The
announcement that Progress, the Blairite Right Wing group inside the Labour
Party, is to publish something called ‘The Purple Book’ later this year is just
the latest development of the so-called Blue Labour project.
The
announcement that Progress, the Blairite Right Wing group inside the Labour
Party, is to publish something called ‘The Purple Book’ later this year is just
the latest development of the so-called Blue Labour project. Progress is a body
with few members but a large amount of big business funding, which has enabled
it to function over the years, pushing the pro-capitalist line of its cohorts.
The Labour Right Wing has always had just well funded pressure groups and
journals to push its case. In the past they had money from the CIA, now they get
it from sympathetic bosses. Why is Blue Labour being so heavily promoted by the
national press? To understand this we need to look at the state of the Labour
leadership itself.
It is inevitable and necessary that
following 13 years of New Labour government, which succeeded in both alienating
its working class base and strangling internal democracy in the party, the
first year in the wilderness after electoral defeat in 2010 would produce an
identity crisis in the leadership of the Labour Party. New Labour ideology,
with its disappointment and failings, weighs heavily on the new leadership of
the Labour Party. They are cut from the same cloth, they grew up under
Blairism, and they accepted it under the illusion that it was the basis on
which their careers would be built. But at the same time there is a gnawing
awareness at the top that something is deeply wrong, that they do not
understand what has happened and where Britain is going. For that reason, the
leadership appears confused, vacillating and unconfident. This confusion is
expressing itself through various advisors displaying deep doubts as to where
Labour is going. They acknowledge that there is some sort of crisis of social
democracy, but do not know why or what to do about it. The reason for this
crisis is that the Labour Party has tried to manage capitalism in an epoch of
enormous capitalist crisis.
Currently
the theorist ‘in vogue’ is Maurice Glasman with his ‘Blue Labour’ project.
There is a lot of hubbub about this “exciting new theory” which can apparently
explain why New Labour failed and how to move on.. Glasman speaks a lot about
the need to regain the confidence of the working class and how New Labour
abandoned ‘traditional’ workers to the ravages of the free market. The ‘Blue’
is a reference to conservatism, being the colour of the Conservative Party,
because Glasman harks back to a time when the Labour Party was able to give the
working class reforms, rather than attack them. Through this attempt at
rebranding we can see the unmistakable mark of the pressure that exists to move
the party to the left to gain support. But it is only a hint of what will come
in the future – Blue Labour is in reality an attempt to appeal to workers on a
reactionary basis. As Lisa Ansell says in the Guardian “Blue Labour is the only way
"New" Labour can continue after a global financial crisis.”
Glasman
writes about the need to recapture a broad base, an alliance of ordinary people
suffering from the capitalist crisis.
“Labour needs to recall its vocation as the democratic
driver of the politics of the common good, a Labour politics that brings
together immigrants and locals, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and
atheists, middle and working classes.
[…]
This
always generates a rich and complex politics that is as much about cherishing
what you know and love as about the pursuit of progressive ends. That is why
Labour politics has always been radical and conservative, wishing to democratise
ancient institutions such as parliament and the city councils.”
Glasman is forced to speak in hopelessly abstract
and nebulous terms about ‘communities’, ‘bringing people together’ (as if
someone were proposing that we deliberately alienate people from each other)
and the all-embracing value of institutions like parliament. The reason for
this is clear – he wants to move away from unabashed pro-capitalism but is
scared of appealing directly to the working class and its organisations. He
wants to find a middle way, one that is not ‘neoliberal’ but does not admit the
working class any leading role. On what programme these disparate communities
will be brought together is never stated.
So everything is blurred, amorphous and indistinct.
Glasman has discovered that, beneath the
superficial differences, there is something that unites ordinary Muslims,
Christians, atheists etc. This is their common experience of exploitation,
“unless there were effective
organisations, immigration led to a double exploitation, of the immigrants and
of the locals. We ran a campaign called Strangers into Citizens so that illegal
immigrants could build alliances and a common life with their new neighbours
and colleagues. We ran the Living Wage Campaign to assert a common human status
for all who worked in an enterprise or institution.
