The small group of academics and politicians touted earlier this year as the coming big thing in Labour’s intellectual firmament is now officially finished, according to Jonathan Rutherford on the New Statesman’s blog, having produced no more than an ebook of first thoughts. Oh no, it’s not, counters the group’s prime mover and guru, Maurice Glasman, in the print edition of the Statesman, apologising for a series of ill-considered public statements calling for an end to immigration, discussions with supporters of the English Defence League and (implicitly) British withdrawal from the European Union that had drawn the fire both of Trots and of Peter Mandelson.
Such a pronounced schism at such an early stage does not bode well. But if Blue Labour is all over before it properly started, I’m not crowing. And before Tribune readers reach for the computer keyboard or the green ink to denounce me, I’ve not been converted either to an intolerance of immigration that makes Migration Watch look liberal, or to consorting with the EDL, or to UKIP-style Euroscepticism.
Blue Labour is a dreadful name for Glasman’s ideas and his group, and the ebook they published a couple of months ago, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, is neither coherent nor comprehensive. It reads as what it is – a string of papers by people who are interested in pursuing certain themes but haven’t quite worked out what they think, with the only really thought-through contribution a schematic and in many respects eccentric essay by Glasman himself that raises more questions than it answers.
Nevertheless, Glasman, for all his extraordinary ability to put his foot in his mouth while dropping a bollock, has some important things to say that need to be said. Dismissing him as a clown or as some kind of far-right infiltrator into Labour’s ranks is easy, but a mistake.
His most telling point is that Labour over the past two decades has abandoned any critique of capitalism as a destroyer of social solidarity and community in favour of cheerleading its creativity and dynamism. New Labour’s unqualified enthusiasm for the “modernising” effects of globalisation, flexible labour markets and free competition has, he argues, left large swathes of the working class utterly alienated from Labour. And the first priority for anyone interested in rescuing Labour must be to reconnect it to these people’s lives as they have been and are actually lived. For many of them, a lot that has happened in the past 40 years – breakdown of communities, collapse of secure employment, ever-increasing shortages of affordable housing – has been for the worse, under Labour as well as Tory governments.
Now, the way Glasman fleshes this out is intensely problematic. There are times when he appears to be romanticising a working class that never existed, others when he seems hopelessly nostalgic about a world to which we cannot return. His prescriptions, both in terms of organisation and policy, are often wrong. He sees community mobilisation as a panacea, on flimsy evidence, and seems to think that it can thrive if only the over-mighty technocratic state is cut back. And moving in one leap from the observation that working-class worries about immigration will not go away to the conclusion that immigration should be stopped at once is breathtakingly simplistic.
But at least Glasman is asking what Labour is for, and his insistence that it cannot survive if it remains disengaged from the everyday lives of the people that were once its core support makes a lot of sense. An arid, abstractly liberal Labour that fetishes the new, professing that things can only get better and turning its back on everything rooted or old, can never inspire a movement – and as Harold Wilson famously (although cynically) put it, the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing.
I was shocked to read in The Guardian that City of Westminster police’s “counter-terrorism information desk” had issued a leaflet urging people to inform on anarchists. “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchism.” The leaflet was disowned by Scotland Yard, which issued a statement saying it was a poor choice of words by a minion at a single police station and that all the leaflet should have said was that the Met was looking for information on those who had caused criminal damage to business premises this year. “The Metropolitan police does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views”. I’ll wager that, when the records are opened in 30 years, we’ll find that a substantial part of Special Branch’s anti-terrorism budget since the end of the Cold War has been devoted to keeping track of anarchists, who in that time have been responsible for zero terrorist attacks in Britain
