The recent local elections demonstrate that these ‘socially conservative and economically leftist’ factions prioritise only the former, and legitimise the far-right instead of beating them.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Nikolai Chernyshevsky published his seminal novel, What is to be Done? The work was bemoaned by conservatives and liberals alike, most notably by the arch-conservative author Fyodor Dostoevsky in his 1873 novel Demons, where Stephan Trimofivich, a parody of the archetypal Russian petit-bourgeois liberal, expresses bewilderment at the novel’s message of economic independence for women and socialist cooperatives amongst the Russian peasantry. Despite the sneering from Russia’s traditionalists and reformists, however, the novel charted a new course with its utopian socialist message, with Dostoevsky’s leading biographer, Joseph Frank, declaring that ‘Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.’
Later, inspired by Chernyshevsky, Vladimir Lenin, the father of this great revolution, penned his own What is to be Done? In 1905. The pamphlet outlined his concept of the vanguard party, which became one of the defining features of the communist regimes of the twentieth century, and indeed the remaining self-described socialist states of today. Again, few names in history are more controversial, particularly amongst liberals, but the influence of such a work is indisputable.
At last, a final instalment in this great socialist triumvirate arrived in January 2025, from the internal Labour party pressure group ‘Blue Labour’, who have, in turn, received criticism from liberal ‘woke’ identitarians, as they would no doubt refer to them as, with their very own, definitive, What is to be Done? This time…in the form of a short blog post.
However, with my jokingly disparaging attitude aside, the article, which sets out Blue Labour’s defining missions, does include a variety of welcome policies. At it’s heart, the group calls for a ‘for national sovereignty and a covenant with the British people’ based on a self-described economic leftism, promoting the nationalisation of key industries, re-industrialisation, and declaring that ‘We should scrap the fiscal rules, in which economic sense and democratic politics are subordinate to faulty OBR forecasts, and invest in infrastructure and the public realm.’
However, what makes Blue Labour interesting, and ‘blue’, is its emphasis on social conservatism, as well as a self-described economic leftism, arguing that this blend of traditional cultural attitudes and protectionist economics is the true politics of the working-class communities that the Labour party seeks to represent.
Much of this framing is extremely relevant in explaining the state of Britain today, with the group noting that ‘Labour must restore the integrity of the sovereign nation’, with the nation state degraded by privatisation and an over-reliance on quangos and corporate contracts to fulfil the basic functions of government. Furthermore, the group calls for a restoration of the ‘trust and authority of our police force’, to protect working-class communities from crime and disorder.
However, this social conservatism also calls for a drastic reduction in immigration, ending what they call the ‘exploitation of the asylum system,’ and takes an almost Trumpian turn in calling for the Labour government ‘to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.
Later, inspired by Chernyshevsky, Vladimir Lenin, the father of this great revolution, penned his own What is to be Done? In 1905. The pamphlet outlined his concept of the vanguard party, which became one of the defining features of the communist regimes of the twentieth century, and indeed the remaining self-described socialist states of today. Again, few names in history are more controversial, particularly amongst liberals, but the influence of such a work is indisputable.
At last, a final instalment in this great socialist triumvirate arrived in January 2025, from the internal Labour party pressure group ‘Blue Labour’, who have, in turn, received criticism from liberal ‘woke’ identitarians, as they would no doubt refer to them as, with their very own, definitive, What is to be Done? This time…in the form of a short blog post.
However, with my jokingly disparaging attitude aside, the article, which sets out Blue Labour’s defining missions, does include a variety of welcome policies. At it’s heart, the group calls for a ‘for national sovereignty and a covenant with the British people’ based on a self-described economic leftism, promoting the nationalisation of key industries, re-industrialisation, and declaring that ‘We should scrap the fiscal rules, in which economic sense and democratic politics are subordinate to faulty OBR forecasts, and invest in infrastructure and the public realm.’
However, what makes Blue Labour interesting, and ‘blue’, is its emphasis on social conservatism, as well as a self-described economic leftism, arguing that this blend of traditional cultural attitudes and protectionist economics is the true politics of the working-class communities that the Labour party seeks to represent.
