Labourism and Social Conservatism

"Social conservatism has always been part of Labour!", so wrote Connor Naismith last week. Seeing that Labour suffered humiliation in Manchester, he argues that there are "voices" who are laying the blame for the defeat on Blue Labour. "Traditional values", they say, need junking if Labour is going to dust itself off and return to winning ways. As a self-identifying supporter of this trend, Naismith has gone into print to defend it.

There are two parts to his argument. Firstly, social conservatism is embedded in Labourism. The party's forward march and its reformist zeal was driven by the need to protect what he calls "the moral economy". That is taking home a wage enough for a family to live on, the sustenance of "communal discipline" (i.e. solidarity), and localism. Social conservatism is social glue, and every radical programme needs that if it's going to succeed. Speaking of the 1945 Labour government, he says "They built the NHS and the welfare state not to dismantle the British way of life, but to fortify it. They were radical in their means because they were conservative in their ends: the health, dignity, and stability of British families."

Therefore, purging social conservatism is like amputating a limb. Labour and Labourism are radical because they are conservative. Social conservatism respects people where they are, imbues places with meaning, and gives relationships substance. It is a rooted politics based in the every day, and one aimed at preserving what is good while making things better. Labour would be foolish to abandon anyone who aspires to such.

The second part of his argument is why Labour in such a state. Naismith says that Labour has abandoned its vote. The breaking of the so-called red wall " ... was because gradually, over decades, the party’s centre of gravity shifted toward a metropolitan liberalism that felt increasingly judgemental of parts of the tradition that founded it." What does this actually mean? In British politics discourse the term "metropolitan liberalism" has distinct connotations. It's right wing shorthand for "things we don't like", such as equal rights and affording racial and sexual minorities recognition and respect. I don't know how long Naismith's been in Labour for, but in my nine years of knocking on doors in Stoke-on-Trent, from the dog days of Gordon Brown to Jeremy Corbyn's Waterloo, no one told me they weren't voting Labour because it supported gay rights. Or offered help to the disabled. What I got instead was a lot of "you're all the same", you "don't listen", some anti-immigration bile, and even an occasional "you've abandoned the working class". For much of the previous 30 years, that last comment was absolutely right. Who oversaw a greater decline of manufacturing than Thatcher? Tony Blair. Who did nothing to enhance collective rights in the workplace? Tony Blair. Who continued the undermining of sate institutions by subjecting them to the market? You get the idea. This was not thanks to metropolitan arrogance, though there was plenty of that around, rather it was because New Labour was open about its contempt for the labour movement, its aspirations, and presented itself as a reliable custodian of British capitalism and manager of its class relations - for capital's benefit. And when this anti-working class agenda was challenged by Corbyn's leadership, we know what happened.

Naismith's class-blind history aside, he really gives social conservatism too much credit. When we look at the toerags and fools who present themselves as Blue Labour, it's telling that this club are a) middle class, b) white men, and c) have absolutely no standing or roots in the wider labour movement. Read Maurice Glasman - I have - and it's obvious that the "economic radicalism" that is supposedly the flip side of this very, very moral politics is merely a rhetorical nod. A never-articulated alibi for a miserable dismalism of scapegoating, and stop-the-world fogeyness. If only Blue Labour was a careful plea to understand the interests of our class, its (long-declining) culture of collectivism, and putting that at the heart of policy making and the vision for a better future. Instead, what we have had under Keir Starmer is a racist effort to out-Reform Reform, the rolling back of trans rights, and until recently a noted reticence to take on bigotry. Very middle class Labour MPs and well-heeled friendly journalists defended all this because this was their idea of what social conservatism was, and they were merely giving voice to values shared by the salt-of-the-earth. Meanwhile, polling of working age Britons has found this ventriloquism is a poor impression of what they say and think. The Labour working class base was imploding because other parties were actually speaking to their interests and their actual values. It was them talking the language of respect and reciprocity, while Labour imitated the spite, the division, and the small mindedness of their opponents on the extreme right.

Thirdly, Naismith's definition of social conservatism is empty to the point of meaninglessness. If Naismith is impressed by the class cultures of old, what policies are he and his party following to promote a new collectivism appropriate to the actually existing working class? The answer to that, of course, is very little. Instead, along with racist and transphobic divide-and-rule politics, we've seen the same commitment to labour market flexibility, of letting capital run riot in the NHS, and the handing of a veto to business over crucial aspects of their much trumpeted, and much watered-down Employment Rights Act. The danger, the existential threat to Labour lies not in the call for the party to be less racist and binning off Blue Labour, but in its refusal to act as the political fulcrum of the class that made it. And this is why that class is now turning elsewhere.