Blue Labour welcomes political debate. The journal Political Quarterly has been promoting an essay by Jon Bloomfield in which he explains the ‘fallacies of Blue Labour’ and his progressive alternative to them. Here’s a response to it.

Political debate has been reduced to name calling, so Bloomfield begins his story of Blue Labour by letting the reader know where to place it on the axis of good and evil. Authoritarian nationalism is rising across the world and its toxins have spread into British politics. Without irony he points his finger at Blue Labour trade unionist Paul Embery who he infers is anti-semitic because he tweeted the words ‘rootless, cosmopolitan’.* And Embery writes for Unherd which Bloomfield describes as a ‘Conservative website’. Embery, he condescendingly says is, ‘lauded’ by Blue Labour intellectuals, one of whom is Adrian Pabst. And Pabst retweeted Douglas Murray’s support of Embery, and Bloomfield calls Murray ‘anti-Muslim’.

So in two tweets Bloomfield establishes the evidence for his political thesis: Blue Labour and the hard core right are linked by ‘accelerating common perspectives’. What these are he does not say. It is not necessary for a person to hold the opinions Bloomfield objects to. A person is condemned for being associated with someone whom he thinks does have them. And so by insinuation he appears to cast Blue Labour as uniquely both anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim. Having established his Manichean worldview, he proceeds with his story by going back to the past.

New Labour and its Third Way European followers failed to understand the economics of modern capitalism. Social Democrats across the EU have been wedded to the ordo-liberal orthodoxies of the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact. Only recently have there been signs of change on the left. But these changes have come too late to prevent the nationalist right capitalising on popular discontent. Trump, Farage, Orban, Le Pen, and Salvini all share the same core story of ‘patriots versus globalists’; a simple binary choice between neo-liberal hyper-globalisation and patriotic nationalism. What is surprising says Bloomfield is that influential voices across the centre and left of politics have accepted what he describes as ‘this far right analysis’.

Within Labour’s ranks Bloomfield accuses ‘newly enobled Maurice Glasman’ of giving prominence to ‘this nationalist framework’. What is his evidence that Blue Labour promotes a ‘far right analysis’? In an Observer interview in 2011 Maurice Glasman defined the Labour politics he stood for as: ‘a unique and paradoxical tradition that strengthens liberty and democracy, that combines faith and citizenship, patriotism and internationalism and is, at its best, radical and conservative.’ But Bloomfield is not to be put off. He goes on to inform the reader that Jonathan Rutherford declared that ‘the future of socialism is conservative’. This is enough to confirm his belief that Blue Labour concentrated on its own variant of a culture war by giving primacy to cultural and national identity rather than the economic or social.

While the initial interest in Blue Labour within Labour eventually waned, Brexit with its focus on national sovereignty has given it a new vigour and a purchase stretching well beyond Labour’s ranks. Bloomfield casts his net more widely to incorporate David Goodhart who he entirely wrongly claims provides the bedrock of post-Brexit Blue Labour thinking. Paul Collier’s book The Future of Capitalism is dismissed for arguing that the biggest social rifts in society are between the highly educated and the less educated, a now common and uncontroversial argument. Matthew Goodwin is introduced as an initial critic of UKIP who has ‘gone native’. While the academic Eric Kaufmann provides some intellectual heft.

Bloomfield claims that all these individuals belong to the same Blue Labour tendency. None has ever identified himself in this way, and so it is beholden upon Bloomfield to back up his assertion with some evidence. What political philosophy or set of policies do they hold in common? He can’t say, except that they all get a sympathetic hearing in the ‘increasingly nationalist’ New Statesman.

Where did Bloomfield make up his story? His list of references offers no clues. Any quick online research of Blue Labour’s founding years would demonstrate that it evolved out of Labour political traditions. It had very little to say about nationalism. Patriotism is not nationalism; raising the issue of immigration policy is not racism. If he thinks otherwise he should say so and explain what he means. Nationalism played no part in shaping Blue Labour’s political philosophy which owes to Aristotle, community organising, Catholic Social teaching and ethical socialism.

