‘A Warning From Europe on Why Keir Starmer’s ‘Blue Labour’ Strategy Is Such a Dangerous Dead End’

“Nations depend on rules, fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not. But either way they give shape to our values, guide us to our rights of course, but also to our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to each other. Now in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them we risk becoming an island of strangers”. 

This speech, made by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month, marked the moment when it became clear that the Labour Party leadership believes Reform UK is now the main obstacle to its reelection in four years time. With the Conservatives as their main opponents, Labour could always point to 14 years of decline in order to see off criticism, but Reform have never held power, so the Government, reportedly acting on the advice of Morgan McSweeney, has decided to instead mimic Reform UK in an attempt to defeat it. 

This predicament, of a mainstream political party panicking at vote losses to the radical right, is not new. Indeed it is a story that has been replicated across most of Europe over the last decade. Byline Times spoke to four European-based political experts to discuss what happened on the continent when other centrist politicians decided that the path to defeating the far right lay in copying them. 

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France

Macronism was never particularly popular, achieving just 24% in the first round of the presidential election. For a long time French politics has been split between three blocs; left, “centre” and far right since 2017. This meant Macron’s electoral strategy has been one of “en meme temps” (at the same time) as he put it during his 2017 campaign. According to Ugo Palheta, a lecturer at the University of Lille and author of the forthcoming Why Fascism is on the Rise in France, “In Macron’s first campaign in 2017, he was pretty liberal – on immigration, but also on Islam and Muslims” he had not yet started using the far right language of ‘islamo-leftism’, ‘immigrationism’, ‘de-civilisation’ that he would go on to pick up later.

But, “in 2017 when he became president he understood that his electoral and social base […] was very narrow and to stabilise his power he would have to expand his electorate and go on the right wing. Because Francois Fillon, the candidate of the traditional right got 20% with very radical right positions”. 

This “post-Sarkozyist” turn for Macron was consistent with his program of cutting public spending. Palheta says that Macron has presided over a process of “fascistisation” and that his presidency has largely been characterised by a “hardening of the state”, in “terms of police repression of [protests], preventing the National Assembly from voting on certain things notably about pensions, and a series of laws around immigration, Islam and Muslims’ rights”.

These laws include the ending of birthright citizenship in Mayotte, the French overseas territory (with a further hardening to come), the botched attempt to introduce national preference, meaning only French citizens could access certain forms of welfare – including non-emergency healthcare and the ‘seperatism law’ which gave the state significant power to dissolve religious organisations and civil society groups if they did not sufficiently “respect the principles of the republic”. Critics such as the Human Rights League say the seperatism law has been used to dissolve and deprive of funds, groups that oppose the Government politically. 

While Macron may have won re-election as President, making him the first to do so since Jacques Chirac in 2002, his concessions to the right have done nothing to stop its rise. In the legislative elections last year the RN won the most seats in their history and all the current polling has the far right, whether represented by Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella, as winning the first round of the presidential election by a significant margin. According to Palheta, even after Le Pen’s guilty verdict, the far right vote “remains very stable and attached to the National Front [the old name for the National Rally]”. “The answer was given 30 years ago, by Jean Marie Le Pen. At the end of day the electorate will choose the original and not the copy”. 

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Italy

Macron’s France is not the only country whose recent history should provide a warning to Keir Starmer. In Italy the far right has entered government, not once but twice in the last decade, with Matteo Salvini’s Northern League entering a coalition with the 5 Star Movement in 2018, before Meloni’s Brothers of Italy swept to power as the head of a coalition of right wing parties in 2022. 

According to David Broder, the author of Mussolini’s Grandchildren, the centre-left  Democratic Party responded to the rise of the Northern League by tacking to the right on immigration. Broder says Matteo Renzi, the former PM and in particular Marco Minniti who served as the interior minister between 2016 and 2018 made policy on the basis of “stop the boats”.

Minniti was dubbed Italy’s “minister of fear” after he made deals with power-brokers in post-Gaddafi Libya and the Libyan government to prevent migrant flows, which critics say resulted in thousands detained arbitrarily in camps. “What we are seeing now with Libya and Tunisia [deals with North African governments to curtail migrant flows] and so on, was already happening then even under the centre-left. It’s just over time it has radicalised more”. 

Minniti and Renzi’s lurch to the right on immigration did not yield electoral results, as evidenced by the election of the incumbent Meloni administration. “It alienates part of progressive opinion and doesn’t succeed in winning over right wingers. So at that level it seems to me to be pointless” says Broder, “when Minniti was interior minister, the number of people crossing [into Italy] fell drastically, but it did nothing to the Lega’s upward vote”. 

Minniti’s hawkishness on migration has fed into a wider trend. Broder argues that Italy’s innovations in curtailing migrant flows by making deals with regimes in North Africa, some of which occurred under the centre-left, have become “an EU-wide Fortress Europe policy that has basically become accepted from centre-left to far-right”. 

The process Broder describes of a convergence spanning centre-left (with some exceptions) to far right in support of Fortress Europe is evident in the way the Brothers of Italy highlights praise from foreign parties, including the Labour Government, in their propaganda. “The [Italian] Democrats will say Meloni is isolated in Europe and then Brothers of Italy will literally publish a front page of the Sunday Times where Starmer says Meloni is good on immigration”.

“Italian media”, Broder says “is completely obsessed with what anglophone media say about Italy and this kind of stuff is very widely noticed”. 

