Labour MP warns of 'completely losing' working class voters as he accuses Keir Starmer of 'drifting a long way' from Britons

Speaking to presenter Gloria De Piero, the Labour MP told how he was a police officer before he entered the Commons.

He said: "I think it's really important that we have a good mix in Parliament. I think that's the key thing. I know a lot of people say we've got maybe too many policy wonks, public affairs people, lobbyists or whatever.

"I'm not against those people being MPs or politicians at all. But I think it's clear that we have moved more in that direction to the detriment of other, perhaps more working class backgrounds.

"So things like the police, but also things like construction and more working with your hands jobs. We haven't got many people in Parliament who've got that experience anymore, so I would like to see a shift back towards that. But that's not to insult anyone who's gone down the policy route. We need that expertise as well."

He said he believed that Labour can still be the party of the working class: "I desperately hope so, and that is what I'm fighting to ensure we are. The last thing I want is for our party to abandon the working class to Nigel Farage and Reform, because I think there will be an abject failure.

"But this has been decades in the making. It's not the fault of any one leader. It's not the fault of any one person at all. But our party has drifted a long way from the people we were formed to represent. We've drifted so far away from them on some of the cultural issues that we've talked about that they say, ‘no, I can't vote Labour’. So we've really got to have a course correct big time."

He added: "And we haven't got a lot of time to do it, because if you look at the election result this time we got fewer votes in 2024 than we got in 2019. So we have only arrested the decline."

Warning that the "working class voter" could "leave Labour all together", Mr Hinder told GB News: "And actually now if we're not careful, the working class will leave us all together. And that's where people are talking about losing votes to other parties. I mean, that's one thing. But what I don't want us to become is a rump in the metropolitan areas at the next general election.

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"We have to be the party of the whole of Britain, and we have to be the party of the towns, not just the cities. So you can probably tell in my voice that it animates me so much. And I really think we haven't got a lot of time."

Mr Hinder said he was trying to address the issue of underrepresentation of working people via his involvement in a group called Blue Labour: "So very simply speaking we are pro-worker, we're economically to the left, so we're very much in favour of public ownership of the key industries, for instance.

"We reject the kind of capitalist consensus that has grown up over the last few decades, which I think the Labour Party has perhaps not been as kind of confident in challenging in recent decades. But we're also where the public are on social issues, much closer than perhaps some of the parts of the Labour Party, wanting to control immigration, backing the police to be a force for good, patriotic.

"It's a combination of things which have perhaps become rare in the Labour Party, but actually it really kind of would describe our greatest Prime Minister as Clement Attlee. He would have been blue Labour. So it's really not perhaps as different as it would have been a few decades ago. But we've kind of drifted towards this hyper liberalism as a party and we need a course correction. So that's what Blue Labour is about."

On his attitude towards one of the voters’ main concerns, immigration, he said: "Obviously the boats are the most visible sign that we have not got control of our borders, and we need that control. But I've written a lot about legal migration levels overall.

"The thing that really finished the Conservatives at the last election was they said after Brexit we did have control of our borders, we're going to be able to reduce immigration. It went sky high, nearly a million net migration in a year. So they basically stuck two fingers up to their new voter coalition and said, actually, we're not going to do what you've actually been asking politicians of all stripes to do for the last 20 years."

He added: "There's always going to be immigration but actually we want it to be balanced. We want to think about what we want immigration to be for our economy, for our country, rather than just having this open borders policy, which, as we've seen, has just failed.

"To be clear, I’ve got nothing against people coming here to work who want a better life for themselves, often working in our public services. That's fantastic. But the reason why we've needed to actually rely on such high immigration is we haven't actually been training our own workforce, investing in those parts of the country where they've been left behind by globalisation so that they can take those jobs in construction and so forth and actually pay them decent wages.

"There's always going to be immigration. They still will be under that system. But really people want it to be controlled. And it's been so high we really need a course correction."

On illegal immigration specifically, he said: "I would say this is about control. And it really frustrates me when people say actually it's a relatively small number compared to immigration numbers. The fact is this has not got democratic consent.

"People are coming into this country in a way that is not controlled. And that's the key thing people want. We've welcomed over 200,000 Ukrainians to our country in the last few years, so we can't welcome everybody. But this is a really decent, tolerant, welcoming nation. And I think it's been undermined by this lack of control. So we've got to get a grip of it very, very quickly."