, no shared union, and no shared stake in each other’s circumstances.

The economic spine that held working class communities together did not bend. It was removed. And when it went, the community it had generated went with it.

What’s Left

What remained, and what people still reach for when they say “working class,” is the cultural memory. The accent. The football club. The attitude toward authority. The instinct for plain speaking. The suspicion of people who use education as a weapon. These things are real and they matter. But they are the residue of a structural community that no longer exists in the same form. They are aesthetic, not architectural.

This is why the Labour government could not define it. Because the honest answer is that the structural definition no longer holds, and nobody in mainstream politics wants to say that out loud because it implies that a very significant political constituency has lost the material basis of its identity – and that nothing coherent has replaced it.

Does the Term Still Have a Use?

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting. Because the pressures that produced working class communities have not disappeared. They have dispersed.

Insecure work. Wage stagnation. Housing that eats income. Services that are stretched or gone. The sense that decisions affecting your life are made by people who do not know you exist. These are the conditions that built those communities in the first place. They are still present in the UK in 2025. They are just scattered across a far wider range of occupations and circumstances than they used to be.

A zero-hours contract care worker and a self-employed delivery driver and a warehouse picker on an agency contract are all living with a version of that precarity. But they have no shared workplace, no shared union, and possibly no shared neighbourhood. The economic condition exists without the community structure that would previously have named it, organised around it, and given it political coherence.

The question is not whether working class needs redefining. The question is whether the thing it pointed to – a community built around shared economic circumstance – can exist without the shared physical structures that used to create it.

My View

I think the term working class is probably past the point where it can be rescued as a precise definition. Its structural basis has changed too much. Using it as an income threshold produces absurdities. Using it as a cultural identity produces arguments about who is authentic enough to claim it.

But I also think abandoning it entirely would be a mistake, because the conditions it originally described – work that is uncertain, compensated poorly relative to its difficulty, and invisible to the people who make economic policy – are more widespread in the UK now than they have been for decades. They just do not come with a community attached.

What we are perhaps living through is the gap between a set of economic conditions that used to automatically generate community and solidarity, and a social infrastructure that has not yet found a way to produce those things without the factory floor and the working men’s club to anchor them.

The Labour government could not define working class because the honest definition is uncomfortable: it was a community built by industrial capitalism, dismantled by the same system, and not yet replaced by anything with comparable coherence. That is not a talking point. It is a problem.