The Italian media also noticed another example of unusual proximity of the Labour Government to the Brothers of Italy, when Yvette Cooper attended the far right party’s political festival Atreju. The Voice of Patriots, a radical right media outlet in Italy described her visit as a meeting of “Two Interior Ministers: Matteo Piantedosi and Yvette Cooper. Two different nationalities, two different political affiliations, a similar vision on a problem that does not allow ideological divisions”. 

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Sweden

While the Italian and French right remain fairly closely rooted to their national context, the Swedish right, much like the British, imports its discourses from across the Atlantic according to journalist Martin Gelin, who wrote in the Guardian in 2023 that “over the past few years, something has genuinely changed. The political discourse is aggressive, focused on the culture wars, and seems stuck in a constant mode of outrage. The shrill vocabulary often seems to be lifted straight from American cable news”. 

In 2022, a right wing minority government was formed which relies on support from the far right Sweden Democrats. Gelin says that Sweden “is maybe the clearest example” of a conservative party allowing a far right party “to write policy and set the agenda. They thought it would kind of marginalise the Sweden Democrats, but they are now very solidly the biggest party on the right”. 

This accommodation with the Sweden Democrats’ positions was not unique to the right, the Social Democrats, Sweden’s centre-left party “have accommodated a lot of their ideas and policies and kind of overcompensated for the perception that they were too humanitarian before 2015”. 

Evidence of this overcompensation can be seen in the support from the Social Democrats for putting electronic ankle tags on children suspected of involvement in gang crime. The proposal, which “does not even target convicted criminals” would become “very obvious fertile ground for racial profiling”. Gelin says “it’s an idea that would have been a shock had it come from the far right 10 years ago” yet now it’s coming from the centre-left. The Swedish Social Democrats are currently leading in the polls and look set to form the next government, however Gelin says that although they are seeing “some short term electoral success” there is a “major cost to this strategy” which is that “they’re losing the ideological battle on immigration and humanitarian issues, and they’re also ceding the whole public sphere, the whole political debate to the far right, to these issues that the far right wants to have discussed day after day”.

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Denmark

Sweden’s neighbour to the South offers the most compelling case for the effectiveness of a tough-on-immigration strategy. The Danish Social Democrats have been in power since 2019 and, in governing to the left economically but to the right socially, have managed to prevent any challenge by the far right. The success of the Danish Social Democrats is undeniable, but according to Lukas Slothuus, an academic whose political writing focuses on Denmark, this strategy has resulted in state overreach in terms of the “ghetto law” and rests on a left-wing economics that Starmer is unlikely to replicate. 

Slothuus says that the approach of the Danish Social Democrats in the last two elections has been to take a “right turn on migration – to be against migration. On social policy issues in general on issues like integration, there has been a sharp right turn and it has kind of paid off in elections”, but he adds “ you can’t really separate it from the broader redistributive politics that they have pursued”. 

According to Slothuus, in 2019 the Danish Social Democrats moved from being simply an anti-austerity party to fully embracing a form of Keynesianism which “rejected some of the basic tenets of neoliberalism”. This meant  “twinn[ing]” the rightward turn on social questions with a “redistributive politics and class politics” that included policies like the Arne pension – named after a brewery worker called Arne – which allowed for workers who have spent longer in the labour market because they did not pursue education to retire earlier. This “was a big part of their success as well” according to Slothuus, though he stresses that the Danish Soc Dems did not pull many voters back from the far right, and instead consolidated the left wing and centrist vote.

“They managed to basically cannibalise” the big centre-right party and have benefited from a “fractured” and “fragmented” right where the vote is split across several parties. 

The success of the Danish Social Democrats has not been without consequence however, while the Arne pension and similar Keynesian public investment policies have improved the lot of those they target, the anti-immigration side of the equation produced the “ghetto law”. The ghetto law assesses a neighbourhood based on various social metrics; crime, educational attainment, unemployment, income and, crucially, on the proportion of immigrants living there. If a neighbourhood has had more than 50% of first or second generation immigrants for the last five years then the Government requires the local housing association to cut social housing numbers including via demolitions and sale of the properties. 

Slothuus says that the policy is evidence of both sides of the Social Democrats’ approach at the same time, “these people are social democrats who believe in social housing ” so they thought “this is very poor quality housing, we need to  improve the housing stock by demolishing the old stuff to build something better”.

Unfortunately, “this process is very hard to do without dispossessing people […] the people in terrible housing tend to be immigrants”. In February of this year a top advisor the European Court of Justice found (in a non-binding advisory opinion), that the ghetto law amounted to “direct discrimination”.

The increasingly influential Blue Labour cohort of MPs is directly inspired by the Danish Social Democrats, particularly their approach to immigration.  Even if Starmer were to emulate Denmark in its harsh anti-migrant policies, critics such as Sam Freedman suggest that the Danish route is not one open to Starmer as the Danish Soc Dems can afford to lose votes to their left due to the PR system, allowing them to work in coalition with left parties after an election. However, the zero-sum competition under First Past the Post would leave Labour losing votes to its left with the Greens in English cities, to civic nationalists in Scotland and Wales and to the right to Reform in the Red Wall and the Conservative seats Labour captured in 2024. 

The European experiences offer windows into the potential futures of Starmer’s strategy, a Danish option that looks impractical, even before the ethics of it are considered, Italian and French options which appear to be leading to defeat electorally, and a Swedish option that sees a social democratic party become prisoner to a radical right consensus. Starmer may want to ask if any of these options are desirable.