From Collective Class Power to Atomised Politics: OMOV, the Christian Right, and the Weakening of Working-Class Solidarity

The history of the labour movement demonstrates that the form of organisation directly shapes the kind of politics that emerges. Where workers act collectively, through trade unions or federated structures, politics tends to reflect class solidarity and material demands. When those structures are weakened, fragmented, or replaced by atomised individual membership, space opens for reactionary currents built on cultural, moral, or national appeals. This essay compares the United States and the United Kingdom, focusing on how the weakening of union power and the shift to one member, one vote (OMOV) systems in Labour reshaped working-class politics. It argues that these processes undercut collective class strength and created conditions for reactionary tendencies like the U.S. Christian Right and the U.K.’s “Blue Labour” current.

The U.S. labour movement entered the postwar era severely constrained. The 1947 Taft–Hartley Act outlawed secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, and union political independence. At the same time, Cold War anti-communism expelled radicals and socialists from the trade unions. This ensured that organised labour was both bureaucratised and tied to the Democratic Party.

As a result, when economic crisis hit in the 1970s—stagflation, deindustrialisation, and the oil shocks—unions were unable to lead a militant fightback. Union density fell from over 25% in the mid-1970s to around 16% by 1990, with private sector density collapsing to single digits.¹

This created a political vacuum. Into it stepped the Christian Right, spearheaded by groups like the Moral Majority (founded 1979). They appealed to disaffected working-class voters not on the basis of wages or conditions, but on religion, family values, and national tradition. Reagan and later Republicans successfully turned sections of the white working class into a socially conservative voting bloc. Here, the destruction of collective union power made atomised cultural politics dominant.

The Labour Party developed differently, as a federation rooted in the trade unions. At its height, unions held 90% of the vote at Party Conference (with constituency Labour Parties making up the rest).² This ensured that organised workers, through their unions, directly shaped Labour policy.

From 1979, under Thatcher, the assault on unions coincided with Labour’s own internal reforms. By 1981, unions’ share of the conference vote fell to 70%, with 30% allocated to individual members. By the 1990s, Blair’s “modernisation” reduced union weight further to a 50:50 balance.³

Union block votes shrank as individual memberships increased. Where once a union with hundreds of thousands of members cast a single aggregated vote reflecting a democratic decision, now atomised individuals determined outcomes.

Middle-class membership grew, diluting working-class weight. Membership peaked at around 400,000 in the 1990s, but less tied to trade union struggles.

This mirrored the U.S. trend: as collective class mechanisms weakened, politics became shaped by atomised individuals.

The weakening of union block votes in Labour created ideological space for new currents. Just as the Christian Right substituted tradition and religion for class solidarity in the U.S., Labour leaders increasingly reached for cultural conservatism to hold together an atomised membership.

By the 2000s, the emergence of Blue Labour exemplified this: its advocates argued Labour should stress “faith, flag, and family” as binding values. This was only possible because unions no longer had decisive institutional weight to ensure class-based policy dominated.

In the U.S., atomised individuals were mobilised through churches and cultural institutions.

In the U.K., OMOV meant Labour leaders appealed to patriotic or socially conservative themes to mobilise individuals outside the collective discipline of unions.

Both represent a turn away from class politics toward cultural conservatism as a substitute for solidarity.

This institutional change was reinforced by political purges. In 1983, the Labour leadership expelled key Militant Tendency supporters, arguing they were a “party within a party.”⁴ These expulsions weakened the socialist wing inside Labour just as union influence was being reduced, mirroring the U.S. where McCarthyite purges had driven radicals from unions.

The result was a double hollowing-out: fewer organised class structures, and fewer radicals to argue for a class-based alternative.

The parallel between the U.S. Christian Right and the U.K.’s OMOV reforms demonstrates a common truth: when collective class mechanisms are weakened, atomised politics emerges, and reactionary appeals gain ground. In the U.S., that meant a working class redirected into religious conservatism; in Britain, it meant Labour shifting toward cultural conservatism and later Blue Labour.

The lesson is not only historical but urgent: restoring working-class solidarity requires restoring collective mechanisms of power. In Britain, that means defending and deepening the trade union link to Labour, and resisting the fragmentation of the working class into atomised individual voters.

Notes

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Union Membership in the U.S., various years.

Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010).

Lewis Minkin, The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of Labour’s Party Management (2014).

Peter Taaffe, The Rise of Militant (1995).