So “Blue Labour”, a group of parliamentarians within the UK’s ruling Labour party, have issued a mini-manifesto (in April, actually, but just reported in the Guardian) which is going to get a lot of attention in British politics, for bad reasons.
The mini-manifesto stakes out a right-wing, authoritarian position which it wants our supposedly centre-left government to take, based above all on hostility to immigration.
Blue Labour do not seem to be a large or popular group, even within their own party. But they are influential on the government which has made itself very unpopular in less than a year and is now worried about the rising poll ratings of the rightwing nationalist Reform party.
Reform poses a direct electoral threat to some Blue Labour MPs and Blue Labour’s response is to advocate for a worldview which is very close to where Reform is heading.
Parts of this position are becoming conventional wisdom in the UK, for instance that the state should actively use industrial policy to improve economic conditions in those regions of the country where poverty and unemployment are high, and that some privatised public utilities should be brought back into public ownership.
These not inherently reactionary or authoritarian positions – if done democratically and with forethought, they are progressive. But in the case of Blue Labour, these other arguments are grouped around the central proposition that immigration is the biggest problem facing the UK.
The problem is not that Blue Labour will ever be able to implement all their ideas, but that they represent a growing ideological trend within British politics which receives tremendous support from our media and may come to be quietly tolerated by parts of the highly-paid white-collar classes which hope, by going along with it, to protect their own privileges.
Blaming immigrants for everything
Immigration is “the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy,” says Blue Labour. It wants the government to “drastically reduce” immigration and pull out of international treaties to do so, if necessary.
They go on to say: “We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities. We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices (italics added), sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.”
The message of Blue Labour here is unambiguous: people of foreign descent are implicated in the biggest political problem facing the UK. They can live their lives quietly here and be tolerated, provided they do not complain about embedded prejudice from which they suffer.
This message is, quite bluntly, wrong. The problems of the British state and British industry, which underpin our national nervous breakdown, are long-standing problems arising from long-term trends and domestic political choices which have nothing to do with immigration.
Blue Labour’s message is not precisely Trumpian – they are not calling for mass deportations – but under the pressures of politics and the need of governments to “do something” – it would quickly become much harsher.
As it is, this kind of utterance deepens the horrible psychological and bureaucratic pressure that people of foreign descent have always faced in this country to show that they “belong here.”
A pressure which our gormless Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, made worse recently with his “island of strangers” speech, a thinly-coded attack on immigration which echoed Blue Labour’s position, albeit in language which, in Starmer’s usual fashion, was intended to be deniable under pressure. (Starmer has a track record of saying controversial things, then claiming he was misunderstood).
The speech was meant to shore up his support with Reform-curious voters but of course had the opposite effect – these voters weren’t convinced by xenophobic dogwhistling from a weak PM who is a former human rights lawyer, while much of Labour’s core support was appalled by it.
Another central other pillar of Blue Labour’s position – familiar from rightwing propaganda all over the world – is a complaint that judges, civil servants and unelected bodies have taken too much power away from Parliament.
What this complaint amounts to in practice is a wish for Hungarian-style electoral dictatorship. In the British system, the Prime Minister has great political power if he or she knows how to wield it (which Starmer is struggling to do), so a call of this kind for Parliamentary sovereignty is really a call for the executive to be constrained only by its ability to secure an electoral majority and not by the law.
Turning right
If you look at the UK’s politics in structural terms, and recognise the intellectually lazy and parochial character of much of its political discourse, all of this is unfortunately predictable.
For many years, the chief split on the right of British politics was between a large faction which looked back to the free-market dogma of Margaret Thatcher and a smaller faction which was at best xenophobic and at worst openly racist.
The Thatcherite faction has almost disappeared: its ideas have become unpopular and implausible to almost everyone else in the UK (you may remember Liz Truss and the lettuce which lasted longer than she did as PM) and the xenophobic faction is now dominant. They were first off the blocks to respond to the crisis of neoliberalism, here and in other countries, because they had a ready-made set of arguments about race which don’t work on the basis of logic or proof but by pushing psychological buttons in parts of the electorate.
Reform’s leader Nigel Farage is by instinct a Thatcherite but in order to win over socially conservative working-class voters who want more protection from the state, he is opportunistically borrowing some more statist ideas which were the province of Labour and in particular the left wing of the party. He’s started to talk about nationalisation, for instance.
Blue Labour is a manifestation of the rightwing authoritarian streak which has always existed in the Labour Party, now marching across the wasteland of the centre ground to meet Reform. Since the media is still influential, and still mostly owned by oligarchs, this message will be given disproportionate prominence in our national conversation and it will take years of effort by open-minded people to push it back to the margins.
Fossil fuels
Blue Labour calls for “cheap, clean energy” to bring down energy prices for British industry. Since the word “climate” does not appear anywhere in the mini-manifesto, it’s safe to assume that “clean” energy in this case means not just renewables but fossil gas.
They don’t say this out loud because the public is generally quite worried about the climate crisis, but this wording suggests that Blue Labour’s position on energy supply will most likely turn out to be the current position of the oil industry: no, we don’t deny the climate crisis, yes, renewables are good, but the energy transition will need oil and gas for a conveniently undefined period which turns out to be conveniently equal to, or longer than, the career spans of executives who are amassing dynastic fortunes out of selling oil and gas and Gulf Arab petrocrats who will buy British assets as long as we don’t rock their petrol-powered boat.
The crunch point for this in the UK will be the fate of the North Sea, which is running out of oil and gas. There are no good arguments for prolonging the life of the North Sea but Blue Labour will no doubt add its shrill and bossy voice to the bad arguments.
I worked for many years for NGOs on political problems to do with natural resources, and there’s some curious framing language right at the start of the mini-manifesto which I think is worth repeating in full:
“The return of Donald Trump to the White House, the war in Ukraine, the threats of big power politics, and conflicts around mineral and hydrocarbon resources, have provided a catalyst for a Labour story about national and economic security.”
The first few clauses are not exceptional in modern British discourse, on all sides of politics, but look at “conflicts around mineral and hydrocarbon resources.” Excepting the tragedy of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, there are no such conflicts at the moment.
The war in Ukraine has implications for the world pricing of hydrocarbons but it is not about natural resources. The destruction of Gaza may have an indirect connection to gas deposits in the Mediterranean but it is not about those deposits. Sudan, now riven by civil war, is a producer of oil but not a major supplier to the world market. And so on.
So why is Blue Labour talking about “conflicts around … hydrocarbon resources”?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the British right, which includes Blue Labour, has noticed Trump’s threats to Greenland and the dominance of mineral value chains by Chinese firms and so envisages a world in which Britain has to intervene politically and militarily in poorer countries to secure energy and minerals, to preserve its high standards of living. Not next year or the year after, I suspect, but within a decade this may become a “thing” on the right.
I personally think this is a nonsense vision – for one thing, the UK’s foreign military expeditions have a bad history which people still remember – but we can expect to hear more of it across Europe in future, as well as from the UK. Armies which are being beefed up to deter Russia to the east can also be sent south, given the right transport and logistics.
So there you have it: the UK’s biggest problem is people of foreign descent, according to Blue Labour. Here’s the ahistorical stupidity of that claim being brilliantly exposed for what it is.
What a miserable diagnosis from a miserable set of people. This entire way of thinking will fail in the end, if only because our population will shrink if it doesn’t, but not before it’s done a huge amount of damage to all of us.
Puck 