Left-wing rally: You can chuck out the polenta. And Gordon Brown should think again about another tax rise. Nearly 70% of the UK public claims to feel 'working class and proud of it', according to a new Mori poll.

It's a huge change from 1994 when only about 50% of people said the same. The other half echoed Mrs Thatcher's mantra, that they had an inalienable right to 'little cheesy-pineapple ones'.

This change is nowt to do with Tony Blair's ostensible political agenda. It's not that he's proved that there is such a thing as society, succeeded in converting Mrs Thatcher's Essex men and women into social democrats. Quite the opposite. It's likely to be a reaction against five years of Blair's more extreme free market ideas, his mania for public-private partnerships, his closeness to big business.

Shocking though hardly surprising, Labour can't now take the traditional working class vote for granted. As Mori reports, manual workers and others on low pay no longer seem to have a class identity that binds them to the Labour Party.

'Those who admit they are working class and proud of it are no more likely to vote Labour than those who do not - instead, they are more likely to say they will not vote or to be undecided.' [Mori].

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Richard Skase, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Canterbury Business School, said that Labour shouldn't take the 'new working class' for granted either.

Without secure jobs and under increasing pressure at work, people who used to be described as middle class, technologists, engineers, doctors, teachers, social workers, are now more likely to describe themselves as working class.

'They don't have safe, secure jobs; they don't have safe, secure futures. As a result they're under increasing anxieties, increasing insecurities, pressures to perform and in that sense they feel they're working class. . . And this is the new working class that Labour is at great risk of losing at the next election.' [Today - RealPlayer needed].

Never mind, Tony. You can still count on your business friends. How many votes is that?

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