Bloomfield fails to recognise that Blue Labour formed its thinking wholly independent of the populist nationalism taking shape on the continent. Its commitment to the democratic practice of the common good which brings together estranged interests is diametrically opposite to the intransigent ‘them’ against ‘us’ of a populism that stokes hostility between migrants and natives whatever the ethnicity of either. Its approach to political economy is completely counter to the often libertarian, free market economics of continental populist parties.

The fundamental problem with Bloomfield’s essay is that he doesn’t actually understand what Blue Labour is and so is unable to construct a critique of it. This however does not prevent him traducing individuals and passing his opinion on its flaws. The first of which is class.

He adopts a post-Fordist economic analysis. The traditional working class no longer dominates the world of work. The new workforce is fragmented and there is a new geographically uneven development of work as higher skilled jobs and managerial, technical and professional workers are concentrated in the larger metropolitan cities with far fewer in older industrial areas.

Bloomfield drops this economistic approach and inexplicably introduces David Goodhart’s sociological arguments about ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’. The latter is attributed to the working class, the former to the professional classes. Blue Labour he claims ignores what he calls the central class division and the rapidly evolving nature of the working class for this artificial Somewhere/Anywhere divide. He believes the purpose of this analysis is not to further understanding of social change. Rather it allows Blue Labour to demonstrate that there is an unbridgeable gap between the working classes and professional classes which gives it the excuse to direct ‘visceral bile and venom’ at the ‘metropolitan elite’.

Bloomfield offers no analysis of class, nor does he reference anything that Blue Labour has written on the subject. He passes no view on the actually existing cultural class conflict dividing the country, nor on its causes. There is plenty to draw on, for example from Michael Lind in the States and Thomas Piketty in France, that can help to explain the changing class cultural politics of democratic capitalist countries. He engages with none of the arguments or evidence. He does not cite the extensive economic analyses of the geographical distribution of capital and class across the UK. He offers no references to evidence the ‘rapidly evolving nature of the working class’ and what this means. Does he mean for example Claire Ainsley’s analysis of a new working class or something else?

Bloomfield’s second Blue Labour flaw is the economy and the way in which its writers ignore, disregard or diminish the realities of a globalising world. Instead the UK — or sometimes England — is deemed to stand above and apart. He appears to suggest that Blue Labour advocates a ‘stand-alone economic strategy within one country’.

It’s true that some in Blue Labour argue for the reconstitution of a national economy in the wake of the country’s strategic economic assets being sold off to foreign owners. It is an approach influenced by the political economy of Karl Polanyi and the ideas of economist Dani Rodrik for new international norms that ‘reconstitute domestic social contracts’. David Edgerton, no Blue Labourite, puts it very well in the New Statesman:

“While both liberals and Marxists argue that the nationality of capitalism does not matter, there is a need to rethink the case for a national capitalism in this age of economic inequality, political fracture and geopolitical uncertainty. If nothing else, by embedding the economy more deeply into the nation and the daily lives of its citizens, and by directing itself towards national purposes and having a greater stake in developing national skills and innovations, a national capitalism would underline and reinforce that lost idea of the common good.”

But Bloomfield’s superficial argument is a travesty of the kind of economics developed over the last ten years in numerous articles, papers and seminars both within Blue Labour and in partnership with Labour MPs. From 2009 onward Blue Labour argued for putting institutions at the heart of a new political economy in order to mediate the power of capital and to limit the commodification of society. Establishing vocational education was necessary for revitalising productivity and giving back dignity and status to work and workers. Putting workers on boards is a means to redress the power of management within firms. Developing regional banking is a means of recapitalising the regions starved of investment. Promoting trade unionism will increase labours share of national income and reduce inequality. He appears entirely ignorant of it all.

His third Blue Labour flaw is its attitude toward sex and family. He claims Blue Labour asserts that there is an essential unchanging bedrock of common sense and patriotic values at the core of the working class’. Nobody in Blue Labour argues this kind of ahistorical, un-sociological romanticism. Bloomfield then cites in support of his argument the 2011 census that shows the rapid rise in people cohabiting and the numbers of lone parent households. He attributes this to trends towards greater variety of family forms, people living together outside marriage, more divorce, separation and single parent households.

