Blue Labour? You can keep it

By Colin Challen

I’m sorry if I missed the launch of Blue Labour. Outside of London the local elections will be the first real test of public anger over the coalition government, and fighting for a good result on May 5th ranks higher in my priorities than a bout of angst ridden navel gazing. But a short Easter respite affords me the opportunity of looking a little closer at the froth emerging from the metropolitan bubble. And it makes no sense at all. I’m sure it’s been said before (apologies again) but you can’t even get beyond the first two words without sensing the enormous confusion emanating from this bowl of political washing-up liquid.

‘Blue’ Labour – what on earth were they thinking? Was this some kind of code for the initiated? I wonder whether the high priests of ‘New’ Labour, now feeling a little discredited (in public anyway) are really saying ‘actually, New Labour was but a transitional stage – we always knew we had to go further.’ This is Tony Blair’s greatest regret, the scars on his back, his remorse over a lack of boldness. It is the maintenance of the idea he often expressed to his occasionally doubtful PLP that if we vacated the centre ground, the Tories would fill it, ergo our policies needed to be more conservative. Is this what Lord Glasman means when he refers to Blue Labour being radical and conservative, harnessing the power of contradiction to win over a sceptical public? I’m sure voters are up for that. Not.

Clearly anything called Blue Labour – especially in the current political climate – deserves a swift execution. Radical and conservative? Are we trying to fight the last war? Is (real) compassionate conservatism to be our new mantra, rescued from its transatlantic death throes? Labour should be defined by an idea of progress (with a small ‘p,’ in case you wondered) which lasts. Progress which becomes embedded, which cannot be knocked down even if we are knocked out of government every so often. New Labour’s problem was that it so often measured progress in terms of activity rather than achievement, with endless reforms of the public services being produced even before the previous reforms had had the chance to work (or not). Lord Glasman is right to describe this approach as Maoist. Such an accurate characterisation takes as its cue the very contradiction between ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ which Blue Labour encapsulates.

Let’s have no truck with it. Instead of trying to fill our ransacked ideological kit bag with some new fangled ideology (which of course cannot be called as much lest it offend those who think we live in a post-ideological world – which itself must be the biggest joke going) let’s have some policies. Let’s have some concrete ideas. On the doorstep, when people ask ‘what do you stand for?’ words like affordable housing, decent jobs, decent pensions, with some idea about their delivery will cut more ice than some reheated stew of neo-managerialist gobbledegook.

Colin Challen was Labour MP for Morley and Rothwell 2001-2010 and is a candidate in this year’s local elections