To understand how Keir Starmer’s team sees class, it helps to know a story. It’s told by his head of strategy, Deborah Mattinson, about a series of her own focus groups. She asked people to bring in a symbol of their social status, and started with those who called themselves middle class. At the first session, an overwhelming majority turned up with the exact same item. What do you think it was: a graduation photo? Keys to their Audi? A prize bit of home decor? Wrong. Five out of the eight chose a cafetiere, while a sixth person waved Twinings Earl Grey teabags. The indiscreet charm of the British bourgeoisie clearly lay in its hot beverages. Her working-class subjects were another story. Their proofs of class ID were the tools of their trades. The joiner carried his chisels, and the beautician displayed her acrylic nail swatches, while one man “delved into his rucksack to find his muddy working boots”, which he plonked on the table. An epiphany struck Mattinson: middle-classness was “about being discerning, while being working class was about the kind of work you do”. What they did was who they were, she believed, and who they were had to be respected. In Beyond the Red Wall, this builds to an argument about why Jeremy Corbyn got bulldozed in the 2019 general election. Over decades, she writes, Labour had condescended to the working classes – now it was paying a heavy price. Not long after that book was published, Mattinson became one of Starmer’s top generals, and her analysis has shaped his pitch to be prime minister. Far from ignoring class, he genuflects before it as devoutly as a choirboy crosses himself. The single thing everyone knows about the Labour leader’s family is that his dad was a toolmaker – those class credentials brandished at the electorate like muddy boots. Up on stage in Liverpool this week, he deployed the phrase “working people” a whopping 21 times. That’s more than he mentioned “voter”, or his beloved “growth”, or even “Labour”. The language in his speech was straight out of the Book of Mattinson: “The pride, the pull of the badge on the shirt, the ambition you feel when building a legacy for your community.” Pride. Respect. Work. In many ways, Keir Starmer is as class-conscious as John McDonnell – but Starmer’s are class politics as marketing strategy, a self-consciously sheepish roll call of buzzwords and symbols. It is part and parcel of how the international socialist now wraps himself in the union flag, or the party’s new membership cards are stamped Putting the Country First (a move spotted by none other than the leader of far-right party Britain First). No gesture can be too forced, no flagpole can go unmolested. If the focus groups showed that working-class men tattooed “MUM” on their chests, the KC would doubtless be off like a shot to the nearest ink parlour. There are other ways to view class, of course. You can look to see who’s above you and who is below; or you can think about who owns what and who wields power. You would certainly factor in how white-collar jobs, say, have become more routine, more surveilled and less well paid and secure. An early-career university lecturer may look and talk and dress completely differently from a train driver, and yet they will face many of the same issues at work. But these do not figure in Starmer’s lexicon, where class is not about opposing sides but fixed identities. Except this is a time when classes are in opposition. From nurses to surgeons, posties to professors, this has been a year of ballots and picket lines, of battles against impoverishment and insecurity. Called upon to pick a side, Starmer has hemmed and hawed before this week edging towards the wrong team. The first two bits you know about. After demanding both sides “get around the table” (the deathless harrumph of Labour leaders faced with any industrial dispute), Starmer made a big deal about his frontbenchers avoiding any picket line. Today he is explicit: once he is in No 10, workers can have more rights – but there will be no big pay rises for teachers, doctors or railway staff. The politician who talks most about dignity for working people will refuse as prime minister to reach into his pocket and pay to give them dignity. As an election looms, the most outspoken trade union leaders have stopped speaking out against Starmer. That will not hold long into 2025. Team Starmer’s true relations with the unions were on show this week, in the seating within the Labour conference hall. Up front, with the likes of Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves, were the milder sorts from Unison and Usdaw. Exiled to the very back of the hall were Starmer’s critics: Aslef, the Communication Workers Union and Unite (which gives Labour more than £1m a year to be treated this badly). Any closer to Siberia and they’d have been searching for salt mines. A true champion of “working people” would look at how wages have been squeezed over the past four decades of deregulation and deunionisation so that the average working-age household has reportedly lost nearly £10,000 a year. Enough, they would say: it’s time for business to pay its way. The opposite was on show in Liverpool this week, as corporations enjoyed dinners with soon-to-be ministers, and lent their imprimatur to party gatherings. Starmer did an event sponsored by a buy-now-pay-later lender, while Peter Mandelson appeared on a panel discussion sponsored by Amazon. The former leader of Scottish Labour hailed the arrival of the “first private sector government in Labour’s history”. This isn’t just the canapes talking: it is a deliberate dragging backwards of the relationship between the party of labour and big corporations. The ex-Labour leader Ed Miliband made the case that businesses that dodged tax or underpaid staff or hacked phones could not be considered good businesses. But now Labour’s outriders claim it is “the party for all businesses”. Welcome, predators! On one big point, Mattinson’s book is right: the working classes are tuning out of mainstream politics. They were staunch voters until the 1990s, observe the Oxford political scientists James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans, and backed Labour. What changed all that was Tony Blair, they write. “This decline of class-based voting was driven by Labour’s shift to the political centre-ground.” Today Starmer is trying to woo back working-class voters even while holding on to his centrism. He claims to be on the workers’ side while offering them little more than spare change. Since 2010, the UK has had wave after wave of elections in which the real winner is anti-Westminster sentiment. MPs’ expenses, Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson. Each time, Westminster has tried to cobble together a response. Each time, it has failed and the political discourse has grown ever more poisonous. The next election will be another anti-Westminster ballot, in which voters will show their revulsion at an economy and a politics that are clearly broken. The beneficiary of that revulsion is likely to be Starmer. But what happens afterwards, as he tries and fails to rise to the moment, could be more frightening yet. Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist