About

Blue Labour is a force within the Labour Party committed to the politics of the common good. Our socialism is both radical and conservative. It is a politics about the work we do, the people we love, and the places to which we belong. 

Our starting point is the democratic renewal of our country. Blue Labour’s goal is a democratic self-governing society built upon the participation of its citizens in the exercise of power and its accountability. 

Our politics is a challenge to the liberal consensus of the capitalist order, but it does not belong to the revolutionary left. Its inheritance is the labour tradition.

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What is Blue Labour?

A lot has been written about Blue Labour. Much more has been tweeted. A lot of it is misinformed. So here is a brief outline of the ideas that make up Blue Labour politics.

Blue Labour started life in 2010 with Maurice Glasman and quickly grew into a small group of academics and politicians. The Labour Party had just suffered arguably its worst defeat since 1918. The group organised four meetings in London and Oxford to debate with senior Labour politicians the future of the party. The discussions were published in an ebook which attracted widespread comment.

Blue Labour began as a challenge to the liberal consensus of the capitalist order. Democracy was becoming an oligarchy with the liberal left in control of culture and the liberal right in control of the economy.

Both Labour and the Conservatives shared a liberal contractual view of society. Instead of mutual loyalties binding human beings into families, groups and nations, Labour saw the individual and the state, the Conservatives saw the individual and the market. Neither spoke about the families and neighbourhoods we are born into, nor about our cultural and religious inheritances. Both overlooked the most basic bonds that hold individuals together in a society.

In the 2019 general election the liberal consensus was broken. We are entering a new political era. However both parties are products of the liberal settlement. They remain substantially unchanged and so unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The Blue in Blue Labour expresses our disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last few decades. Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.

Blue Labour did not come out of the revolutionary left. Its inheritance is conservative socialism which is about protecting nature and human value from the commodification of capitalism and the transactional culture of the market.

What matters most to people is their family, relationships, friendships, work as a source of creative value, a cultural inheritance that gives meaning to life, and for some faith. What holds a society together is reciprocity - do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.

Our obligations to others constrain the pursuit of individual interests and so ensure a society can achieve a healthy balance between give and take, freedom and security.

This ethos is best expressed in the democratic politics of the common good. Democracy requires the practice of reciprocity, the give and take of negotiation, to find a common good to which all participants can subscribe.

Blue Labour is not a communitarian politics. Individuals are constituted by a plurality of religious, cultural, local and vocational communities and we actively shape and reform our inheritance. By deepening democracy and liberty within a framework of shared civic institutions we can constrain the domination of both market and state

Parliamentary sovereignty is fundamental to our politics. It is the source of the agency of a ‘we’ that constitutes our political system. In Blue Labour’s politics the ‘we’ is constituted in pluralism and the democratic practice of the common good. In politics conflict is always present. Sometimes it takes the form of class, sometimes of religion or ethnicity. The task of democratic politics is never complete.

When we talk about a Blue Labour economy we are thinking about a more reciprocal and equal relationship between state, market and society, a balance of power.  Society is threatened as much by an over mighty market as it is by a domineering state.

Blue Labour stands for the renewal of institutions that mediate the power of capital and limit the commodification of society. Vocational education is necessary for revitalising productivity and giving back dignity and status to work and workers. Workers on boards will redress the power of management within firms. Developing regional banking will help to recapitalise the regions starved of investment.  Promoting trade unionism will increase labours share of national income and reduce inequality.

Blue Labour is patriotic, internationalist and European.  But we are not globalist, nor universalist, nor cosmopolitan in outlook. There is a distinction between internationalism and globalisation that is profound. People have a culture, language and history. They have homes and attachments to places. Humans need a sense of belonging which is the task of living together.

Membership of specific solidarities is our entry point into humanity. We build solidarity with one another not in believing everyone is the same, but in recognising the difference of others, and where there is estrangement and conflict overcoming them through dialogue.

Our identities and beliefs matter and they provide an essential source of personal esteem and meaning. But prioritising some identities over others or asserting the moral worth of one over another is counter-productive and leads to conflict. It is why Blue Labour has always sought a broad-based coalition with immigrant communities based on the democratic practice of the common good rather than identity politics.

What matters most to people is love and relationships and so Blue Labour puts the family and relationships at the centre of its politics. Families are the bedrock of society. A stable home is the foundation for a successful life. But poverty, precarious and poorly paid work, and the loss of traditions of solidarity and mutual self-help have left many families unprotected and isolated. Today one in nine children in England suffers a mental illness and those most at risk are in the poorest fifth of families.

There is a growing popular demand for the restoration of the mutual obligations that join people into a common life and a shared national inheritance. And there is a need to re-establish a national covenant which affords citizens a fair wage for work done, a decent affordable home, social protection, opportunities to learn, and a future of prosperity for their children.

Our starting point is the democratic renewal of our country and an economy that prioritises work, families and local place. Blue Labour’s goal is a democratic self-governing society built upon the participation of its citizens in the exercise of power and its accountability. A fair and just balance between individual freedom and collective security.