‘Keir Starmer’s Blue Labour Strategy Is an Electoral Dead End for His Government’

As I’ve written for Byline Times before, every successful political project requires an intellectual framework.  Without such a foundation, when things get tough, politicians tend to lash out at anyone, and grab hold of anything to survive the day.  Over the last week that’s exactly what we’ve started to see with Keir Starmer’s Government.

With Reform leading in some polls, and by up to six per cent in one, Labour’s reaction has been to play them at their own game, doubling down on a battle to be seen as the cruellest party to anyone with the temerity to try and enter our country.

So far they’ve run Reform-style adverts crowing about the numbers they’ve deported, released pictures of handcuffed deportees being led up airplane steps, run social media campaigns in Albania warning people how hostile the UK now is to them, and changed the rules so that no one who enters the country illegally can ever claim British citizenship.

This is a race they can never win against Reform and should never want to. 

But this shift isn’t happening in isolation, it’s happening alongside the comet-like return of the pressure group ‘Blue Labour’ and its leading light Lord Maurice Glassman – a former associate of Starmer’s chief adviser Morgan McSweeney. 

Glassman is the driving spirit of this nebulous political force keen to mix nativism, class, faith and good old small c conservatism with more traditional left economics. Senior advisers in Downing Street itself were said to have been behind briefings heralding the influence of Blue Labour on the Government.  

Up until now I’d enjoyed conversations and debates with Glassman, but he seems to have jumped the shark.  Apparently through connections to JD Vance he secured a ticket to the Trump inauguration and while there appeared on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s War Room show.  In a performance he clearly enjoyed, Glassman argued that “progressivism is a sickness to me, it’s a palsy”.  He has since called for sacking of the Attorney General Richard Hermer who he called an “arrogant, progressive fool”.

The fact the Government is operating in such illiberal and politically ill-conceived ways, allied to the seemingly growing influence of Blue Labour, Glassman’s attacks, not just on some progressives or some progressive stances, but on all progressives is no small step, but a leap into treacherous binary waters. 

The brilliant Italian political strategist Antonio Gramsci argued that ‘there is always a kernel of truth in your opponent’s argument’.  The Blue Labour critique of New Labour also has some validity. Blairism swallowed globalisation whole, with its associated message to the working class to shut up and keep up. It encouraged mass immigration with little attention to the social and cultural implications. The country paid the price, first via Brexit and now through the rise of Reform. 

But the answer to Faragism cannot be the creation of a Reform-lite tribute band, Teal Labour if you like, and to turn on progressivism and denounce it as an illness.

Instead, we must learn from the successes and failures of New Labour, and the helpful, unhelpful and downright dangerous insights of Blue Labour.  And let’s add into that the successes (2017) and failures (2019) of Corbynism.  The only way we’re going to get out of this mess is a left politics which is prepared to combine different strands of thinking and practise into something radically new and popular.

There are elements of our society we need to conserve and parts we need to modernise. Often, we need a politics that is avowedly local but sometimes global.  We need to recognise that democracies and secure economies can only operate within borders that we need to be able to control.  But in a globalised economy and a world of climate chaos and geopolitical upheaval people are never going to be stopped from moving thousands of miles to find better lives. How we deal with those pressures and opportunities compassionately and fairly is the question – not who can punch down hardest. 

Labour, it seems, can only pick between being totally New Labour or darkest Blue Labour.  This isn’t a choice but a condemnation to failure and irrelevance. The future doesn’t have to be rocket-fuelled globalisation or the Hand Maidens Tale. Thinking you can win a majority from just the white working class is as bad as thinking they could and should be left behind, sneered at or treated with contempt because ‘they have nowhere else to go’. 

Reform are polling up to 29%, which under first past the post puts them beyond the tipping point, of not winning 29% of the seats but more like 50%.  They’re raking in money, claim to have 400 branches and over 208,000 members. They are never going to be appeased or thwarted by an imitation game that merely ratchets up the language of hate and not hope.  The answers to 2037 won’t be found in 1997 (New Labour) or 1957 (Blue Labour). 

The most important word in politics is one of the smallest, it is the word ‘and’. It is the messy world of ‘both/and’ that the left must embrace if it’s to deal with the complexities and challenges of the world knocking hard on our door.

The working class isn’t some homogeneous block of post liberal, anti-woke Trumpists.  Just like not every progressive lives in Islington, supports Arsenal and practises law from a first class business lounge.  The left has only ever succeeded electorally and politically with a nuanced message that aligns the interests of the middle and working classes.

We must forge this progressive alliance once more. It is the politics of humility, boldness and pluralism that will give us the intellectual, cultural and organisational depth to overcome the incredible threats and opportunities we face, not the retreat to old and cold-hearted  binaries.