There has been renewed attention on Blue Labour in recent weeks. We wanted to take the opportunity to clarify why we exist and what we believe.
The Labour party was established to represent working class people in parliament. It did not begin life as a liberal party or a progressive party, but a party of, by and for working people. The clue was in the name. But by embracing globalisation, Labour refashioned itself as a progressive party cut adrift from the large majority of the working class. The liberal consensus is collapsing and Labour risks being left in the previous era.
Blue Labour began life in 2011 but we are the inheritors of traditions deep within the history of the left. Ours is not a utilitarian or a legalistic tradition, and our challenge to liberal economics is about fraternity as much as redistribution. Our socialism is about the work that we do and the people and places that we love, about the things we wish to conserve as well as those we want to change.
The Blue in Blue Labour represents our disenchantment with the progressive politics of the past few decades. Things do not always get better. In recent years it has sometimes felt as though Britain is coming apart at the seams. The basics of life are increasingly out of reach. Infrastructure is crumbling or non-existent and our town centres lie neglected. Energy is expensive and we do not produce nearly enough of it. Rent and house prices are eye-watering.
What is going on? Politicians abandoned posterity and treated our national assets like an auction sale. Utilities were privatised, state capacity outsourced and industry offshored. The courts assumed ever more power and decision-making was transferred from the arena of democratic politics to distant bureaucrats and judges.
Lacking political vision, politicians turned instead to mass immigration, the easiest lever to pull. Since Blue Labour first warned that Labour’s embrace of mass immigration was a historic mistake that would hurt working class communities, its level has quintupled. No one now can justify the open borders experiment the Conservatives ran in the interests of global capital.
The British state remains the best tool we have to control global capital and deliver for working class communities. And democratic politics remains the best tool for negotiating a common good in our country. That is why we value sovereignty and why we defend the nation state.
Above all, 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.