What does Blue Labour stand for? It revels in the politics of paradox

“Blue Labour” is currently one of the only stalls going at Britain’s limp and lethargic marketplace of ideas. More than most political labels, it confers some intellectual status upon those who claim it. Its central figure, Lord Glasman, is one of the only thinkers in Parliament. There are at least four books setting out the vision, and four Blue Labour MPs now charged with realising it. It used to be claimed that Sir Keir Starmer himself had Blue Labour sympathies, before this came to be an indictment of the movement; in any case, some of its ideas seem to have infiltrated No. 10.

That is owing to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Once, McSweeney was called a “Blairite”: it was he, after all, who had steered Liz Kendall’s ill-fated 2015 attempt at a New Labour restoration. He remains aligned with Kendall; both have spent the last week under extreme pressure from backbenchers over the welfare reform bill. He has however found that the Blue Labour outfit, at least as far as the rhetoric is concerned, fits him better than the Blairite one: Alasdair MacIntyre beats Alastair Campbell. Maurice Glasman has described him as “one of ours”.

The outfit does have the tactical advantage of being amorphous, of revelling in “the politics of paradox”. It is rhetoric as much as ideology. Sometimes it presents itself merely as a strategy for winning back the “Red Wall”; other times it is a fully-fledged philosophy, which promises to defend the dignity of man against commodification and atomisation, those wretched hallmarks of modernity. Blue Labour is, broadly speaking, anti-woke, anti-euthanasia, anti-austerity; it is pro-union, pro-nationalisation, pro-“Levelling Up”. Its adherents can usually be spotted by their watchwords: “work”, “community”, “tradition”, “faith”, “flag”, “family”. If these sound ubiquitous and banal, that’s partly the point.

It is best understood as the peculiarly British variant of “postliberalism”. American postliberalism tends to carry a reactionary flavour. Many of its adherents are Roman Catholics, more often by conversion than birth, aiming more or less openly at Catholic integralism. There is a Right-wing postliberalism in Britain, too, represented in Parliament by the Conservative MPs Nick Timothy and Danny Kruger. But in Britain’s postliberal scene the Left has the upper hand. The academic Adrian Pabst, who co-edited one of the “Blue Labour” books, wrote the book on postliberalism in 2021; and John Gray can usually be found banging the drum in the Left-wing New Statesman. Britain exported its finest postliberal, Alasdair MacIntyre, to the United States; but although he swam the Tiber, as American postliberals are wont to do, his thought remained much infused by his earlier dabblings in Marxism.

When the British postliberals cast around for an illustrious, indigenous pedigree, they find one on the Left, inhaling the fumes of an old, patriotic socialism. Unlike in America, Catholics do not hold a monopoly on postliberalism in Britain: there is a strong Dissenting element here. The British postliberals can take their cues from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), the most widely read history book in interwar Britain. They can conscript to their squadrons the “guild socialism” of G.D.H. Cole, the Romanticism of William Morris, even the half-crazed rantings of Thomas Carlyle. They can tap into the Englishman’s radical historical memory: Blue Labour is surely the only political force in modern Britain which trades seriously in the language of the “ancient constitution” and the “Norman Yoke”. In its mixture of high-minded intellectualism and the robust common sense of the working man, Blue Labour calls forth the proud tradition of working-class autodidacticism, now largely lost.

Related to all this is the Blue Labour version of Labour Party history, which rejects any notion that the Labour Party was the inheritor of 19th-century Liberalism. This is a heresy which Glasman ascribes to Anthony Crosland — a pernicious turn in Labour’s sense of itself, laying down the foundations for its Blairite hijacking and subversion. No matter that Keir Hardie (for example) started life as a Gladstonian Liberal: Blue Labour is true Labour, promising salvation after prolonged apostasy.

As Blue Labour and postliberalism have risen in recent years, so too has a standard line of attack. Its locus classicus is a brilliant 2023 article by one J. Sorel. It argues, in effect, that the postliberals have already won: that Britain, at least since 1997, has been dominated by the “community” at the expense of the “individual”. Sorel’s is a fair objection. After all, lockdown was sold to a compliant public precisely by making reference to “social bonds”, “responsibilities”, and “community”. Markets were shut down for “the common good”: behold the postliberals’ ultimate victory.

Already in 2022 Glasman was writing about the lockdown with a certain nostalgia. Furlough gave a “substantive role” to the state “in support of the workers”, as he had always dreamed of. The pandemic reminded us all of the quiet dignity of labour: “Pakistani nurses, Nigerian cleaners, Portuguese carers and Bolton lorry drivers all risk their lives to keep things going.” The pandemic focused “the importance of place, of neighbours, of mutual aid and community”.

The Blue Labour sense of being stalked by the phantom of “individualism”, contrary to so much recent experience, quite clearly bears the imprint of the Eighties. For postliberalism is every bit as much an ideology of the Eighties as, say, Thatcherism. It owes much to the critique of Thatcher by the Tory Wets, and to a widespread disgust at the excesses of capitalism as represented by crude caricatures of “neoliberalism”, such as “Loadsamoney” and Gordon Gekko. Britain’s Left-wing postliberalism then formed part of a wider reaction against the liberalism that emerged triumphant out of the Cold War: Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”, so often made to stand for this moment’s hubris, appears as the punching-bag in every book in the postliberal canon.

