The urgent political question facing our party today is the renewal of New Labour and, with it, the construction of a credible political offer for 2015. In that process, Labour’s modernisers should look at new ideas, both inside and outside the Labour party. But blue Labour is grounded in the politics of fantasy. Rather than forming the basis of a new winning coalition, it would ally the party with forces that are in permanent decline. And, most importantly, it is grounded not in a sense of progressive optimism that our best days lie ahead, but in a pessimistic sense that the most the party can offer is a defence of yesterday.
We lost in the 1980s in part because we lacked a political programme that engaged with the great problems facing the nation. By contrast, New Labour won three elections because it had a programme that was anchored in the concerns of the British people and offered realistic policy solutions to them. The mistake of blue Labour is to disinter a political message from a mythical past, and to offer no real solutions, beyond a healthy dose of platitudes and a good hard blow on the dog whistle.
The forces that have changed traditional communities and patterns of living – technological development, demographic change, and globalisation – are beyond our control. What realistic plan for resisting these forces does blue Labour offer? Demand that the government fund only scientific research that would protect existing jobs and communities? Withdraw from the European Union and erect barriers to free trade? These ideas quite rightly seem wildly extreme, but they are the actions the party would have to take if it were genuinely to enact blue Labour’s agenda on the economy and immigration. Otherwise it would remain simply an appeal to nostalgia.
Even assuming we were willing to back up the language of blue Labour with hard policy, there is no viable electoral coalition for this project. The very people that blue Labour would most appeal to have been in demographic decline since the war. This decline was one of the biggest reasons that Labour went for 31 years without winning a parliamentary majority. It was only when it offered a new message around a new electoral coalition that we were able to win. Our share of the vote among C2s dropped at the last election, but focusing on them alone will not be enough to win the next election. There is no future for the Labour party as a party of government if it is a party of a sectional interest. Whether that interest is the liberal middle classes or the white working classes, only a coalition that spans class and geography will be enough.
But more fatal than its lack of policy prescriptions or the absence of a viable coalition for the winning of power is blue Labour’s profound sense of pessimism and conservatism. New Labour was more than an acceptance of the importance of a market economy, and more than the construction of an electoral coalition. It was about an optimistic sense that through the harnessing of these forces, a new and better world could be built. That sense of optimism underpinned not only our electoral success, but affirmed our values. As progressives, our defining characteristic is a conviction that a better world is possible for our children and for our children’s children. The great mistake of blue Labour is the sense that perhaps it would be better if people kept their place, and that the best we can pass on to the next generation is the world as we find it.
During the leadership campaign, David Miliband reminded us that ‘we can learn from the past, but we can’t live in it.’ The mistakes, as well as the successes, of our past should influence the re-creation of New Labour. But a desire to live in the past should not dominate our offer for the future. And that’s precisely what blue Labour offers.
The problem with this analysis of the ‘Blue Labour’ is that it is 1. rooted in a London-centric, metropolitan view of the country 2. rooted in the past itself – it is the argument of the necessity of New Labour not what is needed now. 3. assumes New Labour won 3 elections on its own merits To take each of these 1. outside of London/the south-east traditional Labour voters still exist, sometimes in large numbers; these people are being drawn away from Labour because Labour doesn’t speak to them any more. To allow this drain to continue unchecked would be madness 2. in one sense these voters may be in decline but I would argue that the issues that gave Labour their appeal to them are actually starting to affect an even broader section of the population: the downside of globalisation, i.e. the individualisation of risk. Many parts of the middle classes are now facing the same kind of issues that used to be working class issues – job insecurity, income squeeze, lack of social mobility. New Labour exacerbated some of these issues and to argue that New Labour policies can solve them is nonsense. 3. New Labour won the 1997 election, at least won its landslide, because it did appeal to people and had clear policies which addressed their concerns. It is more arguable that this was the case in 2001 and 2005 given the lack of an effective opposition and an electoral system which over-rewarded Labour support. I am not necessarily convinced that ‘Blue Labour’ is the answer but it is examining some of the issues that the Labour party needs to consider as part of its renewal and to dismiss it as looking back at a mythical past misses its point. And I agree that Labour party renewal must harness an optimistic view of the future in which a better world can be achieved – but this can only be done if it is anchored in people’s concerns. Most worryingly, you say “The forces that have changed traditional communities and patterns of living – technological development, demographic change, and globalisation – are beyond our control.” But these are the very issues that do concern people and to wring our hands and say a Labour government has no response will make Labour irrelevant. Blue Labour is at least trying to engage with these concerns and any renewal of Labour will be the better for this engagement.
Be good this if so-called blue labour actually existed. The phrase was dreamed up a few years ago on membersnet by a few who wanted New Labour dead and buried in favour of ‘Old Labour’, in the naive belief that going backwards would actually make us more favourable to the electorate. That opinion was a stupid as any belief not understanding why we lost and wanting it putting it right being interpreted as Blue Labour
Well when you look at New labour, they built sod all social housing, they had a good go at getting the private sector into the NHS, we went to two wars, and then the leader pissed off to make his millions. The sad fact is all the disabled and the sick are cheats, and should be working, maybe in nice new holiday camps which says work pays. We have a country which now has more people from the Asian continent and we have less houses to rent at affordable prices, Brown kicked income support into the grass. The difference now between labour and the Tories is the personalities of the leader, one is even going to have an operation to solve his posh voice, says a lot for labour.
For me, “Blue Labour”, or the Labour party more generally, will be most successful it can balance choice and opportunity and the idea that people make their own decisions with fuller recognition of the inequalities of choice and opportunity and the constraints some face more than others, and what you do about that. Consider school choice. It is much better that parents/children decide which school they’d like to go to and not automatically be assigned to the nearest (which creates selection by mortgage and poses the real risk of ‘sink schools’). However, it is also the case that some people are better placed to make the choices they really want more than others – whether that be because of where they live, a better understanding of the allocation process, greater mobility, or whatever. The fact that about 90% of pupils are assigned to their first choice school is not a testimony to people getting what they want. It is a suspiciously high number that suggests people are actually acting pragmatically under constrained circumstances. For people to have much freer choice, there would need to be a greater surplus of (potentially unfilled) school places but that costs more and requires something more sophisticated than the current per pupil based funding model. Of course, New Labour was aware of the inequalities of opportunity but left a strange impression of two contradictory positions, viz. it didn’t care that much and/or it would resort to heavy-handed, top-down and authoritarian measures to try and regulate / impose targets. Ultimately it was left looking controlling, domineering and lacking trust in the way professionals do their jobs. To appeal to traditional notions of social justice and fairness whilst at the same time allowing for opportunity and choice (not telling people what to do) that don’t themselves generate inequalities is a delicate balance. New Labour did well on the choice side but talked too little about the problems and limitations of it.