Blue Labour has always been more of a collection of guys than a faction. From its beginnings in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it was Maurice Glasman and a small handful of Jons and not a huge amount more. It is now having something of a resurgence, and beginning to develop a degree of internal reality, although the reality of its actual influence remains debated. A Blue Labour group of MPs formed at the end of last year; now a parliamentary staff network has been set up. There are, I’m told, around 15 of these staffers so far, planning a roster of events and meetings and general association. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking to some of the new staff group to try and understand them. What does this lanyard class that hates the lanyard class believe?
You can paint a picture of who they are with heavy use of the caveat “mostly but not exclusively”. They are mostly, but not exclusively, men, and mostly, but not exclusively, quite young. They mostly work for new-intake MPs; they are mostly white, and mostly from outside of London. In short, they look like any random sampling of Labour’s parliamentary staff class would. Some work for members of the Blue Labour MPs group; some work for completely conventional Starmer-era Labour MPs.
Their diagnosis of what is wrong with the country and what Labour should do about it is commensurate with the rest of Blue Labour in its Dan Carden and Jonathan Hinder era. One member of the staff network views Blue Labour as a project of “realigning the party with areas it represents”. Having come into the party as a Corbynite, they say they “used to be much more liberal on immigration”, but now believe that in the country the “Overton Window has moved” and have moved with it. One staffer talks about being the grandchild of immigrants and hearing her family and friends increasingly express concern that more recent immigrants are not well integrated – indicating, she thinks, that worries about immigration and integration are far from the preserve of racists and traditionally anti-immigration parties, but are something Labour needs to reckon with.
Another staffer says that Blue Labour is concerned with people who have been “ignored by the establishment for decades”, suffering both “economic neglect” but also being “ignored on issues like immigration”. He reckons that the “liberalism of Blair has dominated the party for two decades”, with “not enough focus on class”. Another thinks we have an “economy too focused on London and the South East”, and that Labour is “not giving white working-class men anything”. “You’ve got to read the way the world is going,” they say, and ask “do we want it in a Labour way, or in a right-wing way?”
However, while my impression of Jonathan Hinder is as a man of total conviction (believing among other things that universities should be allowed to go bust and that we should at least think very seriously about leaving the ECHR), the staffers seem just as animated by the process of thinking and talking about politics as they do by the positions themselves. Clearly one of the attractions is not the specific appeal of Blue Labour itself, but the space it provides to talk about things. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not a very ideas-y place, and these are, on an intellectual level, painfully earnest young people.
“We debate quite a lot – it’s good to talk about ideas and philosophy, and all the things staffers never talk about,” says one member; another feels there is a “frustration with the lack of ideas from the progressive wing of the party”. A third notes that “a lot of MPs are issues-led, but not political”. When I ask for political heroes, I get Crosland and Blair: my strong sense is that in a different internal climate, these people might not have found themselves at the door of Blue Labour, and instead been scattered, ploughing perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic furrows in a variety of different factions. However, while their attitude to the government could in broad terms be described as loyalist, the ideological vacuum of Starmerism – famously unburdened by doctrine – and the government’s lack of (or even decidemad uninterest in) intellectual vitality brings them here. It’s not surprising that the people who are here for the debating society have ended up in the tendency which began life as (and arguably has never been much more than) a series of seminars. The staff group’s convenor does sees debate as part of the programme though: he says having “debate and discussion” is really important in and of itself, but also hopes to help flesh out the Blue Labour policy programme (answering questions like, “what is a Blue Labour foreign policy?” for example).
This desire for debate also intersects with another current dynamic in the party: the total sidelining of the Labour left. Dan Carden, the leader of the Blue Labour MP caucus, was a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and came up through Unite (he has described his journey into Blue Labour as being from “left to left”). Various members of the staff network started their political lives as Corbynites, and even those who didn’t are fairly ardent believers in the need for a broad-church Labour Party. I hear some variant on “Blair never expelled Corbyn” more than once in my conversations. One staffer thinks that thanks to Corbyn’s foreign policy positions and the anti-Semitism scandal, “the entire Corbyn project was delegitimised” and there wasn’t a thorough evaluation of what worked and what didn’t.
As much as one of the older members I speak to wants to stress that Blue Labour is not just a reaction to Reform and has been “going for 15 years”, the experience of Corbynism and of the loss of Red Wall seats in 2019 has clearly imprinted itself deeply on the tendency’s new iteration. The new Blue Labour owes significant DNA not just to the valiant seminar-convening of Jonathan Rutherford and co., but also to post-2019 projects like the moderate “Renaissance”, the Corbynite “No Holding Back”, and the Labour Together thinking on show in “Red Shift”, the report which famously brought us Stevenage Woman.
This post-Corbyn inheritance is also present in how the tendency talks about the state and the economy. In one staffer’s view, Blue Labour’s “economic populism is more important than its cultural elements”; the group’s convenor immediately says that it is Blue Labour’s answers on political economy that most appealed to him. The staffers’ views chime with the views of Blue Labour MPs Jonathan Hinder, Connor Naismith and David Smith, who wrote in LabourList last week that their agenda is “an explicit challenge to the neoliberal, capitalist consensus, and it belongs to the radical labour tradition”.
There is a reticence amongst the staffers when it comes to Glasman and some of his more recent interventions (the repeated assertion that progressives don’t want you to enjoy sex with your wife; an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast; tirades about the chancellor and the attorney general). While the group’s convenor (who tells me that he first became interested in Blue Labour because when was younger he would “watch and read stuff online, lectures and articles, by Cruddas and Glasman”) says the Labour peer’s connections with the Maga movement are “realpolitik”, conversations Labour needs to be open to having, others are less positive and more awkward when asked about their long-time standard bearer.
They also acknowledge that Blue Labour has, as one of them puts it, a “brand issue” within Labour, a party whose membership are in the main bog-standard left liberals. They aren’t wrong: one Labour MP I spoke to about this piece called Blue Labour “four guys who claim they do have girlfriends but that they go to another school”. It’s hard to escape the impression that this MP and critics like them won’t be persuaded by one staffer’s arguments that Blue Labour is “not anti-liberal, it’s a critique of liberalism” or another’s earnest assertion that he just wants more of our political conversation to address the “moral plane” of people’s lives.
Arguments about the out-of-touch nature of the political classes are probably not best made by Westminster bag carriers – as the bag carriers well know. (There are “too many of me in the economy”, the group’s convenor, a white man in his 20s with an Oxbridge degree, tells me ruefully.) Everything, however, starts somewhere. Political history is scattered with the vehicles of bright young things, some of which went places and some of which didn’t. This group of earnest young people could do worse for themselves than as the staff vanguard of Labour’s most discussed faction – even if not all the discussion is wholly positive. That being said, the staff network claims fairly moderate ambitions for itself and its tendency: “Can I ever see them putting forward NPF or NEC candidates? Honestly, no,” one member tells me. In the meantime, though, there’s another seminar to attend.
[See also: Labour’s “old right” has been reborn]
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