It was driven primarily by faith communities who asserted the
dignity of labour and the importance of association. It was a resistance to the
commodification of labour. The Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals and Muslims
I worked with did not talk to me about changing divorce laws or prohibiting
civil partnerships, about abortion or the hijab. We spoke about a living wage,
about establishing an interest rate ceiling of 20%, about affordable family
housing and community land trusts and about achieving a common status as a
citizen of the country. We spoke about matters of common concern where we had
common interests.”
But unfortunately he never manages to ascend from
these isolated examples, and so he stops short of giving any sort of political
programme for the Labour Party to fight on and a banner to unite these people.
Rather than say what the content of such a programme would be, he just speaks
in the abstract about the need for a ‘conversation’,
“The centrality of one-to-one
conversations, of relationship building, of establishing trust between what
were seen as incompatible communities and interests transformed my
understanding of what a politics of the common good could be, and of what
Labour should be about. A political party that is a democratically organised
force for the common good. In order to do this, Labour must establish those
conversations that broker a common good…and build a common programme.”
The closest we get to a political programme from
Blue Labour is a statement of general opposition to big banks, “the control of the City of
London in regional investment must be broken and local banks established that
could enable people to have meaningful jobs and live closer to their parents.”
But how is that to be done? Challenging the power of multinational banking
conglomerates is a serious business with serious consequences. Not only would
this task meet with incredibly powerful opposition, but breaking up the banks
is not the solution. The banks should be nationalised and put under workers
control so that they can serve society rather than have society serve them. To
do that and to overcome the bankers’ resistance, the working class must be won
over to this position (which would not be so hard in this period!) and
mobilised to carry it out.
Unfortunately,
it is impossible to seriously entertain the idea that if Blue Labourites came
to power on this vague programme, this general complaint about the power of
finance capital, a serious issue to which he never does justice by proposing
anything clear, that they would do anything other than what New Labour did –
attempt to manage capitalism on behalf of the ruling class. Glasman’s main Blue
Labour adherent inside the Parliamentary Labour Party is James Purnell – the
Blairite minister who tried to ram through reactionary welfare cuts and
demonised the working class in the process.
In their
attempt to find a base of support in the working class without actually
offering them a fighting, anti-cuts programme, the Blue Labourites resort to
the familiar tactic of demagogically fanning the flames of racism. This also
completely contradicts the other statements about building a dialogue between
different communities, and exposes their false and patronising perception of
the working class as riddled with racist and religious prejudices. Glasman has
even called for Labour to establish links with English Defence League
supporters! What sort of effect would that have on Labour’s large support base
amongst minorities?!
What is clear is
that only the working class itself can transform and renew the Labour Party.
Theorists such as the Blue Labour clique cannot do that on their behalf, since
they cannot even appeal to the working class as they are not prepared to break
with capitalism in any way even for an instant. They have nothing positive to
offer workers and so must try to appeal to racism. Glasman ends his Blue Labour
article on suitably vague terms, “the price of victory is a constructive
alternative and it will be crafted by all elements of the tradition.” Inspiring
stuff.
But whereas Glasman tries to maintain New
Labour after the crisis with reactionary demagogy, Patrick Diamond, who drew up
New Labour manifestos and worked closely with our friend Peter Mandelson, has
responded to the crisis by drawing the conclusion that the working class does
not exist or has swung permanently and violently to the right. He has given Ed
Miliband the morbid warning that he is straying dangerously to the left by
participating in the ‘politics of protest’ and is risking its very ability to
win power. Presumably the ‘politics of protest’ remark is a reference to Ed
Miliband’s participation on the 26th March demonstration, which
happened to be the biggest trade union led demonstration ever in the UK. So
much for the ‘dangers’ of chronic irrelevance and unpopularity that this
represents! In reality, Diamond is worried about control of the Labour Party
slipping from the fingers of Blairite elites such as himself and into the hands
of the organised working class. God forbid!
What is the
evidence for this danger of isolation?
