Labour Britain is falling apart in front of our eyes. The Starmer government has not only failed to articulate a vision; it has allied itself with big money rather than working people; it has listened to its donors rather than its members; it has chased far-right voters at the expense of progressives; it has forced out much of the left; it has behaved sycophantically towards Donald Trump; and it has disgraced itself in slavish support of Israel’s genocide.
Things are so bad that we face the threat of Nigel Farage taking power. Even to avoid Pasokification, Labour needs to change. But it is now quite unlikely that, even with change, it will retain a majority in 2029. The progressive alliance that Compass advocates could be the only thing that the stands between Britain and a Reform UK dictatorship. If Brexit = Trump Mark I, a Farage regime could = Trump Mark II with skates on.
In this situation, while dialogue is important, we need a sharp eye on political realities. It cannot be appropriate that the left should choose this moment to engage with Blue Labour, the Labour strand that is most associated with the causes of our present impasse: which embraced Brexit; prioritised immigration control; fetishised the Red Wall; helped inspire Morgan McSweeney’s disastrous strategic course; and even (in the case of its most prominent figure) embraced Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
These were my reactions when I read Frances Foley’s new Compass pamphlet, Soft Skills, Hard Labour: The Case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour Politics. The argument is pitched as a philosophical case for cross-fertilising “communitarianism” and “democracy”, and it would be churlish to dismiss this outright. Yes, the left must combat inequality and seek to retain working-class support. And we should certainly take inspiration from William Morris – but also remember that he was a revolutionary and anti-imperialist, who firmly rejected Blue Labour’s nineteenth-century equivalents like Henry Hyndman.
I’m not convinced that this issue can be addressed at the philosophical level on which Foley pitches it. Blue Labour is a political tendency and must be judged by political standards. I’d be more convinced if there was some accounting for the conclusions to which its ideas have led. If Blue Labour needs to be coaxed back to the liberal, pluralist values of the soft left, perhaps there was something pretty wrong with it all along.
Foley says: “To have any hope of retaining any working class support, Labour must integrate some of Blue Labour’s communitarianism, while also preserving what is best about the soft left’s pluralism”. Certainly, community is a value worth talking about, but in Blue Labour’s terms? Given its roles in Brexit and Labour’s new, extreme anti-immigrant policies, I find it difficult not to read this as a reference to the white, Reform-leaning, section of the working-class, rather than the working class as a whole. And to be reminded that the “blue” here refers not only to blue-collar workers, but also to the colour of the Conservative Party and “conservative social democracy”, which is another way this tendency has been defined. In Blue Labour’s hands, “communitarianism” seems to privilege an idealised white working-class community that no longer exists, cannot be recreated, and whose promotion today only stokes division.
In electoral terms, this orientation is suicidal for Labour. Political scientists are telling us that since the electorate is divided into left and right blocs, the party needs to compete in the progressive world that Compass sees to unite, and emphasise the issues we care about, not play to the far right’s concerns. And emphasising the Red Wall embeds the “ecological fallacy”, the idea that because a constituency has an anti-immigrant majority, the party must pitch to those voters – when actually the potential Labour voters in the constituency have much the same attitudes as Labour voters everywhere.
Labour needs to avoid the terrible mistakes that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made by alienating progressives and minorities during the US election. Driving left and Muslim voters into abstention, and even into the arms of Trump, they saddled the US with an authoritarian regime and all of us with a saboteur of the global order.
Engaging with Blue (or should it be Turquoise?) Labour is a red rag to those who are deserting Labour – not only for the Greens and Your Party, but also for the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru and the SNP. By associating Compass with Blue Labour, this pamphlet risks sending a signal that our problems can be addressed by negotiating with the toxic direction of the present Labour government. If this approach seriously informed Compass’s direction, activists like me who are not Labour members would have to rethink our allegiance.
Martin Shaw is emeritus professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex, who writes widely on global politics and has recently published The New Age of Genocide. His website is martinshaw.org and he is on Twitter and Substack @martinshawx.