Blue Labour

How to claim victory in elections you did not win

There’s a new force in the Labour Party. You probably haven’t heard of them yet, but they are intellectual insurgents, trampling over party shibboleths and ideological dividing lines. They like blue collar Britain. They dislike most varieties of liberalism. And their ideas are attracting interest, plus a few gasps of horror, in the London political class. They are called Blue Labour.

—David Goodhart, 2011

Fourteen years on, with Labour crashing in the polls and the parliamentary party short on ideas, a new grouping of three has sought to revive ‘Blue Labour’. Their aim? To head off the threat of ‘populism’. The defibrillator is out, and ‘right on culture, left on economics’ is being dragged back onto the stage in the hopes of sparking some life into a Commons that gets home at a leisurely, public sector four o’clock. Curiously, the founder of the so-called ‘Blue Labour’ movement, Maurice Glasman, was even spotted at the (second) inauguration of Donald Trump. He was offering guidance to the team that had just won a big victory in one of the most hard-fought elections in recent memory. But why was this maverick peer seeking to advise ‘MAGA’ on how to govern their country? And is ‘Blue Labour’ really the answer to Starmer’s woes?

The origins of the concept of ‘Blue Labour’ can be found in ‘Labour as a radical tradition’, an essay written in 2010 by none other than Maurice Glasman. Here, Glasman uses the analogy of a couple consisting of an ‘educated middle-class “mum”’ and a ‘decent working-class “dad”’ to describe the Labour Party. The mother, a member of the liberal intelligentsia, and thus at home in modern society, looks out for those beyond her family horizons, and is comfortable with her circle of care encompassing the entirety of humanity. Meanwhile, the tool-wielding father lives at the whim of his employer, primarily concerned with the strength of mutual solidarity in his union and local community, those being his only defences against the paymaster’s whip. In hindsight, the weakness of this analogy is that this cross-class union between an upper-middle-class woman and a labouring, culturally conservative man borders upon fantastical, given the well-known desire of most women to marry up socially. It seems reasonable to assume that such a union would have ended in divorce at some point in the ’10s.

As readers may have predicted, Glasman sympathises more with his imagined father than most in the Labour Party. In his other pieces, he suggests that New Labour became too enamoured with globalisation, too friendly towards capital markets, and too estranged from its working-class voter base.

This particular critique of neoliberal centrism became far more obviously relevant after the twin shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Brexit triumphed after a campaign that featured Nigel Farage standing in front of the infamous ‘Breaking Point’ poster and the assassination of Jo Cox MP by a neo-Nazi. Less than six months later, Donald Trump — a billionaire — won the presidency after holding mass rallies up and down the country in which he threatened to jail his main political rival and build a vast, imperial wall on the southern border.

What were ‘reasonable’ people to make of all this? Most people didn’t want to accept that voters may have just preferred these messages to those of their opponents. For many self-perceived liberals, the solution to this conundrum was simple: a small group of ‘deplorables’ and other such bigots were assisted by Russian propaganda, which had befuddled the minds of the rest of a fundamentally well-meaning population. In this interpretation, the twin populist victories of 2016 were simply illegitimate. On both sides of the Atlantic, this provided a carte blanche to dispute the results for years to come, whether through a second referendum in Britain or through attempts to imprison the legitimate victor in the United States.

However, for the few people who are interested in left-wing economics but not so interested in liberal social values, these results could be cast in a much more politically favourable light. Political scientists observed that both Brexit and Trump were reliant upon white working class voters for their respective victories. These voters may have previously attached themselves to Labour or the Democrats, whether out of loyalty to the unions, or in support of policies that were in their basic economic self-interest; now, however, they broke Right when offered the opportunity to punch at globalism.

Thus so-called ‘postliberalism’ exploded in prominence. ‘Postliberalism’ and ‘Blue Labour’ are not synonyms. However, the former has repeatedly been used to explain the voters who sided with Trump and Brexit, and the explanations offered bear a striking resemblance to Glasman’s description of the voters that New Labour (allegedly) failed. To commentators of a certain bent, these seemingly outrageous electoral results could be easily explained, with no vast conspiracy of ‘Russian bots’ required: they were simply expressions of a desire for a renewed communitarianism; for a government that would undo the ravages of ‘neoliberal capitalism’ since Thatcher and Reagan.

It is true that the Brexit vote was, in its most technical sense, a move to cut ourselves off from a larger trading block. And it is also true that Trump promised to tear up trade agreements and place tariffs on America’s enemies. However, unfortunately for the partisans of ‘postliberalism’ and ‘Blue Labour’, time has not stood still since 2016. Voters have had their say on this kind of rhetoric on a number of occasions.

