A Strong Conservative Component to Socialism

By Ed Rooksby, The Guardian UK

22 May 11

Yes, there's a strong conservative component to socialism. But Lord Glasman's thinking sails close to darker strands of rhetoric.

t seemed faddish at first - a here today, gone tomorrow curiosity advocated by a tiny number of Labour party affiliated thinkers and policy wonks. But it looks increasingly like the Blue Labour doctrine may well have greater staying power than many of us previously suspected.

Ed Miliband has been flirting with Blue Labour for several months. Indeed, it's well known that the doctrine's founder, Maurice Glasman, is a close friend of the Labour Party leader. Miliband recently authored a preface for a Blue Labour e-book and this has been interpreted as a sign that he's moving towards a full embrace of Blue Labour as the party's "big idea" under his leadership. It's for this reason that critics of Blue Labour need to take the approach seriously and to look carefully at what it represents. Many have been rather too brusque in their dismissiveness towards it and have failed to grasp the doctrine's real strengths and thus failed to understand the dangers it poses.

The basic idea animating Blue Labour is that Labour needs to rediscover strands of thinking buried in its historical traditions that have been obscured since 1945. Lord Glasman argues for a creative re-engagement with the party's roots in 19th century traditions of mutuals, co-operatives and friendly societies and with associated labour movement values such as community, solidarity and reciprocity. Glasman argues that the party should embrace what he regards as the fundamental conservatism of the working class. An ethics of community and solidarity he suggests implies a defence of traditional institutions, social relationships and identities as valuable in themselves. These include the family, patriotism, faith and the work ethic. As such Blue Labour advocates, in Glasman's words, "a deeply conservative socialism."

Glasman argues that these original values were lost as the postwar reforms of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan produced a bureaucratic state, fostered a culture of irresponsibility and transformed Labour itself into a similarly technocratic, centralised organisation. New Labour made things worse. Its embrace of market forces brought untrammelled "commodification" of human relationships, dissolving the ethical glue that binds communities together. One of the most destructive aspects of this, he argues, was that it led to an influx of immigrant labour that drove down wages and produced huge resentment amongst the "white working class". In addition, the discourse of "multiculturalism" that accompanied this process further corroded community cohesion.

Much of this, let's be clear, is toxic stuff. But this shouldn't blind us to its strengths. Glasman has an impressive grasp of the way in which political traditions are always constituted by paradoxical components - a series of tensions. This is one reason why they are always contestable. Political ideologies are battlegrounds on which factions struggle for hegemony, seeking to articulate these ideological components in different combinations. This is the kind of struggle in which Glasman is engaged. For this reason I don't think that Glasman really believes for one second in the kind of historical story he's telling - a tale of corruption of "authentic", prelapsarian labour movement values. This is not really an objective description - it's a "performative" endeavour which seeks to reshape the ideological terrain and create its own truth.

Of course, Blue Labour hasn't conjured up the values it advocates out of nothing. It's right that there's a long tradition of working class self-organisation, community organising and hostility towards statism. It also takes inspiration from the old tradition of "ethical socialism" which sought to ground socialism in communitarian moral values. Glasman's argument that there's a strong conservative component to socialism - though, at first glance, counter-intuitive - is quite right. It's often observed that socialism shares much in common with "one nation" Toryism. Both emphasise social solidarity and are profoundly suspicious of market individualism. However, whereas conservatism tends to hark back to some past golden age, socialism characteristically seeks to combine resistance on the one hand with radical, creative change on the other.

There are other problems with Blue Labour's narrative. It doesn't take a genius to see that its hostility towards statism, in the context of economic crisis and austerity, could provide useful ideological cover for an assault on welfare. Blue Labour thinking, here, converges seamlessly with Cameron's "big society." Its professed hostility towards market forces should be taken with a pinch of salt. We should also note that Glasman's critique of market forces nearly always singles out "finance capital" - rather than capitalism itself - as the chief enemy. This specific focus on "finance capital" as the root of all evil has an unsettling history - it's long been a mark of rightwing populism.

This brings us to the most disturbing area of Blue Labour's thinking - the similarities between some of its ideas and those of the far right. This is most obvious in the case of its stance on immigration and national identity. The frequent invocation of the "white working class" in particular is reminiscent of far right discourse. No one doubts the anti-fascist credentials of Blue Labour figures - but their ideas sail close to the wind in this respect. Outrageously, Glasman recently argued that Labour should seek to involve EDL supporters within the party. But there's no future for Labour in pandering to far right extremism and it's certainly not socialist to pitch "whites" (working class or not) against immigrants and ethnic minorities.

The left shouldn't underestimate the sophistication of Blue Labour, or the degree to which it represents a serious threat to the principles the left holds dear. Labour needs to hold fast to its most important values - defence of the poor and vulnerable, internationalism and robust anti-racism. The adoption of Blue Labour ideas would be a terrible betrayal of Labour's best and noblest traditions.