Ed West writes:
It was interesting to note that in his Times interview yesterday Tony Blair criticised Blue Labour, the socially conservative philosophy of Labour peer Maurice Glasman. He said:
"I’d be worried about indulging in a nostalgia which suggests a great emotional empathy with someone when you don’t have a policy to deal with it, and so you end up in a small ‘c’ conservative position. The attraction of a concept like Blue Labour is it allows you to say there’s a group of voters out there we can’t reach at the moment, so what we should do is really empathise with their plight. But I think you should always offer a away forward for the future. The way the Labour Party wins, is if it’s the cutting edge of the future, is if it’s modernising. It won’t win by a Labour equivalent of warm beer and old maids bicycling."
He’s not the first. Another critic accused Blue Labour of using “convenient scapegoats” (which is Marxist speak for being anti-mass immigration) while Billy Bragg called it a “socially conservative, economically liberal agenda, which, with its appeals to flag, faith and family, sounds more like something that would go down well on doorsteps in Birmingham, Alabama, rather than in its West Midlands namesake”.
Bragg clearly doesn’t have a clue what he’s on about – Blue Labour is sceptical about economic liberalism, that’s the whole point – but his criticism that Blue Labour would be bigoted is shared by almost all the Guardian’s commentators (bar John Harris).
For Blair to accuse someone of being nostalgic is a bit like Lady Gaga accusing you of being a prude. Blair is almost a hyper-neophile, a particular type of upper-middle class British babyboomer obsessed with modernity – the most obvious symptom of which us the use of the transatlantic Ds for Ts, America representing everything that is modern for his generation.
Blair is also hyper-rich, indeed he is the manifestation of “the global footloose force called ‘international capital’” as the Economist once described them, part of what American social critic Christopher Lasch called “the revolt of the elites” – he has no sense of ties of loyalty to place or people. But nor would I if I was paid £50,000 to turn up at the opening of a toilet factory in Uzbekistan every other day.
Blair represents everything that went wrong with Labour. But it’s a mystery. After all, Labour paid out a fortune in benefits, they actually spent an enormous amount on the NHS and on building schools, and they did enlarge welfare provision in most areas. And yet by the end the working class hated them just as much as everyone else did, and left them in droves.
Why? Because New Labour ignored the most important thing in life – relationships. Under Blair, Britain became an increasingly atomised place, and over the previous 40, perhaps 50 years, levels of social capital and solidarity have dropped remarkably. During that period inequality and crime levels have also both increased at staggering rates – and these three things are all heavily interlinked. Both the Red Tory Phillip Blond and his Blue Labour counterpart Maurice Glasman understand this, which is why both attract such hostility from their own sides, and why both should be listened to.
The two differ on many points, but where they agree is that this thing called the Broken Society exists and is tied up to all three trends. Blond identifies that society cannot be rebuilt unless inequality is tackled, for both moral and economic reasons; Blue Labour recognises that wealth redistribution, while good, is not enough, and that social solidarity must be mended. But this means going against two of the most powerful forces in the Labour party – radical feminists and multiculturalists.
The “bigot” tag is especially strange, because even the more sensible liberals now recognise that multiculturalism is a train wreck and that some sort of national identity is vital to rebuild those relationships. Yet what Blair and Brown offered as a vision of British values – “tolerance”, “equality” etc – was not British but liberal patriotism. Likewise Bragg’s “patriotism” is patriotism for socialism, not England.
And although it was New Labour’s immigration policy that aggravated these social problems, and massively sunk the wages of the poor, it is the Left that actually has a better chance of re-creating a “generous patriotism”, in Glasman’s phrase, one that can unite all citizens.
It is not nostalgia to see where things have gone wrong and to wish to correct them; it is blinkered not to just because it doesn’t fit into your ideological framework. Most people aren’t blinkered in that way, and recognise that the Broken Society exists. That is why the Blue Labour agenda has real potential, even to Conservative voters.
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