A rose by any other colour

By Hazel Nolan / @HazelJN

Labour is red, but also blue… so many colours it doesn’t know what to do?

A mere few weeks after Blue Labour injected its ink into the pot & already there are shades to it’s hue. How blue is blue? How blue are you?

Labour is becoming a rainbow of colour spectrums. A million shades of socialism perhaps? Akin to a broad church it is now a wide pallet, but are we even still all on the same canvass?

It is said that the quickest way to find where you are going is to look at what direction you came from.

The red rose is the symbol of Labour, not just used by the British Labour party- but by our sister parties across the rest of Europe and the world. I always found it interesting how a movement, when looking for a symbol of strength to represent its struggle, would choose a flower.

That rose is a symbol of strength though and maybe we need a reminding of why that is, of where this symbol came from & how we came to adopt it.

It was chosen because it represents the unity of the two inseparable causes of Labour.

The colour red is a symbol of the struggle against material poverty, and the rose itself a symbol of the struggle against spiritual poverty. Combined it is a symbol of human dignity. It represents a covenant between peoples; a promise that life should be about more than just existing.

“Give us bread & give us roses” is a now immortalised call by the Lawrence Textile Strikers in 1912. That immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could be organized, to such an extent (the strike united over 20,000 mill workers) defied even the American Federation of Labour at the time. Their demands were not just based on economic & material needs, but deeper still. It was also based on a universal demand for respect; an acknowledgement of their humanity and it was fundamentally about dignity.

Amid all these competing colours, have we forgotten the picture we are painting? Perhaps we are forgetting something, not just important, but fundamental. Our struggle is not just a material one it is an emotive one.

Blue Labour is raising an important issue- we are losing the emotive debate. It is the area where we are weakest, but it is also the area where we can show the most strength. To take a line from one outspoken opponent of Blue-Labour, Billy Bragg, “There is power in a union”.

Both Blue Labour and its critics such as Billy Bragg are correct in their analysis. The importance of family, faith and flag isn’t in its appeal to conservative nostalgia though – but to the timeless values and power of solidarity and respect. Neoliberalism and centralisation are incompatible with these things and so will always continue to fail to deliver on either. Respect for communities cannot be met through authoritarian centralisation. The importance of solidarity cannot be met through neoliberalism.

Labour is fundamentally a campaign for democracy. It is the struggle to give individuals a stake in the economy and to ensure everyone has a voice in deciding how their material needs are to be met. The motivation behind this is based on respect for a universal dignity to do so as equal members of humanity.

In the colourful debate on how we achieve our end goals, let’s not forget what they are and why we have them.