Demonising blue Labour is not in its opponents’ interests

By Patrick Macfarlane

I’ve heard a lot of criticism of blue Labour in the last few days.

On Twitter, in the blogosphere and in national newspapers, there have been suggestions that blue Labour sympathisers are “Tory infiltrators”, that they would “cast adrift women, the ill” and “play on race tension”, and that blue Labour is product of “a focus group finding”.

No-one who has written on blue Labour has advocated any of this. No focus groups have been set up. Blue Labour is not the brainchild of Eric Pickles.

If you want to know where its ideas really come from, read the positive messages: “it addresses some of the concerns raised by many I speak to”; “there’s something to it that the liberal elite shouldn’t ignore”; “[this] touches on conversations that we on the left seriously need to have about our relationship with identity politics in general”.

Both Labour-leaning voters and party members have been thinking about ‘blue Labour’ subjects for some time.

As a concept, it’s not perfect – but then it’s still pretty nebulous. A lot of people I speak to find the phrase “faith, family and flag” either awkward or disturbing.

But the same people want to talk about the decline of relationships in our families, communities and workplaces.

They’ve experienced the downsides of globalisation, without many of the economic upsides which a well-educated, well-connected and highly mobile elite have seen.

And they see money fears as only part (thought an important part) of their current insecurity. They generally agree with Labour’s argument about the need to maintain growth, but they feel resentful that it doesn’t see the social deficit that has been building up in their lives.

Children who go to sleep before their parents get home. Elderly people who live alone in terraces of strangers. Young workers (from both the UK and overseas) struggling to put down roots in unfamiliar and unfriendly cities.

That’s the starting point for blue Labour. It hasn’t abandoned the party’s commitment to issues such as gender, race and sexual equality. And it doesn’t want to destroy the NHS or abandon schools.

It’s simply trying to introduce a big new dimension into the conversation about policy – one which it’s hard to believe that we left to the right for so long.

By dismissing blue Labour as a reactionary, regressive force, its opponents in the party not only put a gag on the legitimate concerns of many Labour members. They risk keeping themselves in the electoral wilderness at the very time when we have to most to gain.

In its values and in the personalities who lead it, the coalition could not be further from reflecting back an image of voters that they recognise and respect. Labour must fill this gap, or risk moving further and further away from the hard-working electorate that it claims to represent.

Patrick is secretary of Putney CLP and author of blue-labour.blogspot.com.