Much of this framing is extremely relevant in explaining the state of Britain today, with the group noting that ‘Labour must restore the integrity of the sovereign nation’, with the nation state degraded by privatisation and an over-reliance on quangos and corporate contracts to fulfil the basic functions of government. Furthermore, the group calls for a restoration of the ‘trust and authority of our police force’, to protect working-class communities from crime and disorder.
However, this social conservatism also calls for a drastic reduction in immigration, ending what they call the ‘exploitation of the asylum system,’ and takes an almost Trumpian turn in calling for the Labour government ‘to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.
Maurice Glasman, Labour Peer
Indeed, Blue Labour has courted controversy in its, at times, sanguine, even enthusiastic attitude towards Trump. The group's founder, Maurice Glasman, invited to Trump’s inauguration, appearing on Nazi-saluting Steve Bannon’s podcast, and claiming that Trump’s election should have Labour ‘dancing in the streets’, due to its consequences for globalisation, with Trump’s protectionist, tariff-obsessed economic policy having an admirer with Glassman and his Blue Labour ilk.
And it is a position with growing influence in the Labour party, with a new Blue Labour parliamentary group founded earlier this year, chaired by former Socialist Campaign Group MP Dan Carden. In February, the group claimed to have a membership in the ‘double digits’, and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Machiavellian purger of the left, is said to be an admirer.
Indeed, Blue Labour attitudes are a key element of this Labour Government, which, despite its many economic failures, is taking a more interventionist approach, certainly more so than New Labour, evidenced in its recent takeover of British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant. But it is in this government’s aggressive attitude towards social issues that seems to echo Blue Labour to the greatest degree, particularly on migration.
Indeed, in the last few months, especially, Labour has taken a particularly strident line on immigration. In the lead up to the local elections and Runcorn by-election, the party posted Reform-style social media advertisements, both in regards to content and branding. These ads boasted of the government reaching a five-year high in “migrant removals.’ In February, the Home Office released a video of migrants being deported, a move that the left Labour MP Clive Lewis said was part of a ‘mainstreaming of racism.’ Indeed, in the Runcorn campaign itself, Labour’s candidate, Karen Shore, launched a bid to close what she described as the local 'asylum hotel', a pronouncement that Socialist Campaign Group Chair Zarah Sultana deemed ‘callous and indefensible.’
These tactics are the tactics of Blue Labour, to focus on and advertise culture war issues over economic radicalism in an attempt to entrench Labour support amongst the supposedly socially conservative working class, particularly to combat the growing threat of Reform, a threat that, for many Labour MPs across the country, is very real. The far-right party came second in as many as 89 seats, predominantly in Labour’s heartlands in the North and Wales, striking fear into the hearts of Labour MPs representing these areas, with 40 forming a distinctly Blue Labour-esque ‘Red Wall Group,’ focused overwhelmingly on taking a harder line against immigration above all else.
But it is the aforementioned over-reliance on issues of social conservatism, over any genuine economic leftism or substantial class politics, that leaves Blue Labour and its ilk bereft in addressing the pressing problems facing the government. Indeed, though immigration is certainly an issue for many working-class people and the British public more generally, it is not the issue that matters most to Labour supporters or the broader country. Indeed, polling by the Office of National Statistics in June found that ‘the most commonly reported issues were the cost of living (87%), the NHS (85%), the economy (68%), crime (60%), housing (57%), and climate change and the environment (56%)’, with only half of respondents placing immigration as an issue. Despite this fact, however, the Government’s and Blue Labour’s messaging focuses overwhelmingly on social issues concerning immigrants, grooming gangs, and the trans community.
Indeed, Blue Labour and their ilk are so focused on social issues and neglectful of genuine socialist transformation that they take a deeply hostile attitude to figures genuinely promoting redistributive change, constantly demonising the left. Perhaps the most telling example came from the Blue Labour aligned Labour Beyond Cities, which criticised Gary Stevenson, one of the most prominent online figures promoting wealth taxation and fighting inequality, denouncing ‘the Gary's Economics myth of socialism where someone else, maybe Elon Musk, pays for the society they expect.’
As such, the issue with these groups is that they have prioritised social issues above seemingly all else, and instead of promoting economic leftism, often take a combative approach towards its most popular proponents. Instead of prioritising fighting inequality, Blue Labour and their ilk believe that only if Labour were to lurch even further to the right socially, Reform would be vanquished
This fantasy was crushed in the brutal local election results, in which Reform gained Runcorn and Helsby, one of Labour’s previously safest seats, as well as 677 council seats, mainly from the Conservatives, but also from Labour, with the party losing 186 councillors to a total of just 99. The Blue Labour messaging on immigration, deportations and ‘asylum hotels’ resolutely failed, and indeed, only legitimised Reform’s policies among the electorate.