What is driving these trends? Bloomfield accepts them at face value as unalloyed social goods. But what are the pressures on family life and relationships and what are the material and emotional consequences of these trends on people’s lives?

In 2004 the Nuffield Foundation sounded the alarm about mental health. One in ten children had a mental illness. No-one understood the cause except that it might relate to ‘social change’. Today one in nine children in England now suffer a mental illness. Those most at risk are children in the poorest fifth of families. Up to 1 in 5 in display symptoms of mental illness, in comparison to 1 in 20 children in the richest homes. This inequality is getting worse.

For those children most affected, the social bonds that once tied their families into society have been either weakened or have disappeared. The loss of skilled jobs, the rise of precarious, poorly paid work, and the stagnation of wages have created economic insecurity. The decimation of unions in the private sector and the loss of traditions of solidarity and mutual self-help have left families unprotected and isolated. The churches are empty and religion no longer provides them with collective hope and sustenance.

If the stability of their family breaks down, children absorb the stress, fear and insecurity. This is the experience of many in low income families where 48 per cent of 0–5 years olds do not live with both their birth parents. This proportion of children rises to 65 per cent by the time they are sixteen. In comparison only 16 per cent of 0–5 year olds in middle and upper income families do not live with both their birth parents. This proportion rises to 39 per cent by the time they are sixteen.

Is this an accurate and fair analysis or is it wrong? Has the liberal market settlement of the last forty years undermined family life and damaged children’s mental health? Is marriage which statistically leads to more secure partnerships over the longer term a social justice issue? These are questions to be debated, but Bloomfield believes that asking them is simply ‘turning the clock back’.

His final Blue Labour flaw is race and migration, a topic on which Blue Labour he says has been cautious, wanting to avoid being accused of pandering to racism. Blue Labour he says is taking a political trend into ‘very dangerous territory’. What does he mean? He picks two right wing thinkers Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray and wrongly and malignly accuses them of belonging to the white nationalist right, inferring that they believe British citizenship is defined by ethnicity. Neither take this view. Where have either argued it? Bloomfield doesn’t say, but he then accuses Paul Collier of following the same path and Matthew Goodwin as heading in the same direction.

Bloomfield moves on to Brexit and accuses Blue Labour individuals who support the Full Brexit manifesto which calls for a ‘genuinely internationalist and democratic politics of national sovereignty’ of playing into the hands of the hard right. He explains his extraordinary view that any talk of national sovereignty encourages the dangers of nationalism. But a national sovereignty is essential for our constitutional democracy and the social order. It is the source in time and place of the agency that constitutes our nation based political system. What is Bloomfield talking about?

Bloomfield now concentrates on his progressive alternative to Blue Labour. The first step is to repudiate the philosophy of hyper-globalisation. The left cannot retreat to nationalist boltholes but must articulate alternative models of globalisation. Second, the left has to weave together alliances which address the needs of the twenty-first century workforce. Principally this appears to mean an economic policy promoting a new relationship with nature, and policies for those in the most precarious positions in the labour market. Third, the social gains of the last half century cannot be rolled back and the outright reactionary agenda of faith, flag and family must be resisted, although who is advancing this position he doesn’t say. And fourth, progressives should advance a positive vison of migration because there is no going back to the mono-cultural world of the 1950s. Finally, progressives should bring this coalition together united by the idea of ‘think global, act local’.

That’s it. Bloomfield has thin gruel to offer as an alternative to Blue Labour. The world is changing and it is not going the liberal progressive way. The future will be economically radical and socially more conservative. Globalisation is going through a period of retrenchment and there will likely be a turn to improving the nation state as the best means of managing the disruptive forces of globalisation and furthering democracy in the interests of its citizens. This includes our own multinational United Kingdom. In his enthusiasm to traduce individuals and discredit Blue Labour he reveals a progressive politics that has run out of steam. It has been reduced to dogmas and it has been left behind.

*For more on Paul Embery’s tweet and the left and anti-semitism see Maurice Glasman’s essay in the New Statesman, ‘No Direction Home the Tragedy of the Jewish Left’, 22 May, 2019