While the wildest dreams of the liberals were being realised, the British postliberals had all their hopes betrayed. Glasman’s doctoral thesis, co-supervised by John Gray, praised the West German social market, and asked why other countries had not implemented its model. Poland might have; the labour movement Solidarnosc had inclined in that direction under communism. But once communism fell, once Solidarnosc had attained power, it succumbed immediately, on Glasman’s telling, to the forces of Western capital. The intervention of Western “free-market fanatics” was to blame; and those same fanatics were responsible for much “unnecessary suffering” in Britain, too.

The doyen of the Polish economists, Tadeusz Kowalik, wrote a rejoinder in the New Left Review, criticising Glasman for overplaying the extent of “individualism” in Nineties Poland. Glasman’s portrayal of Poland’s “libertarian atomisation” bore no resemblance to reality. Rent and heating were still subsidised; “there is no basis to Glasman’s later statement that there has been ‘a virtual abolition of welfare’”.

These shortcomings could be described as an early instance of the “Blue Labour fallacy”: the assumption that all social ills owe their existence to the excesses of “liberal individualism”. A good example of it can be found when, while dipping his toe into Blue Labour in 2015, David Lammy described the 2011 riots as “the product of a ‘me-first’, ‘take-what-you-can’ culture” — individualism run amok. Gangs are communities of a sort, so their part in the lawlessness had to be brushed aside.

There is, as Sorel observed, also a distinctive postliberal style, characterised by new terms for the various dichotomies and cleavages of modern society. Take David Goodhart’s “Somewheres and Anywheres”, or Danny Kruger’s lesser-known “The Order and the Idea”. Glasman’s 2022 book has “Mercurians” and “Apollonians”, which map more or less onto the Goodhart formula. Mercury is the Anywhere god, the god of commerce and capital and all those who do not till the land. Apollo is the Somewhere god, the god of (to use a postliberal cliché) that sense of place. When Glasman reached for this terminology, as his footnotes make plain, he was — quite strikingly — referring to Yuri Slezkine’s ingenious and controversial book, The Jewish Century (2004).

In that book, Slezkine argued that, in medieval and early-modern Europe, the Jews were “Mercurians” par excellence, “service nomads” who filled a social and economic niche. But Mercury fast became the presiding god of all modernity: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate… modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.” Zionism was one response to this. Whereas America, the destination of many European Jews, stood for “unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism”, the Zionist project stood for “unrelenting Apollonianism”. It promised to return “the world’s most proficient service nomads” to the land; to transform Mercurians into Apollonians, or “rootless cosmopolitans” into hardened sabras.

Israel is now the world’s finest exemplar of the “Apollonian” postliberal state: it places enormous obligations on the shoulders of its citizens (such as military service); it sanctifies community and family life; it is robustly “civic-nationalist”; and it reaps the rewards, as postliberals would have it, in its high fertility rate and few deaths of despair. It can draw on a proud socialist, communitarian heritage, too, with the kibbutz standing in for the British co-operative. When Glasman decided to take his signal inspiration from Slezkine — rather than falling back on Goodhart’s terminology, as he might have done — he was setting out what might be described as a kind of Anglo-Zionism. Labour, in his telling, has too often exalted the Mercurian way of life over the Apollonian; Britain today, thanks to the depredations of liberalism and capitalism, is too Mercurian. To restore Labour to the Apollonians, to Make Britain Apollonian Again, is the central mission of the Blue Labour project. It is, much as Zionism was for the Jewish diaspora in the 20th century, a matter of restoring to an emasculated nation its manhood.

This last metaphor ought to be taken seriously. In an earlier outing of Blue Labour ideas, in the aftermath of New Labour’s downfall in 2010, Glasman made essentially the same point, though with a more familiar dichotomy than “Apollonian vs Mercurian”. Labour then, in Glasman’s analogy, was a strained marriage between a university-educated, progressive Mum and a salt-of-the-earth, traditionalist Dad. The story of the Labour Party was the story of Mum taking over; under Blair and Brown, “the Dad might as well have left home”. One Labour MP, Helen Goodman, was not pleased with the gender politics at play: “it looks more like something suitable for the psychotherapist’s couch than a political tract.” Perhaps this is why Glasman chose to abandon it for “Mercurian” and “Apollonian”.

Blue Labour prides itself on its sense for British history, but here it is selective and superficial. It privileges the rural over the urban, the agrarian over the commercial, the “Apollonian” over the “Mercurian”. Its national feeling tends towards the twee parochialism of Morris dancers and Maypoles. It abhors aspects of our history for which many feel some affection: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of enterprise and free trade. “Commerce” means at least as much in Britain as “community”. In excoriating the vice of “individualism”, Blue Labour dispenses with one of the most precious parts of Britain’s cultural inheritance. Blue Labour dislikes “modernity”, but Britain fared rather well in modernity; modernity is in a sense our creation. A certain “rootlessness”, a devotion to Mercury, is an inevitable characteristic among a people with a diaspora as large as ours. One might go so far as to say that Britain — more like America than Israel — is a Mercurian nation.

But do the British people yearn for more social obligations? After the lockdown they might have had their fill. Do they want higher taxes, as the ideal Blue Labour programme would likely entail? It’s unlikely; the tax burden is already the highest it’s been since the Second World War. Do they want more power in the hands of “local communities”? Perhaps — though they are hardly impressed by devolution in its current form, and might prefer a centralised state which can actually do things. Are they much roused by talk of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Rerum novarum? Even the heartiest Blue Labourite will surely admit that they are not. Blue Labour, in short, is based on a series of misapprehensions about the country it wishes to govern and reform. Britannia is not whispering about “the common good” and “that sense of place”; instead she shouts four rather familiar words, “lower taxation, lower immigration”. The future now belongs to whoever listens.

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