Blue Labour, True Labour

Maurice Glasman writes:

I had a really bad day yesterday. It started with Jon Cruddas and I going down to the Guildhall in the City of London with the Billingsgate porters, all dressed in their whites and boots, to protest against the fact that the Corporation of London was taking away their civic inheritance. The court of common council was voting to abolish "the fellowship of the Billingsgate porters" which has been recognised since 1632. We wrote about it in the Guardian.

At 1pm, about 80 porters walked into the Guildhall and sat on the public seats. They waited and waited while the court went through its business, with the lord mayor, Mike Bear, wearing his three-pointed hat, and flanked by the aldermen in their red robes, telling the court of his visits abroad to promote the interests of the financial services industry. Things sounded like they went quite well in Malaysia. Then there was a long discussion concerning the location of temporary toilets, or "Portaloos", near Liverpool Street, to the great hilarity of the common councilman. The porters knew who was pissing on whom in this war.

And then came their abolition. As an example of why the bylaws needed revoking, an alderman said that one of their conditions was that the porters should "toss out vagabonds and vagrants". He added, "as we know, there are more than enough tossers in Billingsgate market". The porters knew who he was talking about then as well. The vote to abolish the status of porter was unanimous. The City of London Corporation is like the Soviet Union, your economic bosses are also your political bosses. There was never any doubt which way this one would go.

As we walked out the Guildhall the porters felt abandoned, powerless and humiliated. It made me think of the countless acts of enclosure that flowed from the subordination of customary practice to freehold ownership that followed from the Norman conquest and the ownership of the land by the king and his nobles. The dispossession of the English peasantry. The foundation of the labour movement on the basis that when people had neither money nor land all they had was each other. And they built a democratic movement to preserve their status as something other than a commodity.

This is at the heart of the labour tradition. Relationships, organisation, institutions, leadership, power, action.

It was a movement for the common good in which people who were previously divided found common cause. Secular and religious, Catholic and Protestant, immigrant and local. Cardinal Manning led the dockers' march in 1889 serenaded by the Salvation Army band. Christianity has deep roots in the labour movement and the honouring of the love, sacrifice and loyalty necessary for family life was part of that. The exploitation of children and their separation from their parents was resisted by the Labour movement always.

One of the reasons why I'm blue is that capital is extremely powerful and it is built upon the logic of maximising its return on investment. This leads to "commodification", the process through which human beings and nature are turned into something that you can buy or sell on the market. The City of London Corporation is the sublime form of this power. It enjoys a privileged position in the ancient constitution as the embodiment of democratic citizenship. It is, indeed, a "commune", but it is entirely at the service of capital. The most ancient institution in the land is the driver of brutal modernisation that is based on the subordination of labour to capital. It has been getting its own way for more than a thousand years and this was no different. The years ahead will require bravery, solidarity and perseverance.

This was my mood when I came home and Cruddas told me that Billy Bragg had written a piece in the Guardian saying that "Blue Labour" was pursuing an "economically liberal agenda".

I don't understand and I need help.

In everything I have ever written or done I have criticised the domination of capital and argued for the democratic renewal of the Labour movement to resist its power. That is all I stand for really. Resistance to commodification through democratic organisation. That's the position. Labour as a radical tradition that pursues the common good. That is Blue Labour, and the rest is commentary.

The work I did with London Citizens – living wage, interest rate cap, community land trusts – was built on this idea. Renewing relationships, institutions, the practices of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity, organising people to resist the power of money. Labour is not the liberal party. It resisted that fate. It understands finance capital as a power and promotes the democratic resistance to its domination. That is why it is Labour, and it is Labour alone that can once again generate a politics of the common good.

And yet Bragg thinks I represent the opposite.

The debate about why Labour went wrong and how it can become stronger is of the highest importance in renewing a movement that can resist the power that robbed the Billingsgate porters of their civic inheritance.

Ray Charles asked "Am I blue?" and answered himself with the question, "Ain't these tears/In these eyes telling you?"

Thursday 7 April 2011 was not a good day.