Socialism is when you admit your parents were right – why Labour needs better manners

By Jon Wilson

When I was a cross adolescent lefty shouting at the TV news, my mum used to tell me socialism began at home. She told me you needed to listen to other people before you could say anything sensible about politics. It’s taken me nearly 38 years to realise it, but she was right.

Throughout its history, Labour has been about the quality of the relationships we have with each other. Everything of value comes from social relations. We do more together than alone. But poverty and lack of opportunity corrode our ability to get on with family, friends, neighbours and our community. It’s hard to be social working a seven-day week, or if you’re not respected at work. But that’s what happens if capital rules and we’re forced to work harder doing less rewarding work for less money.

As advocates of Blue Labour argue, Labour’s struggle has always been to put human relationships before money. The only way for that to happen is to organise. It is to get involved in institutions like the Trade Unions, the Co-op, the socialist society or Labour Party branches themselves which can confront capital and which represent the power of ordinary people organised, democratically to create a common life together. At least that’s what they were for much of their history.

The trouble is, somewhere along the way we lost our manners. Good relationships depend on listening to what the other people say. In our anxiety to have something to get the message across, we forgot to listen to the people around us. Labour believed it could create a society based on equal dignity and mutual respect without thinking about the relationships it created, or tolerated in the process. We – from our local branches to Labour in No.10 – severed means from ends. We imagine the good society could be created without listening.

Labour’s only chance now is if it seriously modifies its behaviour, and treats the public, even its members, in the same way we’d expect our neighbours to treat us.

But we’ve got a long way to go.

Take, for example, the Tawney Dialogue organised by the Christian Socialist Movement last month. With Sadiq Khan late, Maurice Glasman and Lucy Winkett started talking about ‘how we should live’ – beginning a conversation about how Labour and faith institutions can create the kind of local relationships that sustain the good life.

After the other two speakers had finished, Sadiq Khan arrived. The shadow secretary of state for justice told us the good society was the kind of thing politicians would create when they took control of the levers of state – and next time we’d do a better job than the last lot.

Sadiq Khan can be absolved for missing the point; he’s a busy many, with a million other things to do. But he can’t be forgiven for refusing to relate what he said to what had been said before, for his failure to imagine that he’d been invited to a dialogue. Style matched substance, as a top-down, state-delivered vision of social change was articulated in speech delivered without regard for the mood of its audience.

The trouble is, it all just showed how out of touch with real life politicians can be. If a friend walked into the middle of a conversation and held forth without finding out what we’d been talking about, you’d think their behaviour was outrageous. We should stop putting up with the kind of conduct from politicians we wouldn’t tolerate in our mates.

And take, for example, Billy Bragg’s recent attack on Blue Labour in the Guardian. Bragg criticised Maurice Glasman for being ‘economically liberal’. Glasman is nothing if not an enemy of the powers of finance capital. While Bragg was trying to elect a LibDem MP in Dorset, Glasman was fighting against the powers of finance in the Corporation of London and for a living wage. Bragg could easily have read a bit, or picked up the phone – but to do so would have been to put the quality of relationships, and the power to listen, before a good argument.

We’ve all been here, in local Labour meetings full of the same people expressing the same opinions. Or on the doorstep, where our zeal to get the ‘message’ across, or to get that one piece of voter ID, means we are deaf to the real stories of hardship and suffering, the anxieties and fears which drive many people in their disengaged attitude to politics.

In my CLP, Greenwich and Woolwich, we’ve started trying to have conversations on the doorstep about how people are surviving financially in tough times. The response of residents to Labour activists listening has been over-whelmingly positive. But you still get activists anxious about getting the ‘message’ right, and worried that communication is all going the wrong way.

That’s where we come to Blue Labour. Blue Labour is about finding out where people are, listening to the stories people tell, and recognising that sometimes they say things that progressive, liberally-minded people don’t find comfortable. It’s about recognising that when you talk about politics with most people, the conversation isn’t about abstract values or a future utopia, but about much more tangible things – making where we live a decent place, protecting our families and communities, having the power to shape the kind of common life we want to live. It’s about making sure that the big forces with power like capitalism or state are on our side not against us. But first of all it’s about listening to where people are and how they want to live their lives.

Perhaps it’s the fact that all politics begin at home. As Billy Bragg might have put it, Labour politics happens when you admit your parents were right.