After last week’s seismic local elections, the conversion of formerly Labour strongholds to the Reform camp has been brought to light. Labour mandarins and new MPs from the 2024 intake are in panic mode concocting ways to stem the hemorrhage of public support. Many will have two words on their lips: Blue Labour.
Blue Labour refers to a political campaign group founded in 2009, but it’s also a broader philosophy of conservative socialism. It melds economic socialism with socially conservative values and aesthetics, rejecting “utilitarian moralism and liberal economics”. Here, capitalism is viewed as exploitative, commodifying social interaction, whilst secular progressivism erodes the value that people reap from faith, community and family.
Blue Labour is a distinctly backwards-facing ideology. Dr. Richard Johnson calls it “melancholic”. Despite rejecting the label “reactionary”, Jonathan Rutherford, a prominent thinker in the movement, characterises it as a “revolt against change”. Lord Glasman, co-founder of the eponymous 2009 campaign group and their alleged Wang Huning equivalent, makes this nostalgia explicit: “[t]he Labour Party’s future lies in reclaiming its inheritance. Our tradition is our future”.
Which inheritance is Glasman mourning? The conservative socialism of 1920–30s Labour. A Labour Party discontented with society centred around “negative freedoms, and passive rights (like property)” and “19th and early 20th century Whig and Gladstonian liberalism”. Not that he’s a Disraeli fan, either…
Glasman yearns for the messianic statism of R. H. Tawney, George Lansbury and John Wheatley, the economic policies of whom were characterised by the Labour Party pamphlet For Socialism and Peace (1934). Such positions include opposition to “the harsh administration of the Means Test” and “a society based on private ownership”. In their place? State-directed industrial strategy, rent controls and the nationalisation of all major industries from coal to water and everything in-between. These were economic centralisers with holier-than-thou motivations.
Conservative socialism withered throughout the 20th century. But, like Frankenstein’s monster, the electric success of Reform seems to have shocked Blue Labour’s corpse back to life. Take a look at Louise Haigh’s response to the teal threat: “raise taxes fight off Nigel Farage”. The Blue Labour parliamentary caucus has a double-digit number of MPs, and seems to be growing. One such member — Jonathan Hinder — has called for the renationalisation of steel since April.
The Blue Labour agenda goes much further than merely “reducing immigration”, which the Party must clearly do if it’s serious about winning a second term. Blue Labourites promote social conservatism. Dan Carden, founder of the Blue Labour parliamentary caucus, is on the record opposing “progressive politics” for “challeng[ing] the value of long-standing institutions, from trade unions to churches”.
Social conservatism is a slippery slope, and not a very popular one. Britons may oppose mass migration and the excesses of the social justice movement but we are, by and large, liberals. Britons are good enough at joining our own Burkean “little platoons” by choice. We don’t need — nor want — nudging in either direction.
Britain’s flatlining economy will not be saved by engorging the state
Britain doesn’t need a conservative revival, it needs economic growth. Significant real terms wage growth hasn’t happened for 16 years and we are facing the highest tax burden in 70 years. The graduate job market has never been worse while the average house in Britain costs 860 per cent more than the average income. It’s these bread-and-butter issues, not some imagined decline in the social fabric, that’s responsible for today’s problems.
Britain’s flatlining economy will not be saved by engorging the state and putting key industries back under government control. We’ve already tried a high-tax, mixed economy — it led to 1970s stagflation, and there is no reason why 21st century nationalisation would yield anything else. As wealth creators, key talent and entrepreneurs are drained from Britain in droves, increasing taxes and further disincentivising success will only make the problem worse.
Instead, we need to cut the taxes choking our economy. We need to cull the environmental and planning regulations that make building in this country so needlessly difficult. We need to make it easier for businesses to employ people and grow. We need to make Britain a rewarding place to seed and scale start-ups. That all requires a low-tax economic environment, which Blue Labour revolts against.
There are peripherals to Blue Labour that read well. Supply-side energy reform, YIMBYism, quango culling that centralises state power, realist foreign policy and the supremacy of parliamentary sovereignty make me an unlikely (and unwilling) bedfellow. But we must not be wooed by such contextual pragmatism. At its core, the twin pillars of Blue Labour — centralised, statist economics and social conservatism — are obelisks worth abhorring. What comes with the other, fashionable solutions is a compromise not worth taking.
Lord Glasman is wrong. The answers to Britain’s woes don’t lie in Labour’s past. They lie in the future. Forward-looking organisations in the centre-left space, such as the Labour Growth Group and Centre for British Progress, provide vital counterweight and an energetic laboratory for pro-growth solutions. But for the other side, those on the right should not be charmed by the conservatism of Blue Labour — what lies within are old economic fallacies repackaged in the vogue of today’s hot-button issues.
