A spectre is haunting the Labour party — the spectre of Blue Labour.
Every now and then, progressives come for us. On social media, in hastily assembled blogs and academic papers, in newspaper columns and in parliamentary soirees. It tends to happen after progressives have a rare encounter with the working class, which usually doesn’t go very well. After Brexit, for example, or the 2019 general election.
They call us dog-whistling xenophobes, miserable nostalgics who hate the modern world, and say that for us the working class consists of a man down the pit and a woman chained to the kitchen. That’s the mild stuff. Perhaps it is for the best: we believe in the common good and reconciling estranged interests, and mudslinging is a pastime that allows Blairites and Corbynites to bury the hatchet. Liberal conservatives can get in on the act too.
That there is no substance to these attacks is beside the point. They do not come from a genuine understanding of the politics of Blue Labour, nor of our political economy. Instead, they are conjured from deep within. We act as a depository for all things murky and dark and backwards that lurk in the progressive psyche. There are the technicolour sunlit uplands – open, global and diverse – and then there is us.
Some of these attacks are cynical. Those making them know that what they say is untrue but they say it anyway. Their political project – whether New Labour or Corbynism – is on its last legs and they are hurting and lashing out. Blue Labour fulfils an important psychological function in this regard.
But we want to take the opportunity to clarify things for those who are not cynical. The working class – those who are treated as dispensable by the current dispensation but who are right now proving that their labour is not – are not an ethnic group. We value and celebrate love and relationships above all else, regardless of sexuality. We have never had a bone to pick with immigrants. Our origins lie in organising in immigrant and religious communities for the Living Wage, long before political parties took an interest in the idea. Maurice Glasman continues to work in the Middle East with Kurdish Sunni Muslims and with Shi’a during the Arba’een.
We do, however, distinguish between internationalism and globalisation. And we object to liberal globalisation and the imposition of capitalism by statute law in the form of the ‘four freedoms’ – of labour, goods, services and capital – that define the European Union. By embracing this form of anti-politics, Labour has refashioned itself as a progressive party cut adrift from the large majority of the working class who it was established to represent.
Marx wrote that with the emergence of capitalism, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” We share Marx’s view of capitalism. Far from being a bulwark of traditionalism, it erodes the social ties that bind us together. He saw this as a necessary staging post on the way to communism, however, and it is here that we part ways with him.
Blue Labour believes in the need to retrieve meaning and dignity from a political and economic system that would deprive all of us, and particularly the poor, of such things. The role of the labour movement is to constrain capitalism’s tendency to commodify human beings and nature, to improve the lot of the working class, and to rebuild a common good in our culture. This is what Blue Labour is for.