Blue Labour has been tragically vindicated
by Jonathan Rutherford
Sabrina Huck argued in a LabourList piece earlier this year that the Corbyn movement was failing to develop a coherent theoretical politics to define its identity and its aims. For too long, she wrote, Labour had avoided questions of identity and belonging, and this twin failure had left an intellectual vacuum, which was being ‘exploited’ by Blue Labour thinkers. Unless the movement urgently built its own intellectually coherent, theoretical base it would become a hollow movement overwhelmed by ‘dangerous currents’ and ‘reactionary forces’.
What exactly is Blue Labour that it can cause such melodrama? The Twitter sphere is incoherent on the subject. Only a few years ago the Corbyn movement was galvanising national politics. Until this election it commanded the Labour Party and an enormous membership. But it has now led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935. Corbynism, despite constructing an architecture of supposedly radical supporters in alternative media, never developed any intellectual or political coherence. Why?
Since the election result it is clear that Blue Labour politics has been vindicated. 59 seats were lost in working-class Leave-voting constituencies across the north and midlands. But Blue Labour has no membership and no formal organisation. Until the last few days it was politically marginal within the party. Despite this, its ideas have grown considerably in influence since 2010. Much of the reason is that its politics are mainstream in the country. For some years there has been a political majority for a radical approach to the economy and a culturally conservative approach to society, culture, national defence and security. The Conservatives, understanding this shift, have begun to monopolise the position. Their 80-seat majority shows how effective this strategy has been.
Blue Labour politics can be described as small c conservative and socialist. It is internationalist and European. However, it is not globalist, nor universalist, nor cosmopolitan. People have a culture, language and history. We are social and parochial beings with homes and attachments to places. Our membership of specific solidarities is our entry point into humanity.
The labour movement has been a defence against the power of capital and the state. Resistance to the commodification of labour and its extension into society is part of our democratic modernity. Blue Labour is part of this tradition. It began as a challenge to New Labour’s liberal market economics, support for financial capital, uncritical embrace of globalisation and irresponsible approach to large-scale immigration. Labour had moved from being a party of the people to a ‘progressive’ manager of capitalism.
The growing dominance of liberalism subordinated democracy to the economic realm. Politics became managerial and political conflict was reduced to technical problems and legal procedure. But justice cannot be achieved simply by the procedures of a legal order, by bureaucratic state administration, or by the profit motive of the market. Legal rights are always a political achievement and they must be backed up by a democratic political community.
So Blue Labour believes that the democratic nation and its rule of law is the best means of safeguarding our rights and freedoms. And the nation state is still the best political unit to manage globalisation in the interests of a democratic polity. A democratic nation is defined by its sovereignty. Sovereignty is the source in time and place of the agency that constitutes a political system and underlying this agency is a ‘we’ — a community of people bound together by reciprocity.
For Blue Labour, the ‘we’ is not homogenous but a plural that must be brought together in a democratic politics of the common good. Different groups and classes that constitute a polity have interests that require negotiation to explore the possibility of a common good. Sometimes conflict takes the form of class, sometimes of religious and ethnic communities. Consensus has to be worked for. It requires political skill to build bridges. It is argumentative and it can be angry. Conflict and difference will always be present. Issues get decided in a temporal, revisable way through democratic decision. The only rule is that you have to do it again.
Building a broad political coalition for a majority Labour government requires this kind of democratic politics. It will include people of a more conservative disposition than liberalism is comfortable with. Many of the responses to Sabrina’s article showed that some parts of the left are unwilling to accept this: they will only take part if everybody first agrees with them.
The problem with a politics that opposes borders and the idea of the nation, is that it ends up as an abstraction. It cannot develop an alternative story of democratic nationhood, nor one about belonging, nor about international relations. It ends up championing a global monoculture that is neither here nor there and is only of any benefit to a class of mobile professionals. In rejecting the particular and the historical in favour of the abstract and universal, it loses any conception of a democratic polity in which mutual obligations guarantee rights. In calling for the defence of all workers, it ends up defending none.
In response to this political failure, Sabrina suggested that the Corbyn movement should champion economic equality along with socialist values such as class unity, internationalism, feminism and multiculturalism. That’s fine, but people want decent jobs and wages, good homes in safe and pleasant neighbourhoods, enough money to take a holiday, schools that give their children a good start in life, and a sense of security. Without these things, Corbynism failed utterly, despite public support for many aspects of the manifesto. What matters to the great majority is their family, fairness, decency, working hard and a society in which rights are matched by obligations. They want a country to feel good about and a government that they feel is their own, and which they can trust to safeguard our national defence and security.
In this election a vote to ‘Get Brexit Done’ was a vote for economic and cultural security. The Conservatives, realising this, have begun to pivot into the new centre ground of British politics. But they cannot offer the radical economic restructuring needed to improve the lives of working people in Britain. To win again Labour must seize this time of reflection and rediscover its conservative socialist traditions rooted in the lives of ordinary people. Not to do so will be fatal.
