Kill Blue Labour – before it kills us

Although ‘Blue Labour’ purports to be a radical departure from New Labour, it is based on faulty assumptions which lead to entirely regressive and reactionary proposals. We should kill Blue Labour before it kills us.

I made the time to write this article for two reasons: firstly, the interest in the ‘Blue Labour’ e-book and secondly to emphasise that the Labour Party should promote politics based on economic class rather than cultural identity.

Maurice Glasman’s paper concerns the philosophical development of the Labour Party, culminating in the characterisation of the Labour Party as a marriage between a proletarian Dad and a bourgeois ‘upper middle class’ Mum. I can identify with this cultural analysis because it has played itself out in my own life. I approach my socialist politics from two angles. On the one hand I am a university graduate given to analytical, rational and intellectual analysis of social conditions. On the other hand I am the grandson of an East End postman and the son of a father who was made redundant several times during the 1980s and 1990s. Such personal experiences have strongly influenced the way I see the world and the way I criticise political theories. Both the University of Oxford and the University of Hard Knocks have a lot to answer for.

Unfortunately the fatal flaw in Blue Labour thinking is to start from a superficial socio-cultural analysis of class rather than examining economic conditions and the social attitudes to which they contribute. What Blue Labour describes as cultural conservatism is actually material necessity. I would like to illustrate this with a personal story. Several years ago, when I was a student, I remember telling my grandmother that I thought criminal justice should be essentially rehabilitative and more should be done to tackle the economic causes of crime. She disagreed. My grandfather was a postman, a Labour voter, a staunch supporter of trade unions and opposed everything Thatcher stood for. However, what my grandparents knew was that the victims of crime are often the poor themselves: criminals put their selfish interests ahead those of society. They reject solidarity and collectivism in favour of selfishness and individualism. People who blight their own communities with drugs, vandalism, theft and violence deserve to be stopped and punished in the short term then rehabilitated in the community setting.

This was one thing that forced me to look at society more deeply and reflectively. During the August riots, I reminded my Nan of that conversation. While many left-wing commentators looked for explanations and long-term solutions, as the violence gathered strength my Nan and I both agreed that the main priorities were: to make the streets safe; to stop people being burned out of their own homes; to support those brave enough to defend their livelihoods and communities; to support the police. Hard-nosed? Undeniably. Conservative? Certainly not. The main divergence between the ‘mother’ and ‘father’ is not cultural but material: it arises from conflict between idealism and realism. The former starts from where it thinks society should be; the latter from where society actually is.

Where Blue Labour goes totally wrong is with the concept of conservatism. It starts from the premise that the majority of British voters are socially conservative. Jonathan Rutherford says ‘economic modernisation has led to an affirmation of racial and cultural difference’ amongst the ‘educated elite’ of England’s larger cities. However he contends ‘across the country a more conservative culture holds sway which values identity and belonging in the local and familiar’. These comments appear both patronising and insulting. Those in lower socio-economic groups are more likely suffer the sharp end of economic globalisation and the unnerving speed of change it can bring. The ‘educated elite’ is protected from it. Arguably, people on lower incomes are more flexible and adaptable because they have more direct experience of the ‘real’ economy.

As a consequence it should be anticipated that a low or precarious income combined with family and housing commitments can make individuals choose safety and security over risk-taking, preferring the familiar to the unknown. Perhaps Rutherford’s most controversial conclusion is the way in which he approaches immigration. “[Labour] must ask the question, what in our differences do we hold in common? And it must find answers capable of holding together broad ‘national-popular’ alliances across classes and cultures” . Fighting racism should be a means of promoting strength through unity. Identity politics perpetuates division even if its intentions are well-meaning. Britain is not so much a ‘multicultural’ country but a homogenous, secular country with a single culture of many different influences. What concerns many voters is not that their culture is being undermined, but the way that the fast pace of economic change can affect their already hard-pressed communities. It is insulting to speak of working class reactionary attitudes to cosmopolitan values. Cultural ‘differences’ have become mixed and an example would be the way music of black origin continues to have a strong influence on youth culture (even in market towns in rural Suffolk). The English Defence League is not a symptom of ‘cultural dislocations’ but rather a sign of a weakened labour movement and the lack of a strong class-based opposing discourse to identity politics.

Blue Labour also has a naïve approach to economic reform. Ed Miliband has sought to distinguish ‘predator’ and ‘producer’ capitalism. Glasman believes the re-establishment of guildhalls and the restoration of the county hundreds would allow Labour to ‘present a radical challenge to the concentrations of power and general sense of powerlessness’. Assuming this was achieved, there is basis for doubt that it would lead to real empowerment. The producers can become predators too and ‘profit at all costs’ is what matters. Modern forms of organisation are required and there can be no retreat into nostalgia. In a global free market economy exploitation has gone global too and trade unions are adapting to this. International protest movements follow the globalisation of capital. Social enterprise and ethical business practice are all forms of change from above: charitable acts which lead to disempowerment, meekness and subservience. To quote Oscar Wilde:

“the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it…why should they [the poor] be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board…a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality…”

Much of the genuine conservatism and nostalgia still resides with the bourgeois ‘upper middle class’ itself. Parts of the left have always had a very uneasy relationship with proletarian forms of organisation and control. Beatrice Webb once described trade unionists as “those underbred and undertrained workmen” and referred to “the myriads of deficient minds and deformed bodies that swarm our great cities” . This barely disguised contempt continues to this day: the successors to Beatrice Webb now talk of ‘problem families’, ‘low aspirations’ and ‘chavs’ (as eloquently criticised by Owen Jones in Chavs). The radical left has not moved outside my field of vision. It may not express the same contempt for the working class as the liberal left, but its mistrust is present in the language of ‘vanguardism’ and ‘backwardness’ used by some Leninists. A lack of revolutionary zeal arises not from ‘false consciousness’ but often from lived reality. It should be recognised that joining a demonstration or a trade union brings with it certain risks. The far left often advocates positions which may be supportable in theory but are reckless in practice. For all their talk about ‘material conditions’, the far left is often uniquely skilled in misinterpreting them.

The reactionary right understands this political malaise only too well. It has distorted the desire for independence and self-reliance to justify its own policies of rolling back the ‘Nanny’ welfare state and ‘bureaucratic’ public services. Although the ‘lower middle class’ is really no more than a job loss and a financial crash away from poverty, the political right present them as having no common cause with the burgeoning ‘underclass’. Of course, this is untrue. Neo-liberal policies and the widening of property ownership elevated a large proportion of the traditional ‘working class’ into a property-owning ‘middle class’ and left the rest behind. These developments have also occurred alongside an increasing casualisation of employment and erosion of workers’ rights, so what is called the ‘lower middle class’ belongs firmly in the proletariat. This is the natural constituency of the coalition parties: those who have no collective consciousness of a viable labour movement. What Labour must do is reach them by providing an alternative to neo-liberalism.

To conclude, Labour should work with those trying to bring about change from below rather than trying to promote change from above. This means supporting campaigns against big corporations and trade union campaigns. This means supporting workers who take strike action where negotiation fails. Being working class takes a great deal of courage. Many working class people, me included, face life with hard-nosed stoicism, more often than not to our own detriment. We sometimes appear harsh on those around them because if they are not hard then the consequences could be worse. It is not conservatism: it is a fact of life.

We may as well condemn ourselves to another eighteen years of opposition if we fail to understand.

Kevin hinds was Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Bury St Edmunds and is vice-chair Bury St Edmunds CLP.