The many shades of Blue Labour (or why saying Blue Labour wants rid of Ed Balls is nonsense)

According to a report in The Sun this morning, “Blue Labour” want rid of Ed Balls. This alleged fact is presented alongside a glowing report for a strand of thought that is close to Ed Miliband’s heart (albeit with a rather unusual definition of what Blue Labour actually means – the abolition of tax credits is at the darker end of the Blue spectrum). Before we take this report at face value, lets just remember some of the partial reporting that the Sun are so keen on when it comes to the Labour leadership.

That said, it’s interesting to see Blue Labour making a return to the national stage. The moniker was widely considered to have been retired a couple of years ago, before being rebranded and subsumed into “One Nation” at last year’s conference. Many of those closest to Ed Miliband are either Blue Labour or Blue Labour sympathetic. Perhaps the best example is his close adviser and friend Marc Stears – recently hired to work full-time in Miliband’s office – both a founding member of the Blue Labour clan and a key exponent of One Nationism. Jon Cruddas is also something of a Blue Labourite too, and Maurice Glasman is far more influential than he is often given credit for, despite being placed on the naughty step in the days before One Nation was Labour’s new mantra.

But if Blue Labour is to return to the forefront of party debate, we need to be clear on something. This isn’t a party faction. This isn’t a group of people with a united vision on each and every policy. This isn’t a group of people who have a united view on who should hold what posts within the party. This isn’t even a group of people who uniformly voted for one Labour leadership candidate – there are, in fact, supporters of Ed Balls in the Blue Labour clan.

Blue Labour is a thoughtful, largely academic, slightly too male circle of thinkers. It takes a broad view on everything but a specific, corporate view on surprisingly little. Its academic nature means that those working within it require a certain level of flexibility.

Which is why it’s important to take care when saying “Blue Labour thinks that..”, because it’s never, ever as simple as that. It’s entirely possible – probable even – that there are those in the Blue Labour grouping who would prefer a different Shadow Chancellor (one who they might find more open to their arguments – also pushed by Ed Miliband – that we need to “remake” capitalism). But it’s an entirely different proposition to argue that removing Ed Balls is a majority position within Blue Labour, nevermind the Labour Party as a whole. That’s simply not the case. One leading Blue Labourite told me this morning that the idea Blue Labour was plotting to replace Balls with Cruddas is “absolute total madness”.

No doubt there must be either a reckoning or a reconciliation at some point between what we might call “Blue” Labour and (Gordon) “Brown” Labour (although Ed Balls has made notable breaks with the former PM in recent months). There is a way of rebuilding the British economy in the next ten years that should be palatable to both of these tendencies (which rather than being in competition, should be working together), that involves a short term stimulus based around house-building and infrastructure, backed by a strict long-term deficit reduction plan, and a shift in the way in which the public and the state interact. Both of these powerful strands in party thinking are becoming more sophisticated, to the extent that there may well be considerable overlap.

I’ll be outlining what that might look like tomorrow…