IN the run-up to and since both the 2024 Westminster General Election and the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, we have heard an awful lot from politicians from many different parties pledging to put “country before party”.
Launching Labour’s General Election manifesto, Keir Starmer summarised his strategy for governing as “country first, party second”. He has continued with this framing to such an extent that it has become something of a slogan of his.
SNP leader and First Minister John Swinney has not used the exact terminology but his meaning is still the same. In his 2026 campaign conference address, he offered the people of Scotland “reliable, trusted and experienced leadership in turbulent times” and “pledging to provide that to my country”.
Upon being elected First Minister, he said: “I will work to be a First Minister for all of Scotland.”
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Meanwhile, under Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour pledged to “put country before party and the interests of the people of Scotland first”. Last month, Sarwar accused Swinney of putting party before country by rejecting an investigation into former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell.
Not to be outdone, Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay told Swinney in parliament on May 19 on the issue of seeking a second independence referendum: “For the sake of Scotland, drop it. Put country before party … govern for all of Scotland.” Now Andy Burnham has added to the lexicon by saying he’ll put “place” before party. But what we have not heard anything about is putting class before country, party or place.
Why is this? Although there are other social divisions such as gender and race, socio-economic class explains more about the inequality in wealth, power and life chances in the capitalist society we live in than any other factor or influence.
Yet class is seldom talked about. Instead, in Britain, we get the framing of the likes of “strivers”, “scroungers” and “skivers” or “grafters” and “grifters”, along with “hard-working families” being counter-posed to the “workshy” and the “undeserving”. In Australia, the rhetoric is of “lifters” and “leaners” – lifters work and leaners take.
Rich and poor, and the “haves” and “have nots”, do not get much of a look in either. The vocabularies of the 1% and the 99%, as with “for the many, not the few”, have somewhat fallen into disuse in the 2020s.
But none of these explain social class in relation to the ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange in the economy, and the according benefit from them. Instead, we get paeans to country, nation, national interest and patriotism.
For centuries, the ruling classes have successfully sought to bury the social divisions of class deep in a subterranean subterfuge of those concepts.
They have increasingly used them to frame a narrative to the extent that it has become the dominant one for their own ends.
In the neoliberal era, this framing, and the ideology underlying it, has captured all the mainstream parties, from the Tories to Labour and the SNP. Even the Scottish Greens are not immune to its “charms”.
While the composition of class has changed in terms of the decline of a male-dominated industrial or manufacturing working class and the rise of a feminised service-based workforce, class as the critical and crucial social division has not gone away.
Instead, it has merely been reconfigured and the gap between the contending classes of the ruling and the working has widened in terms of wealth, power and life chances has. Sometimes it is difficult to see that the working class exists. If it is not fighting as a class for itself (through strikes most especially), its visibility and presence is not obvious.
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The same is not necessarily true of the ruling classes. While their rule is camouflaged by their control of and influence over the media and mainstream political parties, sometimes it breaks through in terms of their conspicuous consumption of the likes of houses, yachts and cars.
If the awareness and recognition of class as the key dividing line in society is not to be forever subsumed within the narratives of nation – where homogeneity and not heterogeneity triumph – then we need to see Labour and the SNP for what they are – parties in hoc to the ruling classes. They are not disrupters or resisters to the neoliberal ideology. Instead, they are subservient to it.
Burnham will be no different if he ends up leading Labour. Although there is little evidence on the ground of a socialist party being capable to organise and lead the discontent and dissatisfaction, there is no other option available if we are to make a profound, permanent and progressive change to the capitalist society we currently live in.
Professor Gregor Gall is a research associate at the University of Glasgow
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