‘Progressivism or bust: Why Blue Labour is the wrong answer to Reform surge’

Labour is in trouble. The rise of Reform poses the most significant challenge to the British party system since the SDP in the 1980s. While the Tories have more to fear than Labour for now, this won’t stop them making a deal with Farage at the next election, as they did in 2019. Meanwhile, Labour is haemorrhaging support to the Greens, nationalists and even the Liberal Democrats from voters frustrated by the government’s lack of vision.

The fragmentation of the electorate and rising threat from the right are both symptoms of a deep malaise. Opinion polls have been showing for years that most of the public want a meaningful break with the decades of neoliberalism and austerity. They haven’t got it, despite Labour’s tepid reforms.

A majority also want an end to mass immigration, while smaller numbers express hostility to the general direction of cultural travel, hankering for a world without DEI programmes and flexible pronouns. At the same time, of the majority of voters who want public utilities renationalised, a significant proportion are committed to social liberalisation, multiculturalism and migrants’ rights. It would be difficult for any political project to build a coherent coalition in this context. But the ideologists of ‘Blue ‘Labour’ think they have the answer.

‘If people are looking for a return to the past, they don’t look to parties of the left’

‘Blue Labour’ emerged from a series of seminars held at Oxford University in 2011, not all of the participants at which would eventually endorse its agenda (I was actually invited by Jon Cruddas to attend, but work commitments kept me away). At the time Phillip Blond— a minor Anglican theologian—was enjoying a predictably brief stint in the public eye as a supposed influence on Cameronite liberal conservatism; the name ‘Blue Labour’ was derived from his self-designation as a ‘red tory’.

Blue Labour’s chief proponents became London-based academics and commentators Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford. Both had historic connections to Labour’s soft left and the Communist Party of Great Britain, which is perhaps why they were able to present as novel a set of political positions that were in fact largely indiscernible from those of Labour’s traditional, pre-Blairite right wing.

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In brief, Blue Labour argued that the party ought to reject Blairism so completely that it would jettison Blair’s modernising optimism and social liberalism, along with his commitment to globalisation and free markets. Glasman recognised that much of what working-class, socially-conservative voters wanted—stable family lives, predictable careers, functional communities—were things that social democracy had given them, while neoliberalism had taken away. So why not appeal to their longing for security by combining a promise to reign in capitalist power with a commitment to ‘faith, flag and family’?

The answer, of course, is that if people are looking for an explicitly regressive social and political project, with no vision of a future that is anything but a return to the past, then they do not go looking to parties of the left do deliver it for them. They never have, they never will, and it would be absurd to expect them to do so. Blue Labour—which never amounted to much more than a handful of newspaper columns and speeches—failed to capture the public’s imagination in the 2010s. But now it’s back. 

‘There is no reason that re-industrialising Britain should also mean defunding higher education’

Writing in the Daily Mail recently, former Corbynite MP Dan Carden called himself the leader of the Blue Labour group in parliament (which, according to Wikipedia, has a grand total of three other members), advocating for a policy of re-industrialisation, immigration controls and universities being replaced by technical vocational colleges. In other words: turning the clock back to 1962, before globalisation and the expansion of universities spoiled everything.

Some of this is desirable, and some of it might be possible. But it’s also clear that much of what shapes Blue Labour thinking is a deep cultural conservatism, often shaped by religious belief. Glasman is Jewish, but Carden’s commitment to Roman Catholicism is well advertised, and Catholic Social Teaching has always been one of the few intellectual resources on which Blue Labour advocates seem to have drawn. Without these reactionary cultural commitments, there is simply no reason for anyone to argue that re-industrialising Britain or even controlling immigration should also have to mean, for example, defunding higher education. Glasman has recently begun to use the word ‘progressive’ as an explicit term of abuse.

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‘Blue Labour is a total rejection of everything the party has ever actually stood for’

This isn’t a subtle or strategic modification of the Labour Party’s traditional habits of mind; it’s a total rejection of everything the party has ever actually stood for. Neither Keir Hardie, Ellen Wilkinson, Nye Bevan, Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison, Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle nor Tony Blair would have recognised their party as one that could be used a bulwark against ‘progress’. Perhaps the same can’t be said of a figure like James Callaghan: an explicit opponent of progressive schooling and ‘the permissive society’. But Callaghan lost the support of his own base while losing the 1979 election to Thatcher. Any Labour government that tries to follow the Blue Labour formula is likely to end the same way.

