Labour’s identity crisis – caught between Blairism and Blue Labour

The problem most tribes in the Labour Party have is that they rarely get to fully define themselves. Choices they make early on, when they are still feeling their way — ones that may have felt trivial or tangential to their mission — come to assume outsized importance. The projections placed upon them by those who either know very little about what their aims are, or who understand and oppose those aims (and so wish to paint them as negatively as possible), can come to define them more strongly than anything they do or say themselves, if they are not vigilant and unrelenting in their own self-definition.

I was thinking about this as I read the fascinating piece by my colleague Daniel Green about the recent ‘in conversation’ event between leading Blue Labour figure Shabana Mahmood and the architect of New Labour, Tony Blair.

READ MORE: ‘No racist is going to make me feel I don’t belong’: Shabana Mahmood on resilience, faith and public service

There are whole books in existence about both factions — and many more will be written. I return to my first paragraph as a warning that I too will use shorthand when defining what those movements are about: shorthand that will be informed by my own experiences, perceptions and prejudices.

In essence (or shorthand, if you will), New Labour’s belief was in using the free-market economic system they inherited from Thatcher to grow the economy and then better redistribute the results, both directly through measures such as the introduction of the minimum wage, and indirectly through using increased tax receipts (and private funding models) to inject cash into state functions such as schools and hospitals, while reforming how those institutions worked.

Their largely unspoken deal with the left was that they would, at the same time, increase the state’s support for socially liberal values through things like the Human Rights Act, the repeal of Section 28 and the introduction of civil partnerships (which may seem almost quaint now, but at the time were considered a giant leap forward for gay equality), as well as a series of pieces of legislation that first introduced the notion of hate crimes into UK law.

However, New Labour’s economic model died with the 2008 crash.But so dominant had it been that there had been no thinking done throughout the New Labour years about how to pursue a politics of redistribution in a time of scarcity. So all we had left was a model of cuts and a fight over who would introduce those more fairly, Alistair Darling or George Osborne. I would take the former any day – of course. But the orthodox terrain being fought over was very narrow.

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Into that breach stepped Blue Labour – a complete inversion of New Labour politics, but one deliberately situated on the old Labour right. This was a politics of strong statism economically, with an equally strong state distaste for social liberalism. Blue Labour came into being at the tail end of the New Labour government and was formed as a reactionary counter to it. Its name, though, almost killed it at birth because, as a piece of marketing shorthand, it is an incredibly poor way to sell the philosophy behind the organisation. It made it sound as though they wanted Labour to be more like the Tories, when economically they were arguing for a break with free market economics.

Labour from 2010 to 2019 was not about building on and moving on from the New Labour years, but about repudiating them. First this came in a gentle rebuke from the soft left in the form of Ed Miliband (who capitalised on Labour members’ understandable disgust at the Iraq War), and then from the hard left under Jeremy Corbyn, who was able to point to the ease with which the Tories (and the Lib Dems) had undone so much of the progress of the New Labour years and argue that this was the result of the shallowness of those changes.

This, in turn, simply led to a full-throated defence of the whole New Labour project from those who felt the rejection of their politics keenly. Then everyone spent about a decade distracted by Brexit and the new political and social fissures it exposed.

So when the wheel turned again and the party moved on from Corbynism, there wasn’t a new set of institutions, policy ideas and political fundamentals from the right of the party that had been developed in response to the challenges of the 21st century. As Starmer has refused to develop such an ideological framework, he has instead been trapped between the ideologies of those who surround him — two opposing camps of old New Labour hands and Blue Labour devotees. It is perhaps this incoherence that has driven many of Labour’s problems in government.

Starmer’s government is often accused of doing ‘un-Labour’ things by those on the left of the party. I don’t think that’s quite right. What they mean is that it is doing things that don’t gel with their particular vision of Labour — socially or economically. But, as they were accused frequently of in the aftermath of the Budget, they are doing things that are quite old Labour in terms of welfare and state provision. That may or may not be to the taste of all members; it may or may not go down well with the public. But it is not un-Labour. Nor, too, is being socially conservative. It’s just not the flavour of Labour in government that we have become used to or that many of us are comfortable with. 

What they aren’t doing is picking an ideology and sticking with it. That might suit Starmer’s distaste for such things, but it is driving the persistent feeling that there is a lack of coherence and consistency. It is exceptionally hard to discipline people for not singing from the same hymn sheet if you refuse to provide the words.

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If the powwow between Mahmood and Blair is the start of a reconciliation between New Labour and Blue Labour, it might just have a chance to develop into an ideology that can meet in the middle between the two and move both into a  politics that match the moment we’re in now rather than harking back to a pre-crash past. Or we might end up with the worst of both worlds. I suspect 2026 will provide an answer pretty quickly.

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