Blue Labour: Modern life is not rubbish

By Jon Wilson / @jonewilson

Redcar, Barnsley East, Merthyr Tydfil, these are the heartlands of England and Wales where Labour’s vote was decimated in 2010, with an 18% swing against in some places. They are places Labour abandoned to the forces of the state and market, where society died. The closure of a steel plant in Redcar, for example, was an act of both market and arbitrary power which voters blamed on our party. As a result Labour is near to becoming a coalition of the un-rooted and the enraged, of ethnic minorities, the liberal middle class, and people from nations and towns with a historic grievance against the Tories – Scotland and Liverpool for example.

But Labour’s lost roots aren’t only a problem for the heartland. They are a sign that the party lost touch with ordinary British life, from industrial northern town to Birmingham’s commuter belt, to the working class south.

As Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford’s Progress article ‘Selling England by the Pound‘ point out, what Labour lost was its ability to protect what people value: a decent livelihood, civilised family life, an idea of place, and sense that you can get on without leaving the town or village you’re from. Along with a growing group of thinkers on the left like Maurice Glasman and Marc Stears, Jon and Jonathan ask us to abandon New Labour’s mantra of perpetual change and permanent mobility. Instead they call for Labour to take on a blue-ish tinge and recover its fundamentally conservative instincts.

In the ideological stakes to renew the Labour Party, conservative Labour is the only game in town. But the new conservative radicals aren’t asking us to embrace a sepia-tinged nostalgic view of the past. Conservative Labour is about connecting with life in Britain as it is now.

To say Labour should be conservative is to say that it should listen to what people say. It recognises that when they’re listened to, people want to protect the things they’ve had in the past. When people want to get on, they do it with their feet planted in the place they’re from. Everyone wants some change, but very few people want everything to change all the time.

In their Progress article, Jon and Jonathan are not saying Labour should be conservative. They simply think that if we are to live lives that have any meaning, dignity and purpose we are conservative. Necessarily, those things that give our lives both meaning and purpose come from the past. It is through the languages and practices we inherit from the past that we are ‘intelligible to ourselves and to each other through the shared symbols of a common life’.

This is a practical political philosophy that looks for the good life in the way we live now, wanting to protect and nurture it. It finds value in how people are, rather than telling us we need to transform ourselves to become radically different. It recognises that modern capitalism and public sector management are destructive forces. But it says there is room for optimism about the possibility of living a good life the way we are now.

Does this mean Labour needs to get nostalgic? In a sense, yes. Nostalgia’s original meaning was simply ‘homelessness’. Conservative Labour asks how we can recover a liveable home life against the dispossession of capitalism and state government.

But nostalgia is also often used to describe a yearning for the past not for home. It evokes a vague and romantic sense of the past as a better world that we have lost forever. This kind of nostalgia severs us from the past whilst celebrating it. This is Tory nostalgia, John Major’s maids cycling to church in the mist or David Cameron’s village hall volunteers. These sepia-tainted images only disconnect us from the way life is actually lived in the here and now. Taken seriously, they leave us with a sense of the absurdity of our own lives, and an empty sadness.

That nostalgic approach to culture and identity that marked Enoch Powell’s conservatism; the conservatism which, as Jon and Jonathan point out, instigated Thatcher’s revolution and continues to define much of Toryism today. A romanticised image of community life in all-white England were essential to Powell and Thatcher’s politics. But that nostalgic past made no moral claims on how we should act out our political or economic lives in the present. The result was that people could dream about a different past, feel bad about themselves because they didn’t live there, and then get on with money-making without any moral qualms.

Our task is to recognise that the traditions that give us dignity and meaning have had a continuous existence, surviving even through their darkest moments. To embed our politics in a locally-rooted, settled sense of the common good, it is not enough to dream about how things were once different. We need to make the past real.

One role for political leadership is to tell stories about the way people have made their home together in real communities with real institutions through the years. It is to celebrate the place of local libraries, schools, football clubs, churches or forests as sites where we have created a common life that stretches into the past. Through those stories, we recover a sense of pride in who we are and where we’re from: but we also renew a sense of our collective power to make the lives we live for ourselves.

That is a difficult task. Our world tells us what’s new is good; and everything that is right and just has no history. But it is possible.

Let me end with an example of what I mean. In the ward in Walthamstow where I was a councillor a few years back, there is a much praised voluntary-sector run SureStart Children’s centre. The centre is built on very strong relationships between real people that have been built up through a shared history of common struggle and work over more than 30 years. The children’s centre began as a community-run under-5s club in the early 1980s. The strong relationships it is based on allowed it to reinvent itself four or five different times, in response to different council and government initiatives.

That past is invisible though. Anyone who came across the centre for the first time would see it as an institution without a history. They would think it had been created by the latest bureaucratic command. That it served abstractly defined ‘needs’ defined by governments and councils that promised to make things new and better. In fact, the centre exists because generations of parents have worked continuously together to protect something they valued. It was made by the common action of people through time.

To hear the story of the way people like these SureStart parents make the good life for themselves together in modern Britain, you have to listen very hard. It is our role, as Labour activists, to work out how we can listen. It is then our task to find a way of recognising what we have heard.