Indeed, it is hardly surprising that Labour’s adoption of the Reform framing of refugees and migration has merely legitimised Reform’s framing of the issue, leading to a severe coarsening of the public debate on the matter. This coarsening was evident in Novara Media’s coverage of the Runcorn by-election, in which Aaron Bastani noted that while in the general election the conversation around immigration was more measured, even among Reform supporters, vox pops now spoke of ‘conquest’, ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement.’ Similarly, Bastani noted that issues of housing, for instance, were, in almost all cases, immediately viewed ‘through the prism of migration.’ Such a framing benefits the far-right, and with Labour merely adopting the same framing in its condemnation of ‘asylum hotels’, Reform is boosted.
These elections demonstrate a basic fact: you cannot outflank the far-right on immigration. You cannot out-Reform Reform. The only thing achieved by adopting this Blue Labour strategy is to increase the salience of immigration as an issue and legitimise Reform’s framing. Furthermore, polling demonstrates that attempting to go after Reform, by adopting their framework and policies, alienated Labour’s core vote rather than entrenched it. Indeed, as former Corbyn adviser Simon Fletcher noted in an article for Byline Times, ‘recent research from Persuasion UK concluded that there are approaching three or four times as many 2024 Labour voters who are considering switching to the LibDems or Greens than those to Reform, with about 11% of the Labour vote shown to be ‘Reform curious.’ The core Reform vote is, by contrast, solidly anti-Labour.’ As such, it makes little strategic sense to focus so single-mindedly on Reform voters, and Labour is better off focusing on delivering for its core vote.
Indeed, in this era of multi-party politics, where all parties are below 30% in the opinion polls, the sensible strategy for any party is to attempt to retain and placate its core support. On the other hand, Labour has failed to deliver its manifesto pledges, watering down the popular Employment Rights package, and the once-heralded GB Energy has faded into near-obscurity in government messaging. Furthermore, in the removal of the Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners and the savage £5bn in disability cuts planned, Labour has done nearly everything possible to alienate its base. Labour supporters will not return to our party due to a doubling down on anti-immigration sentiment, or merely an acceleration of our current trajectory, with Starmer saying that the results should push Labour to go ‘further and faster’ on its plans. Instead, the only sensible thing to do is to change course. People voted for Labour for two main reasons: To improve the NHS and to improve living standards. For the party to survive, we must deliver on those key issues, instead of acquiescing to Reform’s outrageous framing.
This survival, however, is not possible with these current policies, of allowing industrial decay in Grangemouth and Port Talbot, of accept huge rises in water bills and refusing to nationalise the industry, and keeping the horrendous two-child limit in place, which has brought a further 30,000 children into poverty since the election, to name a few.
Blue Labour is right on one thing: we need to scrap these arbitrary ‘fiscal rules’ and deliver for the British people with investment and public ownership. However, their insistence that Labour must move even further to the right socially, and, in so doing, further legitimise Reform, is not a serious strategy.
These elections have shown that when we play by the far-right's rules, we lose. For instance, we cannot beat Reform on an issue like housing if we accept the hysteria around hotels. Instead, the way we beat the far-right on an issue like this is by noting that the reason young people can't get on the property ladder is not because of immigration, but because of greedy landlords and complacent home building. And, in Government, instead of placing blind trust in private development, we embark on mass social housing programmes, and rein in predatory landlords with rent controls. Only when we challenge the far-rights narrative can we succeed.
We must deliver on the people’s priorities, and the priorities of Labour supporters, instead of promoting policies that, in an attempt to attract Reform voters, haemorrhage our own base.
Instead of stealing Reform’s clothes, we can only succeed, or indeed survive, by blazing our own trail - speaking up, not for Blue Labour, but for real, and red, Labour values.
And it is a position with growing influence in the Labour party, with a new Blue Labour parliamentary group founded earlier this year, chaired by former Socialist Campaign Group MP Dan Carden. In February, the group claimed to have a membership in the ‘double digits’, and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Machiavellian purger of the left, is said to be an admirer.
