Not exactly news
The Left hsa been split between the working class left and the technocratic left for at least a century. In 1903 Martov and Lenin had pretty much the exact same debate that the Labour party is currently wrenching itself through. Lenin argued the technocratic viewpoint, that there should be a professional political party that controlled everything because the workers were too stupid to bring about socialism. Martov took the grassroots option, arguing for a decentralized, democratic movement that would allow working people to determine their own destinies with dignity, without being controlled from above.
Under Neoliberalism (ie, since Reagan/Thatcher in the early 1980s), the left in both the US and the UK has become entirely consumed by the technocratic viewpoint that middle-class, highly educated professionals should manage society for the benefit of all. Hence why everyone in parliament has identikit Oxbridge PPE educations and started out as a researcher or policy wonk, never doing a genuine job outside politics in their lives. They honestly don't understand why the working class left have been abandoning them in droves as a result of this. Both the Democrats under Clinton and New Labour under Blair pretended to be moving to the left for the benefit of everyone... and yet the societies that they shaped turned out to be very baised toward, well, people like Clinton and Blair, and completely forgot about the people that they were elected by.
Those groups found no voice on the left, and so began to move toward the Right to find any representation at all; they aren't all crazy racists or insane xenophobes, they simply want to smash a system that has no place for them. They view all of politics as corrupt because they see Blair making millions consulting for fascistic Arab dictators, or Clinton grooming his wife and then daughter for a dynastic coronation (just as the Bush family have been doing on the Right), and see that despite all the promises that were made, they ended up shut out of the system while the guys making the promises have made a fortune. They feel ripped off, and quite rightly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