Blue Labour ideas are attractive to Labour’s right wing because they express some their traditional prejudices, while seeming to hold out the possibility of winning support from a key voters groups who are disproportionately influential in contemporary British politics: older, socially-conservative swing voters in marginal constituencies.

The apparent rise of authoritarian social conservatism among non-graduate young men—as evinced by the popularity of figures like Andrew Tate— possibly suggests to some that a broader social coalition might be possible for a programme promising non-graduate jobs and a restoration of patriarchal values. (Of course, if you dig into the opinion  polls, Tate is much more popular with teenagers than with men in their 20s, but that’s another story).

‘Blue Labour’s voter coalition isn’t large enough to win elections’

The problem with this analysis is the same one that has bedevilled advocates of ‘socially conservative, economically radical’ programmes for decades. This is the fact that Labour cannot win elections without the support of cosmopolitan urban voters any more than it can do without the support of older voters in the post-industrial regions. Blue Labour rhetoric likes to imagine that everyone in the UK who isn’t a blue-haired postgraduate is a churchgoing industrial worker, desperate to turn back the clock on multiculturalism and trans rights.

But the polling actually shows that working age urban voters – whatever their social background or educational qualifications – don’t like social conservatism, or anti-migrant rhetoric. This is true of graduates employees across the country, but it is also true of many groups of poorer workers in our cosmopolitan towns and cities. The fact is: the voter coalition that Blue Labour claims to speak for simply isn’t large enough to win elections.

READ MORE: Labour goes quiet on membership data after LabourList reports falling numbers

‘Labour has refused to offer any compelling vision of a social democratic Britain’

Arguably this is a question that Labour has been faced with since the 1970s, and which it has rarely been able to answer: how to balance the different cultural orientations of the two key halves of its historic coalition. Here, it’s important to remember that there never was a time when Labour was simply ‘the party of the working class’. Working-class Toryism has been an important part of British politics since the 1870s, and Orwell was already complaining that the Labour Party was too middle-class in the 1930s.

Salaried professionals were as much part of Labour’s coalition by the 1940s as were industrial workers. What’s happened since the 1970s is that the perceived interests and cultural orientations of these groups have diverged, especially as most of the people who were once the industrial working-class have aged into retired, home-owning pensioners; while many of their children and grandchildren have entered the indebted, rent-paying professional classes. 

The idea that these differences can be overcome by simply asserting the cultural values of one side makes little sense. The more logical response would be to identify those issues on which they can be brought together while finding some way of resolving the ones on which they can’t.

It’s striking today how widespread the public desire is for a raft of progressive policies, from wealth taxes to price controls to public ownership of key utilities. While Labour refuses to consider implementing most of this agenda, voters and activists are understandably moving towards the Green Party, the nationalist parties and the network of independent MPs, led by Jeremy Corbyn, that may yet morph into a new political party.

At the same time, all the evidence suggests that Labour is losing working class voters to Reform not only because of their immigration policies, but because such voters feel unrepresented by a Labour party that has refused to offer any compelling vision of a social democratic Britain. The resulting fragmentation of the progressive electorate could allow right-wing candidates to win a landslide at the next general election.

‘Uniting the progressive left is more plausible step than disowning idea of radical future’

If such a disaster is to be prevented, then it’s unlikely that this will happen by means of one party becoming the singular vehicle for progressive and radical politics in England, Scotland or Wales. Political cooperation between parties and their supporters, especially at a local level, is likely to be necessary across much of the UK.

If this is to become possible, then some sense of a common programme will have to emerge, giving expression to this widespread desire for meaningful change. Enough is Enough generated enormous public enthusiasm with the promise of a public campaign based around a programme rather than a party a couple of years ago.

One promising initiative aimed at developing such a common programme is Forum 2029, a series of public policy seminars involving figures from across the progressive left, to be hosted by the Autonomy Institute this year, that I’ve helped to organise along with Autonomy and several others.  Compass have attracted a huge crowd for their event advocating for a progressive Labour policy platform just this month.

Of course, such small initiatives can only play a contributory role in developing a real alternative to far-right government in 2029. But uniting the progressive and radical left is surely a more plausible step forward than simply disowning the idea of a radical future altogether. 

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