Is Blue Labour the answer to Labour’s woes?

What can the much-derided Blue Labour offer the party? It is a question worth asking, because the leadership contest has so far largely eschewed big ideas. Surely, losing so badly in England and being flat-out destroyed in Scotland calls for a thorough reckoning with the party’s downward trajectory from 2005 to the present – a soul-searching process which asks: what is Labour now for? Jeremy Corbyn is excelling and inspiring partly because he is the only candidate with a clear and optimistic answer to this question. Even so, I would argue that all the candidates, Jeremy included, stand to gain from a second look at this strand of thought.

Around this time in the last parliament Maurice Glasman was arguing for the revival of Labour’s lost tradition of communitarian-socialism which predates the Second World War. Reinforcing it with theorists as diverse as Aristotle and Karl Polányi, Glasman sought to reimagine contemporary social democracy as rather more social and democratic than practised under Blair and Brown. After initially demonstrating enthusiasm for these ideas – not least by making Glasman a peer – Ed Miliband withdrew into an ideological no-man’s-land, neither Old, nor New, nor Blue Labour. At the same time, some on the Left mistook the (deliberately controversial) prefix ‘Blue’ to mean a further embrace of neoliberal capitalism, and it lost momentum.

Despite this, there are promising elements of Blue Labour which might be fruitfully drawn on.

First there is its diagnosis of contemporary Britain. Britons feel disempowered, governed by a remote elite in Westminster and Brussels, and subject to the whims of a rapacious free-market centred on the City. Jobs have become ever more insecure whilst demanding ever more hours, the housing ladder is nigh-on impossible to access, and the places in which people live have become hollowed-out fiefdoms of Tesco. Unbridled consumerism and individualism have led, on the personal level, to more stress and depression. This is increasingly the case for both the working- and middle-classes, in towns and cities alike. Since Thatcher the Conservative party has not only accepted this destructive process, it has actively encouraged it, and as long as that remains the case they will be unloved and therefore beatable.

Blue Labour’s innovative alternative to both neoliberalism and the planned economy is to strengthen communities, rather than the market or centralised government. Power would be devolved from Whitehall to local authorities to exercise in partnership with civil society. It would support the creation of co-operatives as an alternative to, for example, the rackets that are our privatised utilities and railways. Freeing trade unions to engage in collective bargaining it would seek to restore dignity to work. Understanding more than just the bottom line, places and spaces of intrinsic value would be defended from predatory capital. Perhaps most boldly, it would support the creation of a federal United Kingdom of the English regions and Celtic nations, and lead the fight for a democratic, people’s EU.

In this vision of a more accountable politics and economy there is much of value. Unfortunately, however, it has been obscured by dubious aspects of Blue Labour’s social agenda. Firstly, the inflammatory remarks Glasman made about immigration evoke an exclusionary 1950s Britain that is – fortunately – not coming back. A second major worry is that the emphasis on contribution in social security serves to justify its destruction at the hands of the Tories. For example, in a 2013 feature on Newsnight, Jon Cruddas (who I have great respect for) suggested that food banks were a good community initiative and here to stay. While praising the volunteers involved, no Labour party worth its salt could accept the replacement of the safety net with charity.

A brief overview shows that Blue Labour is far from being the whole answer to Labour’s woes – but it does, however, contain the seeds of a progressive political economy for contemporary Britain, and a way of reclaiming notions of community and localism for the Left. It would be good to hear all the candidates’ views on such issues, as part of a proper debate about ideas with the victor establishing a clear agenda. Not only is that the only way Labour can hope to win over a disillusioned electorate by 2020, isn’t it also what a leadership contest is for?

Lewis Coyne is a PhD student