Maurice Glasman, Blue Labour (2022) and William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890).
There was once a seminar, at the Labour party stronghold of University College, Oxford (Beveridge, Attlee and Wilson all had connections) that brought together thinkers from both the New and the Blue Labour folds. It was 2009; Gordon Brown was prime minister. Putting the Blue side, Maurice Glasman opened his remarks by quoting Virginia Woolf’s diary: “Terrible weekend. Man drowned in river. Went to Labour Party meeting.”
Glasman went on to set out the essential Blue Labour position. The Labour party is a marriage that failed, he argued. It is a party born of a fusion of the trade union movement and the Fabian tradition of inevitable scientific improvement. Sadly, in Glasman’s estimation, the Fabians always dominated the marriage. The victory of technocrats led to the dead end of nationalisation and the illusion of state planning. The earlier, pre-Fabian tradition of voluntary association, social solidarity and ethical socialism was buried in a blizzard of plans and documents for the improvement of human beings.
Glasman, a Labour life peer since 2011, is back in the news as, apparently, the only Labour parliamentarian to be invited to Trump’s inaugural speech and as a guest at the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference organised by various soi-disant conservatives. This is perhaps an inevitable destination for Blue Labour but certainly not where it began.
When Blue Labour first emerged as a player within Labour in 2009, there was talk of an intriguing alliance of New and Blue. The New Labour supporters of James Purnell were in constant conversation with the Blue Labour advocates of Jon Cruddas in the hope of creating a leadership partnership that would upset the usual divide between the party’s right and left. By then, the lukewarm statism of the Brown government was looking, at least in the assessment of both parties to the conversation, as though it were coming to a terminus.
This was entirely a tactical fix. There was a hint of philosophical fraternity between New and Blue Labour. Both groups believed firmly in the work ethic and the claim of contribution rather than abstract claims of need or equality. Both groups were more sceptical of the efficiency of the central state than is common in the Labour party. Both sides believed that solutions to entrenched social problems were liable to be found as much in individual and community enterprise as in the abstract schemes of the well-motivated reformers.
In addition, Blue Labour acted as a sort of restraining order on New Labour. The Blue Labour critique—that the New Labour people were too credulous about market power and too slow to understand that economic globalisation, on balance a net good for Britain, also creates losers who will eventually take a political revenge—has a lot to be said for it. Blue Labour can also reprimand New Labour for coming to power emphasising individual responsibility and the dignity of labour but allowing these themes to vanish in a blizzard of targets and controls. New Labour people were naive, say the Blue Labour people, about the managerial proficiency of the state.
And yet, when Blue Labour tries to move from critique to constructive suggestion something goes awry. William Morris’s pastoral utopia News From Nowhere (1890), which tells the story of the transition from a land of exploitation to a society of brotherhood shares the same concern with ethical socialism and the same stress on solidarity between free people that animate the thinking of Blue Labour. Though Glasman himself, in his first book, Unnecessary Suffering (1996), and the more recent Blue Labour (2022) derives his own philosophical credo from Karl Polyani and social Catholic thought, other advocates—especially Cruddas—have always stressed the ethical origins of the creed.
There, is though, another characteristic that Glasman shares with Morris. The precise way in which society passes from disaster to utopia in New From Nowhere is, to put it kindly, a little opaque. The agent of change merely stumbles upon the ready-made utopian society without too onerous a search. It’s a major omission in a work that is meant to be taken as creative political philosophy. It is a complete failure to answer the practical question, Lenin’s famous question, of what is to be done?
The same lacuna blights the Blue Labour movement. It is surely telling that, in Blue Labour: Forging A New Politics (2015) edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst, one of the epigraphs comes from the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah. There is more than a hint of miserable declinism in the Blue Labour analysis, a sense that various foolish governments—usually of the left—have ruined the country. In the end, Blue Labour leads backwards into a world that has gone.
Glasman was invited to Trump’s inauguration by the vice-president, JD Vance. In a speech in which he appeared to endorse a Trump presidency, Glasman talked about the “multi-ethnic, interfaith, working-class coalition against progressives” that was giving the Democrat party the shellacking it thoroughly deserved. Progressives, Glasman told Steve Bannon’s podcast in January, “are the enemy because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love”. Perhaps Glasman has already abandoned the Labour party, if not his own conception of the labour view. It seems so when he can say that “the only place to build a house now is on the left side of Maga square”. There is a trap here for Glasman. Bannon called him a “hero” on his podcast and he has for a long while been close to Vance. Glasman’s impending appearance on GB News with Nigel Farage is another portent of his alliance with the populist right.
William Morris was no lackey of the established powerbrokers. In News From Nowhere the Palace of Westminster is used for the storage of manure and a cabbage and turnip market. A Committee for Public Safety ensures that all desire is satisfied in a happy nation in which all the inhabitants are devoted to the pursuit of the commonwealth. It’s impossible to imagine, though, that his hopes for community solidarity would ever lead, as they have in the case of Blue Labour, to the claim that the Labour government used immigration as a de facto wages policy: “Labour lied to people about the extent of immigration ... and there’s been a massive rupture of trust,” Glasman wrote in 2011.
The Labour party is low on philosophical fuel, that much is evident. There have even been rather strange suggestions that Morgan McSweeney, an electoral strategist and a good one, is in fact a philosopher, as if he were this government’s Tony Crosland. This is just overheated lobby correspondent rubbish. It may well follow that Labour MPs worried about the threat posed to their political future by Farage will look to the conservatism of the Blue Labour credo for salvation. They will find no programme for government there. There is no programme of any note in the tradition from which Blue Labour is derived, even if they definitely have the monopoly on good wallpaper.
