Blue Labour and the Working Class

With another group of (unnamed) Labour MPs urging Keir Starmer to "get tough" with immigration, it seems the party is on a doomist trajectory. Doomist because moving right, as any honest observer of political history will tell you, only legitimates right wing talking points and benefit extreme right wing parties at the expense of the centre left. In our case, Reform, which is now enjoying its first polling lead since its Brexit Party incarnation topped the surveys nearly six summers ago. But this talk has been around for a while, and so it was only a matter of time before Blue Labour made its reappearance.

Writing at the weekend, Sienna Rodgers and Tom Scotson have profiled its second coming. We learn that among its neophyte adherents are Dan Carden, formerly of the Socialist Campaign Group, and now a "left wing" supporter of the project. He's attracted to Blue Labour because of the importance it attaches to community and the place of working class institutions within it, such as trade unions. Jonathan Hinder, the Westminster group's room booking monitor says he wants to see "bold, left-wing economic policies", lower immigration, and an end to "divisive identity politics". His counterpart Jonathan Brash from Hartlepool more or less says the same thing, saying on crime and punishment and immigration he's "right-of-centre". But again, he wants "big government" and more intervention to help working class people.

How have these chaps stood up for our class during this parliament so far? They refrained from rebelling over the child benefit cap, nor could they even bring themselves to sign an Early Day Motion on the subject. No doubt they've sagely nodded along to older people on their doorsteps moaning about immigration. But they were less inclined to hear their views on scrapping the Winter Fuel Allowance. Precisely none of our champions of the working class so much as abstained.

Two of them are not so reticent about stirring up division. Hinder, for example, has made his name known as a transphobe. And David Smith, the fourth in the new Blue Labour quartet, got himself in the papers for playing beggar-thy-neighbour politics with Scotland. This is not down to individual foibles, but is a characteristic of Blue Labour behaviour. When its leading light Jon Cruddas was in the Commons, for all his "economic radicalism" he was hardly known as a doughty defender of trade unions or sticking up for working class people. Though apprenticed to him at one point was Morgan McSweeney who, along with Keir Starmer, have done more to gut the Labour Party of working class representation and working class politics than Tony Blair ever managed. The same can be said of Maurice Glasman, the "founder", who had absolutely nothing to say about the economic radicalism of the Corbyn years (or much else for that matter), only to resurface with a 2022 book on Blue Labour that was almost as thin as the ideas it contained.

It doesn't matter how many words Blue Labour has crafted, their record says a great deal more. Glasman was at Trump's inauguraton a couple of weeks ago hobbing and nobbing with GOP luminaries. The well-known Twitter troll Paul Embery always had more time for attacking anti-racist, anti-sexist, and environmental initiatives instead of promoting the solidarity you'd have thought would come naturally to a trade union official. The examples are legion. At best, Blue Labour could be described as a manifestation of negative working class politics, but it's worse than that. It's telling that Blue Labour's origin as a semi-coherent body of thought emerged ... from a series of seminars involving academics, politicians, and policy wonks. As relayed in Rowenna Davis's semi-official history, Tangled Up in Blue. Far from being an expression of working class politics, Blue Labour is based on a simulacrum of what it means to be working class. A middle class idea of the lower orders as blunt and bigoted. Something that reflects their own prejudices.

Blue Labour is an effort at trying to construct an identity politics of our class as a subaltern class. It gains ground in elite circles because it has enough truthiness to them, even though the realities of class today are far different from their narrow imaginings. But there's more to it than prejudice. There is the political utility. As a party of the establishment, Labour has to mobilise a loyal constituency for elections. But the danger of being a party whose roots are in the workers' movement is this might go too far and politicise workers as independent political actors conscious and capable of acting in their own interests. Hence one reason why Corbynism had to be shut down - it pushed at the limits of Labourism and its traditional role as the political cap on and manager of the labour movement. Starmerism response to this problem is interpellating its support as "working people", a political fiction they want voters to fit into. A signal they would respond to with a "yes, that's me" but not mobilising them beyond that because any other political content is evacuated. Blue Labour's SW1 caricature of the working class is an effort at the same. It pretends salt-of-the-earth authenticity and radicalism, while appropriating a conservative politics of division to arrest solidarity and hamper the consciousness of collective class interests. It's not for nothing that women, ethnic and sexual minorities are absent from their cynically drawn picture of class. However, the reason why Blue Labour hasn't taken off - yet - is because its crudity if off-putting to other sections of the party, and it's surplus to requirements right now.

That might not always be the case, but one thing can be sure of. The greater Labour invests in a Blue Labour strategy, the less successful they will be and the faster they bury their chances of winning the next election.

Image Credit