“DESPISED:” The Left and the Working Class.

George Bernard Shaw, though a Fabian socialist, brushed aside anyone who called him a “friend of the working classes.” He scoffed that he “had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people.” A century ago Britain’s Labour Party brought together the Fabians (who supplied the policy wonks) and the trade unions (who supplied the voters). The party had been founded to give working people a voice in politics, but gradually control passed to the university-educated, who were internationalist, technocratic and supremely confident that they could plan the future.

Then came two awful shocks. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, the Remainers won the affluent vote, but the working classes carried the Leavers to victory. And in the 2019 parliamentary election, the Tories swept depressed factory towns that had heretofore been safe for Labour. “You can’t trust the people,” snorted novelist Howard Jacobson. That’s what happens when the rabble are “given this new confidence in their own opinions.”

Paul Embery might be called a populist in America, but a more accurate label is “left conservative.” A firefighter, union official and lifelong Labour activist, he writes for the resolutely unorthodox webpaper UnHerd. And in “Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class,” he suggests that Bernard Shaw’s enormous condescension is now the dominant ideology of the progressive intelligentsia, which embraces every subcategory of identity politics except class identity. The endless squabbling among fractious identity groups “serves only to fragment the working class and undermine what should be the primary goal of developing common bonds and building the maximum unity required to defend its interests.” Somehow, “inclusivity” doesn’t include the workers.

Mr. Embery protests that the British tradition of vigorous debate—deeply rooted in union halls and worker-education classes as well as in Parliament—has given way to “echo chambers, ‘safe spaces’ and draconian hate legislation, all of which serve the purpose of suppressing unwelcome opinions and enforcing an official orthodoxy.” Arguably the stifling began when Tony Blair told the Labour Party that globalization was not open to discussion: “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” . . .

Uncontrolled immigration displaces low-pay workers or depresses their wages. Cambridge economist Robert Rowthorn calculated that immigration may grow the national economy in the long run, but new jobs created always lag behind new entrants into the labor market. Those hurt most are often immigrants who arrived earlier (which may explain why 60% of U.K. migrants and their children want to reduce immigration, and why so many Hispanics voted for Donald Trump ). Brexit was supported by about a third of nonwhite voters, who noticed that, under EU policy, Poles could more easily enter Britain than Jamaicans.

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr. Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves. “Despised” makes a compelling case that “global governance” is radically incompatible with democracy, civil liberties and broadly shared prosperity. Supranational agencies like the EU inevitably concentrate power in unresponsive bureaucracies and concentrate wealth in multinational corporations. The left should have resisted their rise, but conservatives too were slow to recognize that globalization subverted everything they valued: traditional communities, patriotism, religious faith, stable families, unintrusive government and personal freedom. Mr. Embery’s goal is to build a society where citizens no longer feel like colonial subjects in their own country. He reminds us that the British exited the EU due to “the desire for self-government and sovereignty”—the same reason that the Irish and the Indians exited the British Empire.

Indeed. People want those things here, too.