Boris Johnson won the 2019 General Election while espousing ‘levelling-up’. But it seems beyond doubt that his victory had far more to do with a desire among voters — especially (but not only) Brexit voters — to finalise the result of the Referendum after three years of turmoil. Theresa May — who somehow managed to lose David Cameron’s slim majority in 2017, despite her opponent being one of the most inept major political leaders in modern British history — leaned into ‘postliberal’ rhetoric more than Johnson ever did. Dominic Cummings later called the ‘levelling-up’ concept pushed by Boris Johnson ‘a rubbish slogan’ which ‘never worked’, and during the campaign told Johnson that ‘nobody understands this, stop saying it, focus on what we know works’. What worked was ‘Get Brexit Done’ — not any kind of call to a renewal of communitarianism.

Similarly, after Biden’s victory in 2020, there was little evidence of any repudiation of the ‘postliberal’ agenda that had supposedly elevated Trump. In a rare case of bipartisanship, many of Trump’s tariffs remained in place, and the CHIPS Act was one of a number of initiatives aimed at onshoring American manufacturing. Indeed, leading postliberal Sohrab Ahmari has praised Biden’s industrial policies effusively, arguing that he engineered a ‘manufacturing revival and more resilient supply chains; robust anti-monopoly enforcement; and the protection of some of the weakest workers and consumers against corporate power’. Despite high inflation, the Biden economy was strong, especially for those at the lower end of the wage distribution. And yet, none of this did the Democrats much good in 2024: Trump took massive gains with almost every demographic, including the benighted white working class supposedly crying out for the industrial jobs Biden was doing his best to bring back to the the Rust Belt.

Perhaps it was that they perceived Trump as the more effective prosecutor of a shared postliberal agenda, but this is hard to square with the fact that his first term’s flagship economic policy was enormous tax cuts for the wealthy. It seems far more plausible that the public was not actually voting on communitarianism in 2016 to begin with; in fact, they were voting for something far more indisputably right-wing.

In the General Election of the same year, the Conservative Party were thrown out of office. ‘Levelling-up’ had become a farce: unfilled Treasury postings in Darlington had taken the place of connecting the North to HS2, or — god forbid — actually improving inter-city rail transport in the region. Probably more importantly, the entire economic outlook — unlike in the United States — was sluggish. Immigration (both legal and illegal) had spiralled out of control, despite the Conservative Party’s repeated promises to cut numbers. Labour’s response to this was to campaign on very little at all, giving no real indication that Sir Keir was anything other than a North London lawyer who, for all that everyone hates this sort of person, was nonetheless still not a Tory.

Obviously, the Conservative Government did not simply fall to a shift towards the Labour Party. Reform UK won five seats and knocked the Tories out of a further 80, mostly campaigning on the issue of immigration (with some attacks on Net Zero thrown in on occasion). Reform is not a postliberal party. They may make noises about saving British steel here and there — after all, they are still an opposition party — but anyone being honest about them knows they are a tax-cutting, PIP-slashing, regulation-burning party, insofar as they even have a firm economic agenda. This was confirmed by a manifesto which promised to ‘slash wasteful spending’ in every department (in order to fund tax cuts), to ‘abolish the tourist tax’ on foreign visitors (i.e., to restore the VAT rebate for the international super-rich shopping at Harrods), and to cut unnecessary ‘red tape and nanny state regulations’. This is hardly a stump speech at the Durham Miners’ Gala, and yet they have continued to surge in the polls at the expense of both Labour and the Conservatives.

Why, then, when ‘levelling-up’ turned into a lie was it Reform, of all people, who benefitted? After all, even if you can explain away why voters didn’t flock to Labour, there are many other third parties in Britain. The SDP offers a full-fat ‘Blue Labour’ agenda, with cuts to immigration coupled with a strong industrial policy. Led by former Tory councillor William Clouston, with spokesmen including such prominent individuals as Patrick O’Flynn and Rod Liddle, they are — by all accounts — a fairly well-organised minor party with respectable conferences. Obviously, they have no Farage, but they can hardly complain that they have received insufficient coverage in the media, given that they are a movement that claims their niche is connecting directly with Britain’s most forgotten voters. And yet: their electoral performance is routinely poor, despite a pact with Reform UK at the last election.

The enduring popularity of Donald Trump despite Biden’s pro-worker policies and the resurgence of Reform absent any economic concessions to the working class should give pause to the siren calls of ‘Blue Labour’ and ‘postliberalism’. Glasman’s recent claim that the great overturning of the Woke is ‘worthless unless you’re actually pro-worker and pro-trade union’ would be ridiculous to the fictional father depicted in his 2010 essay who, at this point, has divorced the mother and is voting for Reform. Rebuilding communities and coming together around the family is now a null demand. The new voters of the Right want backlash on culture and immigration, nothing more and nothing less — and the Labour Party is always going to be incapable of satisfying them.

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This article was written by Scott Goetz, our deputy editor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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