“The Policy Network, founded by
Lord Mandelson, is to publish the findings of a YouGov opinion poll that shows
a public lack of confidence in the ability of the European centre-left to
govern for the mainstream. The poll was conducted in the US and in Britain,
Germany and Sweden. It found the following:
A lack of faith in the ability of
governments to stand up to vested interests – just 16% believed they could in
the UK, 21% in Germany and 27% in Sweden. This leads to scepticism about the
ability of government-led action to improve societies, with 29% in the UK and
27% in Germany questioning whether governments can be an effective force. [This
proves precisely that the working class has only lost faith in reformism’s
ability to fight capitalism, a belief that is pretty well founded!]
A strong belief among centre-right voters
that centre-left governments tax too much, with not enough public benefit. Over
two-thirds of Tory voters (68%) and 30% of Liberal Democrats believe this.
[What exactly is polling Tory voters and finding out that they disagree with
Labour supposed to prove?]
Pessimism about the benefits of a
university degree. Scepticism is highest in Britain (79%), with the deepest
reservations among the 18- to 24-year-olds (83%) and the over-60s (88%).
[Again, this belief is pretty well founded and only further proves a lack of
faith in reformism and capitalism]”
These theorists, falling over themselves to
find excuses to keep the party on a Tory agenda, have falsely drawn the
conclusion from this poll that, since faith in traditional social democracy has
declined, it must be replaced with something more like Toryism. They display
their theoretical superficiality by not analysing the reasons for this lack of
faith – that social democracy or reformism enters into decline and crisis as
capitalism does. Since capitalism can no longer offer reforms for the working
class but cuts instead, it would make sense that reformism would lose
credibility. Statistics also consistently show that faith in all major
political parties is at an all time low. The brutality of Thatcherism towards
the working class has done long term damage to the electability of the Tories,
who could still only muster about 35% at best after 13 years out of power. The
phenomenon of apathy or cynicism towards politics expresses dissatisfaction
with what capitalism has to offer. That high powered and unelected advisors
should always draw the conclusion from such findings that we need to move even
further to the right, only proves their blind commitment to the capitalist
system which has served them so well.
But we agree with Diamond when he says the
following,
“There is
little sense of a coherent ideological programme through which social democrats
might govern in the future in a world transformed irrevocably by the global
financial crisis. It is not simply that social democrats have failed to win
elections at the national level. Rather, it is the lack of public confidence
that social democrats have a clear idea of what to do with power when they
win."
The global crisis of capitalism and the increasing polarisation
of British society do pose serious questions for the leadership of the Labour
Party. On 16th May 2011 we read in the Guardian that,
“a new ICM poll shows that 72% of the public think high
pay makes Britain a grossly unequal place to live, while 73% say they have no
faith in government or business to tackle excessive pay…the top 0.1% of UK earners
will see their pay rise from 5% to an estimated 14% of national income by 2030,
a level not previously seen in the UK since the start of the 20th century.
"Average pay growth was slowing before
the recession, wages took a real hit during the recession and we’re now seeing
very slow wage growth coupled with high consumer inflation. There are real
issues of fairness at a point when workers are facing the greatest squeeze in
living standards for decades."
Much of this polarisation took place under
and was officially sanctioned by the New Labour government. That is the reason
for the discrediting of ‘social democracy’.
We do not share this doom and gloom about
the working class. The social basis for the Labour Party has not disappeared or
abandoned the idea of socialism. We have just witnessed the largest trade union
led demonstration in British history. There is a mass movement developing
against the Tory agenda. The Liberals have been shattered and the Tories’
support will be next. The majority of those marching on 26th March
were Labour supporters. Whereas the demonstrations for the cuts can muster 300
people, the organised working class who still support Labour come out in
hundreds of thousands. And as they struggle against this government and move to
reclaim the Labour Party for themselves, the working class will teach Messrs.
Diamond and Glasman a lesson in how to really renew the Labour Party.
Blue Labour and it’s promised bible “The Purple Book” is just a pathetic
attempt by disgruntled Blairites, who hark back to the days when “their man”
was in number 10 , to push Labout towards a mythical centre ground that is
nothing more than a re-hashed version of the Tory-lite policies that doomed New
Labour before. The way to win the votes of workers and youth is to stand up for
clear policies that will challenge capitalism, the cuts and the exploitation of
the masses.. These policies are called socialism. Forget the Blue and the
Purple, we want Red!
