When I speak to people who grew up in Eastern Europe under Communism they tell me that it was not simply the falseness of the slogans that were so dispiriting, it was their relentless optimism.  ‘Forward to a brighter future’ was a perennial favourite apparently.  In this genre New Labour transcended Bolshevism in its commitment to a false progressive imperative with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. 

If this year has any meaning, it is proof that this isn’t true. 

Last year ended with a cataclysmic defeat for our Party in which large swathes of our heartland vote finally deserted us.  We did not keep faith with them and they abandoned us.  The estrangement had been building for many years but it was still shocking when it arrived.  It felt as if a covenantal promise had been broken. 

As the year drifts to a close there is no indication that things will get better.  The vaccine offers hope of remission but there is the potential collapse of small businesses, looming unemployment, an intensification of debt and no vision of how to renew our party and our country. 

The blue in Blue Labour has always referred to a sense of sadness and loss, and as death stalks the land and families are fractured this Christmas, feeling blue is an entirely appropriate response.  I have lost beloved friends this year and I mourn them.  As a politics based on real physical presence, on the importance of place and the centrality of relationships, this year has been very hard going.  The internet oligarchs and the Chinese economy are booming and consolidating while our social, economic and political life withers.  Our cherished liberties of association and religion were all suspended as public assemblies and worship were banned.  An isolated, shrunken and mediated life became palpable, not as a future dystopia, but as a present reality.  Death, and the fear of death had greater real physical presence than friends, family and neighbours.   The internet became our environment and the sound of strangers laughing became a strange memory. 

The immediate response to the virus was heartening.  There seemed to be recognition, for the first time for many years, of the importance and dignity of workers.  There was also a new definition of the working class, it was something you could not do from home and involved leaving the house putting yourself in danger and doing something for someone else, usually with your hands.  I wrote about this for the New Statesman in May. 

The mood didn’t last and was followed by anxiety, drift and the unpunctuated time of Zoom meetings.  We were reduced to debt and the NHS and it was clear who was benefitting most from the virus as the stock market boomed and the real economy collapsed.  The consequences of this were discussed here. 

As the Government also drifts, without any plan of how to renew the abandoned places, restore civic pride and the dignity of labour and instead reverts to crony capitalism and centralisation as its default response, it is vital that we articulate our vision and renew the Labour Tradition as the best and most profound hope for our country.

This must be based on a renewed covenant between us and the working class that can domesticate capital and its intense imperative to turn human beings and nature into commodities and assert instead that democracy and solidarity are the basis of community and labour is the source of value.  Our politics is a source of genuine hope because by endowing regional banks so that assets can be restored to areas depleted of resources, by establishing a vocational economy that values skills, by campaigning for land reform and community land trusts so houses can be built by and for local people, we restore reciprocity, mutual obligation and democracy as the fundamental practices of society.   We need to take the lead in debt forgiveness and bind businesses to their locality, to the vocational colleges and to the protection of the land and our natural inheritance so that we can pass on a renewed civic and natural inheritance to the next generation.  In doing so we can redeem our historical promise by binding estranged communities together in a socialist politics built around the common good. 

We can generate a real hope in the country because our politics addresses the issues of debt, the concentration of assets, the status of workers, geographic inequalities and the stewardship of nature and integrates them into a set of institutions that can shape a response commensurate with the crisis we confront.  It is the very idea of the social that is besieged, society itself, and it is through its renewal that we will be renewed. 

In the next year we will be sharing our politics on work and nature, place and debt forgiveness, internationalism and democracy and long, with a patient heart, for the time that we can meet again and bear witness to the transformative power of real physical presence. 

The year has not been without joy.  We congratulate Rowenna Davis on the birth of her daughter and also Arne Graf for his book, ‘Lessons Learned: Stories from a lifetime of organising’.  Arnie has been a true friend to Blue Labour and the tradition of organising which he practices was a fundamental part of the formation of the Labour Movement and if we are to renew, of its future. Relationships, persistence and politics shine through his book. 

As part of that politics,  it is vital that we form relationships between generations and a common life.  I urge you to remember the golden rule of Blue Labour, which is that whatever the difficulties and distances, the dislocation and despondency, if you are lucky enough to still have a Mum, treasure her this Christmas with your love.