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Blue Labour

Blue Labour
Parliamentary group leaderDan Carden
FounderMaurice Glasman
FoundedApril 2009 (2009-04)
Ideology
Political positionEconomic:
Left-wing[7]
Social:
Right-wing[7]
PartyLabour Party
Colours  Blue
Parliamentary Labour Party
4 / 404
House of Commons
4 / 650
Website
bluelabour.org

Blue Labour is a British campaign group and political faction that seeks to promote blue-collar and culturally conservative values within the British Labour Party – particularly on immigration, crime, DEI and community spirit – while remaining committed to labour rights and left-wing economic policies.[8][9][10][11][12] It seeks to represent a traditional working-class approach to Labour politics. In Parliament, the faction is led by MP Dan Carden, who founded the Blue Labour parliamentary caucus of Labour MPs in 2025 along with Jonathan Brash, Jonathan Hinder, and David Smith.[1][13][14]

Launched in 2009 as a counter to New Labour,[15] the Blue Labour movement first rose to prominence after Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election,[16] in which for the first time the party received fewer working-class votes than it did middle-class votes.[17] The movement has influenced a handful of Labour MPs and frontbenchers; founder Maurice Glasman served as a close ally to Ed Miliband during his early years as Leader of the Opposition, before himself becoming a life peer in the House of Lords.[18] The movement has also seen a resurgence of interest[19] after the loss of red wall seats in the 2019 general election.

Blue Labour argues that the party lost touch with its base by embracing anti-patriotism in the face of Brexit[20] and by undermining solidarity in local communities through bureaucratic collectivism, social agendas, and neoliberal economics. It argues that whilst postwar Old Labour had become too uncritical of state power, New Labour far worsened this with an uncritical view of global markets as well. The group further advocates a switch to local and democratic community management and provision of services, rather than relying on a top-down welfare state which it sees as excessively bureaucratic.[12][21][22] Economically it is described as a "movement keen on guild socialism and continental corporatism".[23]

The Blue Labour position has been articulated in books such as Tangled Up in Blue (2011) by Rowenna Davis, Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst and Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good (2022) by Glasman himself. Additional elucidations on Blue Labour's ideas can be found in The Purple Book (2011) by Robert Philpot and Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2020) by Paul Embery. A number of commentators, including Adrian Pabst himself, have argued that, as leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has adopted significant elements of Blue Labour's analysis and policies.[24]

  1. ^ a b Rodgers, Sienna; Scotson, Tom (1 February 2025). "Blue Labour v Reform: The Pro-Worker, Anti-Woke Plan To Beat Farage". PoliticsHome. Retrieved 1 February 2025.
  2. ^ Jim Pickard (4 February 2025). "Labour MPs set up group to focus on threat posed by Reform UK". Financial Times. Retrieved 4 February 2025.
  3. ^ [1][2]
  4. ^ Pitt, Daniel (2021). "Future Conservative Electoral Prospects: Time for Tory Socialism ?". 3. What the future holds... The Conservative Party and the Brexit Crisis. 27 (1): 267–291. doi:10.4000/osb.5513. In recent British politics, the combining of the left side of the economic axis and the conservative side of the cultural axis has also been experimented with. For example, Blue Labour argues for conservative positions on social issues, and guild socialism in the economic sphere.
  5. ^
    • Garland, Nick (2024). "Plain Old Labour". Renewal. 32 (4): 14. Blue Labour's cultural politics can in many ways be seen as an inversion of Marquand's 'progressive dilemma': the presumed challenge was not to orient a Labourist working-class party such as to secure the support of the progressive middle classes, but to bend a progressive middle-class party to speak to an alienated, culturally conservative 'labour interest'. In its distaste for 'technocrats' and embrace of the ethical socialist tradition, this perspective essentially rejected wholesale the party's achievements in government.
    • McDaniel, Sean (February 2019). "Social Democracy in The Age of Austerity: The Cases of The UK Labour Party and France's Parti Socialiste, 2010-17" (PDF). Politics and International Studies. University of Warwick: 130. Blue Labour represents perhaps the best-known strand of new thinking within the ideational spectrum around Labour during this period (see Jobson 2014). Led by Maurice Glasman, the basis of the Blue Labour political economy is an ethical socialist critique that draws upon Polanyian (2001 [1944]) thought (see Finlayson 2013) to reject the statist, materialist and redistributive conception of socialism upon which the party had, it argues, come to rely since 1945 (see Glasman 2011: 21-22).
  6. ^ Bolton, Matt; Pitts, Frederick Harry (2020). "Corbynism, Blue Labour and post-liberal national populism: A Marxist critique" (PDF). British Politics. 15 (1): 2. doi:10.1057/s41293-018-00099-9. Instead, Blue Labour favours a corporatist system of labour relations in which work is regarded not simply as a means to make a living but as the primary bearer of the cultural and ethical traditions of the national community, to which political realm should be subservient.
  7. ^ a b Fleck, Micah J. (2022). Privileged Populists: Populism in the Conservative and Libertarian Working Class. London: I.B. Tauris. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-7556-2739-4. Contemporary politics is full of political movements or currents which are socially conservative while economically liberal (Thatcherism and Reaganism), or socially liberal while economically "right-wing" (David Cameron), or socially "right-wing" while economically "left-wing." (Blue Labour, the revived SDP, Steve Bannon, Neil Clarke).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference guardian-20250602 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Goodhart, David (20 March 2011). "Labour can have its own coalition too". The Independent.
  10. ^ Pickard, Jim; Payne, Sebastian (29 April 2021). "Labour's lost heartlands: Can it win them back?". Financial Times. Cruddas was a key figure in the "Blue Labour" movement which [...] urged the party's leadership to listen more closely to blue-collar concerns about immigration, crime and the EU.
  11. ^ Oleary, Duncan (21 May 2015). "Something new and something blue: the key to Labour's future?". New Statesman.
  12. ^ a b Grady, Helen (21 March 2011). "Blue Labour: Party's radical answer to the Big Society?". BBC News.
  13. ^ Cowley, Jason (18 January 2025). "I'm the MP Elon Musk praised for 'integrity' over the grooming gangs". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 1 February 2025.
  14. ^ Maguire, Patrick (30 January 2025). "To take on the right, will Labour go blue?". www.thetimes.com. Retrieved 3 February 2025.
  15. ^ Moss, Stephen (19 July 2011). "Lord Glasman: 'I'm a radical traditionalist'". The Guardian.
  16. ^ Wintour, Patrick (21 April 2011). "Miliband Speech To Engage With Blue Labour Ideals". The Guardian.
  17. ^ Kellner, Peter (16 May 2011). Labour is not just the party of the working class (Report). YouGov.
  18. ^ Wintour, Patrick (4 January 2012). "Ed Miliband's leadership attacked by Lord Glasman". The Guardian.
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference inews-20191216 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ Freedman, Theo (30 July 2021). "The Labour left can no longer afford to ignore Blue Labour". LabourList.
  21. ^ Barrett, Matthew (20 May 2011). "Ten Things You Need to Know About Blue Labour". LeftWatch.
  22. ^ Score, Steve (30 March 2011). "Review: Blue Labour". The Socialist.
  23. ^ Bagehot (19 May 2011). "A nation of shoppers". The Economist.
  24. ^ Goodhart, David (22 November 2022). "Has Keir Starmer found the sweet spot in British politics?". The Spectator. Retrieved 5 September 2023.

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