Maria Exall asks, has Blue Labour’s “Family, Flag and Faith” moment finally arrived?
Maurice Glasman, one of the chief architects of Blue Labour, has celebrated the ascendance of Donald Trump to the White House as the death of neoliberal globalisation. Earlier this year, at the invitation of JD Vance, he attended Trump’s inauguration and declared a home for Blue Labour on the left of MAGA Square.
This move caused consternation amongst other Blue Labour supporters. But has Blue Labour’s “Family, Flag and Faith” moment finally arrived with Glasman’s revisionist interpretation? Should we be concerned about this new version of Blue Labour and the renewal of its influence within the PLP and the Labour leadership?
The short answer is yes. Some of the key causes of Glasman’s version of Blue Labour are currently promoting an echo of Reform Party priorities. They express a nostalgic view of working-class interests as inherently reactionary, are actively hostile to the rights of immigrants and ridicule anything “progressive”, including Labour’s proud record on equality and diversity. All notwithstanding the fact that asserting the British working-class are socially conservative is empirically contestable, as Jon Bloomfield has shown.
Evidence from Danny Dorling, Kim Moody, and others immediately after the Brexit Referendum in 2016 made clear it was not a working-class revolt, a revenge of the “left behinds”. Nevertheless, this narrative has stuck, and it now supports the Trumpian move within Blue Labour.
After the referendum, Maurice Glasman and fellow Blue Labour colleague Jonathan Rutherford called for “The Full Brexit,” a programme arguing a red-brown case against free movement, alongside Matthew Goodwin and Paul Embery. Glasman and Rutherford are now co-leaders of the Future of the Left project at the Tory-founded thinktank Policy Exchange.
The school of “Blue Corbynism” during Jeremy’s leadership of the Labour Party repeated the narrative of Brexit as the revenge of the “left behinds”, and this dovetailed into left populist framings of antagonisms between “the people” vs “the elite establishment”. Whether this view will hold sway within the new “Your Party” remains to be seen.
Glasman has caricatured policies on equality and diversity in our society and workplaces as a preserve of the “lanyard class” and has called for a rolling back of “DEI” initiatives. This is a contemptuous dismissal of positive action to address ongoing social injustices and the lack of civil rights for marginalised groups. It fails to address the accelerating transphobia, homophobia and misogyny in the UK and appears to justify the recent actions of Reform-led local authorities to ban support for Prides and problematise the involvement of public sector workers.
At the heart of Blue Labour’s political philosophy is the assumption that mutualism is the authentic traditional origin of the Labour Party, an assumption Jon Lawrence describes as Blue Labour’s “founding myth’. It fails to take into account the foundational importance of the collective values of industrial struggle and working-class political representation in Labour’s history and today.
Blue Labour in its revised version eschews the deeper understandings of the historical and structural issues of class and power in advanced capitalist economies that have created the current democratic crisis. Instead, its focus on nation and tradition fits rather too well with the appeal of “civilizational fascisms” of the new multi-polar geopolitical world.
The challenges to fundamental democratic norms in Glasman’s relaunch of Blue Labour are concerning. But they have always been there within Blue Labour. Its ideological roots are in the alternative post liberal narrative of modernity which rejects Enlightenment values of universality and egalitarianism.
The ethical theory of the late Alasdair MacIntyre and his particular interpretation of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) have been used to support the view that paradigms of nation and locality, belonging and place are central in our time. An inward focussed nationalism of belonging is seen as a necessary response to rootless neo-liberal globalisation.
There is another reading of CST however, that would emphasise the necessity of international co-operation and the importance of acting for the human dignity of all, especially the poorest and those suffering the violence of war. Recognising the rights of migrants and the need for global coordination for economic and environmental justice is more in line with the thinking of both Pope Francis, and now of Pope Leo.
Organising as Blue Labour has always been a way of creating space for Christian and other faith traditions within politics – not in itself a bad thing. But their promotion of faith values as monolithically socially conservative is a caricature which does not represent the complexity within faith communities. It fails to take into account the positive work done on social cohesion and inclusion, including support for asylum seekers and refugees, by faith organisations.
At a time when several new (and not so new) Labour MPs have declared themselves a Blue Labour grouping, and many of their ideas are welcomed by the current Labour leadership, we cannot afford to ignore this latest twist in the Blue Labour story.