‘Labour must change its tune to the new blues

‘An embryonic alliance between the party’s co-operative roots and its Blairite rump could be its way back to power.

‘At a recent seminar in Oxford that brought together new Labour and blue Labour, a philosopher attached to the latter quoted Virginia Woolf’s diary: “Terrible weekend. Man drowned in river. Went to Labour Party meeting.” Arguments in the fraternal party are usually boring, acrimonious or both, but the blue Labour academics and the new Labour refugees have been getting on famously. Between the two, something unusual is struggling to be born. The first fruits of these Oxford seminars will be published at the party conference in September.

‘The dialogue started with the two reluctant principals, “new” James Purnell and “blue” Jon Cruddas. Mr Purnell and Mr Cruddas both thought there were more interesting ways to split the party than old-new or Left- Right. Both thought their Government had trusted too little in popular power and too much in the central State. Both had lost patience with Gordon Brown’s belief that the road to Utopia was paved with tax credits. Since the general election defeat, the only intellectual life in the party has come from blue Labour, an intriguing set of ideas associated with Maurice Glasman, an academic and community organiser ennobled by Ed Miliband. Blue Labour attempts to revive Labour’s lost tradition of voluntary association.

‘In Glasman’s genealogy, Labour is the offspring of a father from the trade union and co-operative movements and a forbiddingly earnest mother who is forever attending Fabian summer schools in the quest for scientific techniques to alleviate the condition of the poor. The central blue Labour claim is that the marriage failed and it was mother’s fault. The victory of the technocrats meant that the dead end of nationalisation was succeeded by the illusion of state planning: 1945 was a victory from which Labour never recovered. In the process, Lord Glasman says, “social democracy has become neither social nor democratic”.

‘As someone who finds that the cap of new Labour still fits, this account seems to me bang on the money and its critique of 1997-2010 is a rebuke that must be taken seriously. The Blair Government did have a tendency to elevate manic change to a principle in its own right. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once said that change usually feels like loss and blue Labour offers a reminder that, for all the benefits of mobile capital and labour, globalisation leaves losers too.

‘Blue can also remind new that it came to power emphasising individual responsibility and the dignity of labour but that these themes vanished in a blizzard of targets and controls. New Labour people were naive, say the blue Labour people, about the managerial proficiency of the State.

‘Blue Labour has a solid economic critique. Concentrated market power can break the ties that bind communities. The 2008 crash was a crisis of corporate governance, in which power was concentrated in all the wrong places. Anyone sensitive to the volatility of capitalism would never have declared that boom and bust had been abolished. When you add in the blue criticism that new Labour regulated ineptly and spent freely, you have the basis of the confession without which Labour will struggle to be heard.

‘So, as a restraining order on new Labour, blue Labour has a lot going for it. As a prospectus in its own right, it is more despondent. Like most conservatives, blue Labour thinkers profess their love for a nation that, simultaneously, they think is going to the dogs. They are, though, prepared to confront tough questions. Blue Labour shares with David Cameron the fear that immigration leads to “discomfort and disjointedness”. In an interview with the new Labour journal Progress, Lord Glasman alleges that the Labour Government used immigration as a de facto wages policy: “Labour lied to people about the extent of immigration … and there’s been a massive rupture of trust.” He traces the rise of the English Defence League to the severed bond between Labour’s lofty idea of fairness based on need and the English people’s alternative notion that fairness means you get back what you put in.

‘It’s not yet clear where this anxiety takes them. And it’s hard to see some blue Labour economic demands – stronger worker representation and a German banking system – making it into the manifesto. But these ideas have a source with which new Labour should be comfortable – that markets are conscious creations and that the balance of reward between capital and labour must be kept under vigilant review. This is what Lord Glasman is driving at when he talks (more tongue- in-cheek than head-up-backside) about the importance of Tudor statecraft. He is describing an optimal balance between the State, market and civil society. It’s arcane but not daft.

‘The real problem for blue Labour is not that it doesn’t get the Tudors. It’s that it doesn’t get the mock-Tudors. Labour cannot win without the middle class. It is telling that Progress is devoting its next issue to blue Labour and more telling still is a piece by Peter Kellner, of the pollster YouGov, which shows how vital it is for Labour to pull in the bourgeois vote. When Harold Wilson won a majority of 100 in 1966, only two million of Labour’s 13 million votes came from the middle class. In 2010 Labour got more votes from the middle class than the working class.

‘That is why the lead partner has to come from the new Labour side. Unfortunately, the current leader has still to define himself properly. He is not old Labour; he is any old Labour. Ralph Miliband once argued that there is no parliamentary road to socialism and it may be his son’s fate to prove him right. But a new option is appearing for Mr Miliband – a synthesis between new and blue.

‘The alliance is still embryonic but it will be based on the work ethic and individual contribution rather than abstract claims of need or equality. It will be unremittingly pro-competition and a champion of small business. It will not tolerate criminals and will put conditions on the receipt of benefits. It will seek to correct poor market rewards at source, not through retrospective remedy by the State. It will disperse power in public services to local government, neighbourhoods and individuals. It will cherish people who devise their own solutions rather than being grateful for what they are given.

‘This is the message that Mr Miliband must now articulate. Raised to the leadership by all that is old and red in his party, he must be the voice of those who are new and blue. It may be that he can’t or won’t. In that case, the future will go unclaimed, for now. These are only seeds and are still to flower but one day they will, perhaps for someone as yet unheralded.’

This article was originally published in the Times

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