I suspect Blue Labour is just another great moving-right show
This new 'blue' ideology seems more conservative than radical, but at least Labour is acknowledging how bad things are for the party
Feeling blue … Miles Davis’s soundtrack to Labour reform?
Very shortly now, most of the population – except the class warriors of the Tory party – will take to the streets to demand the overthrow of capitalism. It won't take long. Overnight, the dignity of labour will be restored, and jobs created. Wealth will be understood to be about more than just money, communities will bond, and the world will live as one.
This is a lovely fantasy ruined by the perpetual failure of the bloomin' working class to head up this revolutionary vanguard. But, comrades, it is even worse than that. Many of "them" don't even bother voting Labour. Can you imagine that? I can, actually, as I grew up in a Tory-voting working-class household and can easily rattle off the explanations for their bad behaviour: the evil manifestations of the rightwing media, consumerism, false consciousness. Or I could say, why should people vote for a party that increasingly does not look like them or speak like them, when they can vote for people who just seem to be in charge anyway?
Finally, though, Labour is on the case. The policy vacuum is trying to suck in some ideas. Historically, oppositions may take more than five years to get in gear, but the fallout from the crash is so severe that there is a kind of desperation around at the moment. Simply hoping that growth doesn't happen, in order to prove the coalition wrong, does not constitute an opposition.
Like many, I long ago lost faith with the Labour party – and indeed the bubble in which much "leftwing debate" takes place. Nonetheless, the old question, "What is the Labour party for?" has to be answered yet again if it is to continue. When I worked at Marxism Today in the late 80s, "the project" evolved from an analysis of Thatcherism that understood the "aspirational" voter. The fruition of this was the coalition of different classes that brought in Blair. Recognising that Labour could never have been elected by appealing only to its traditional vote was key, but now something else has gone wrong. In securing the middle-class vote since 1997, nearly five million of its voters, mainly working-class, have drifted away. If the party is to survive, Labour, now more managerial and bourgeois than ever, needs to find a way to win back what it used to consider its "natural" base.
How can it resuscitate the values that brought the Labour party into being, and appeal to "ordinary people"? One way, I suppose, might be not to sneer at such people. The party's tortuous jargon – "direction of travel" etc – gets it nowhere. Some of this will be knocked out in this weekend's Labour policy review. It will be interesting to see how much influence the Blue Labour strand of thinking has had. Ed Miliband is said to be impressed by this small group, which includes James Purnell and Jon Cruddas. While I don't share much of their thinking, I do at least think they are moving Labour out of denial about how bad things really are.
In trying to claim back the word blue from all its nasty Tory connotations, we are told to think of Miles Davis or Picasso. Or how about just the blues itself? I woke up this morning and my core vote had gone?
The prime mover behind Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman, now in the Lords, is right to say it is not enough for the party to appeal to those former Labour voters who went to the Liberal Democrats – it has to go further, but it cannot do so without what Glasman calls "a plausible ideology". Of the party itself, he says, "It had no narrative of the past 13 years that could explain its lacks of transformative power." Renewal, he argues, will come from a seeming paradox. The party must be "radical and conservative". Conservative in the sense of conserving what is good, whether it be forests or families. It starts, therefore, from a set of values rooted in relationships.
This is part of an attempt to reach out to those who left Labour for the Tories. These are the people who probably read papers you don't like. But Blue Labour is saying to them, it's OK to want a sense of belonging, of decency, of stability, of not being blown around by the gusts of globalisation. Rebutting the New Labour obsession with change, cosmopolitanism and individualism, it looks to a pre-1945 tradition of guilds and co-ops. It talks of family and community and seeks to identify itself with those who feel disoriented and insecure. This is code for talking about crime and immigration. It talks up tradition, not modernity.
This refiguring of terrain is an electoral strategy that may repel the left of the party, but what else is on offer right now? Not the smashing of a system, even though that system has been shown to be so fundamentally flawed.
Much of what Glasman preaches strikes me as more conservative than radical, especially in relation to women. I fail to see how we need more socially conservative policies at a time when women, particularly single parents, are bearing the brunt of these cuts. Part of Labour's "tradition" surely includes embracing women's rights.
All the talk of reciprocity, mutuality, solidarity and civic culture could easily be Red Toryism or "big society" waffle. Except for one thing: the talk of limiting the market and the commodification of human beings. The big society discourse is, in contrast, utterly silent on the market.
Whether any of this will translate into vote-winning policies is debatable, but it is a move out of inertia. Yes, it is mired in nostalgia for the radical conservatism of William Morris or Ruskin, but other parts of the left are currently wallowing in daft strike nostalgia, so denial takes different forms. The public sector has still to take the public with it, though it is heresy to say that. The calculation may well be that the coalition does not need public sector votes anyway.
This is the context in which Miliband will seek to reconnect with the so-called conservative working class. Is this anything other than another great moving-right show? Let's see. It is at least a realisation that the third party does not have years to tell us how it is different from the governing parties. The crash seems to have produced not a desire to limit the market, but to limit our vision. And a desire for familiarity. What is meant to be a paradigm shift is an attempt to make Labour electable. It is pragmatic, not revolutionary. This aim is merely to soften the blows of capitalism with an almost spiritual faith in "relationships". It is, as Cruddas told me, an attempt to start a conversation. Some see Miliband tacking to the left, but I don't agree.
In reality, his seeking to change "the common sense of the age" is a form of cultural politics. Genuinely new and radical politics may well spring up from places we don't yet know, but what we are seeing is the return of what was repressed under New Labour: we are once more talking about class and ideology. Labour needs the working classes again as much as it needs to rewrite its own ideology to attract them. That alone makes me feel kind of blue.
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