The ‘big society’ therefore belongs to the Labour party; David Cameron and the Conservative Party are uninvited guests.

There is of course an ideological confusion at the heart of blue Labour. The campaign seeks to rediscover the value of tradition and associative bonds, and create a politics of virtue; it associates this agenda with conservatism, which is why argument that Labour must become more conservative is in its DNA.

Yet as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, this understanding omits conservatism’s quintessential commitment to an unequal social order. Conservatism indeed recognises and champions the kind of virtue that blue Labour believes has been lost – this is key to the big society narrative, despite the fact that Glasman thinks ‘there is nothing conservative about this government’ – but also upholds that a virtuous social order can only be maintained by authoritative leadership. Ultimately this must come from a concentration of property and wealth among those best equipped to lead.

Conservatives will happily embrace novelty if it reinforces a natural, unequal order. Conservatives defend inequality in terms of reward as well as order (which is perhaps what has thrown Blue Labour). But while Margaret Thatcher’s New Right was the fullest expression of this sentiment within the conservative tradition, it was not the first.

This does not mean blue Labour has nothing to teach today’s Labour party – far from it. Glasman et al are justified in my opinion to argue that a profound acceptance of globalisation encouraged New Labour leaders to take a neoliberal approach to society and the economy that often undermined the aspects of life that we value the most. The campaign also contains a powerful depiction of a Labour party disconnected in organisational terms from the day-to-day realities of its traditional supporters among the working class, and therefore in breach of its duty to engender and embody democracy.

Blue Labour has very little, however, to say about the state. A critique of New Labour’s statecraft is central to the campaign:

‘The withdrawal by New Labour from the economy led to a manic embrace of the state. New Labour’s public sector reforms were almost Maoist in their conception of year zero managerial restructuring.’

For blue Labour, New Labour treated individuals as commodities, and their relationships with the state as purely transactional. The state became subservient to the economy as benefits were redesigned to supplement low wages and grease ‘inclusion’ in the global economy rather than support family and community life. And it did not matter how public services were delivered as long as outcomes reflected value-for-money.

Whether one agrees with this view of New Labour, the problem is that blue Labour offers no alternative. Glasman seems not to appreciate New Labour’s tortured relationship with the state. It may have halted the New Right’s emasculation of the state in some ways, but fundamentally accepted the state’s delegitimisation as a purposive actor.

Blue Labour actually puts the final nail in the coffin of the state by placing faith primarily in communities as the last line of defence against the market, and leaving the question of the state’s function unanswered. Glasman makes a virtue of the fact that the living wage campaign is not fixated on legal changes but rather on shaming private firms to transform their practices voluntarily. This is as politically naïve as it is intellectually frustrating. Labour needs a view, for instance, on what happens to public services in age of fiscal austerity. It needs the machinery of the state to democratise the economy in the way envisaged by blue Labour (for instance, creating regional banks), and while the living wage model is inspirational it is also limited, and Labour needs the state to adjudicate on equality, however this is conceived. 

Photo: Christine Vaufrey