Politics & Power Quote by Patricia Hewitt

A polite sentence with a warning baked into it: nostalgia is organizing itself. Hewitt frames the shift as something she’s merely “seeing,” a classic politician’s move that turns an argument into an observation. It implies momentum without owning it, letting her sound attuned rather than alarmed. But the key phrase is “return to class-based politics,” which treats class not as a permanent feature of society but as a mode you can switch on and off, like an old program that’s suddenly back in reruns.

The subtext is twofold. First, it concedes that the era of “post-class” messaging - the Third Way habit of talking about aspiration, consumers, and “hardworking families” rather than workers and owners - left a vacuum. People are reaching for a vocabulary that names winners and losers more directly, because rents, wages, and precarity don’t politely fit into lifestyle branding. Second, it hints at unease inside mainstream center-left politics: class talk tends to pull parties toward redistribution, union power, and confrontation with capital, not just technocratic fixes.

Context matters: Hewitt’s generation of Labour modernizers helped steer the party toward managerial competence and away from old socialist identities. Her line registers that the costs of that bargain have become harder to ignore, especially after deindustrialization, austerity, and the visible stratification of the “knowledge economy.” “Return” is doing rhetorical work here: it casts class politics as a cyclical mood rather than a structural demand, even as the sentence admits that the mood is spreading.