Indeed, Blue Labour attitudes are a key element of this Labour Government, which, despite its many economic failures, is taking a more interventionist approach, certainly more so than New Labour, evidenced in its recent takeover of British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant. But it is in this government’s aggressive attitude towards social issues that seems to echo Blue Labour to the greatest degree, particularly on migration.
Indeed, in the last few months, especially, Labour has taken a particularly strident line on immigration. In the lead up to the local elections and Runcorn by-election, the party posted Reform-style social media advertisements, both in regards to content and branding. These ads boasted of the government reaching a five-year high in “migrant removals.’ In February, the Home Office released a video of migrants being deported, a move that the left Labour MP Clive Lewis said was part of a ‘mainstreaming of racism.’ Indeed, in the Runcorn campaign itself, Labour’s candidate, Karen Shore, launched a bid to close what she described as the local 'asylum hotel', a pronouncement that Socialist Campaign Group Chair Zarah Sultana deemed ‘callous and indefensible.’
These tactics are the tactics of Blue Labour, to focus on and advertise culture war issues over economic radicalism in an attempt to entrench Labour support amongst the supposedly socially conservative working class, particularly to combat the growing threat of Reform, a threat that, for many Labour MPs across the country, is very real. The far-right party came second in as many as 89 seats, predominantly in Labour’s heartlands in the North and Wales, striking fear into the hearts of Labour MPs representing these areas, with 40 forming a distinctly Blue Labour-esque ‘Red Wall Group,’ focused overwhelmingly on taking a harder line against immigration above all else.
But it is the aforementioned over-reliance on issues of social conservatism, over any genuine economic leftism or substantial class politics, that leaves Blue Labour and its ilk bereft in addressing the pressing problems facing the government. Indeed, though immigration is certainly an issue for many working-class people and the British public more generally, it is not the issue that matters most to Labour supporters or the broader country. Indeed, polling by the Office of National Statistics in June found that ‘the most commonly reported issues were the cost of living (87%), the NHS (85%), the economy (68%), crime (60%), housing (57%), and climate change and the environment (56%)’, with only half of respondents placing immigration as an issue. Despite this fact, however, the Government’s and Blue Labour’s messaging focuses overwhelmingly on social issues concerning immigrants, grooming gangs, and the trans community.
Indeed, Blue Labour and their ilk are so focused on social issues and neglectful of genuine socialist transformation that they take a deeply hostile attitude to figures genuinely promoting redistributive change, constantly demonising the left. Perhaps the most telling example came from the Blue Labour aligned Labour Beyond Cities, which criticised Gary Stevenson, one of the most prominent online figures promoting wealth taxation and fighting inequality, denouncing ‘the Gary's Economics myth of socialism where someone else, maybe Elon Musk, pays for the society they expect.’
As such, the issue with these groups is that they have prioritised social issues above seemingly all else, and instead of promoting economic leftism, often take a combative approach towards its most popular proponents. Instead of prioritising fighting inequality, Blue Labour and their ilk believe that only if Labour were to lurch even further to the right socially, Reform would be vanquished
This fantasy was crushed in the brutal local election results, in which Reform gained Runcorn and Helsby, one of Labour’s previously safest seats, as well as 677 council seats, mainly from the Conservatives, but also from Labour, with the party losing 186 councillors to a total of just 99. The Blue Labour messaging on immigration, deportations and ‘asylum hotels’ resolutely failed, and indeed, only legitimised Reform’s policies among the electorate.
Indeed, it is hardly surprising that Labour’s adoption of the Reform framing of refugees and migration has merely legitimised Reform’s framing of the issue, leading to a severe coarsening of the public debate on the matter. This coarsening was evident in Novara Media’s coverage of the Runcorn by-election, in which Aaron Bastani noted that while in the general election the conversation around immigration was more measured, even among Reform supporters, vox pops now spoke of ‘conquest’, ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement.’ Similarly, Bastani noted that issues of housing, for instance, were, in almost all cases, immediately viewed ‘through the prism of migration.’ Such a framing benefits the far-right, and with Labour merely adopting the same framing in its condemnation of ‘asylum hotels’, Reform is boosted.
These elections demonstrate a basic fact: you cannot outflank the far-right on immigration. You cannot out-Reform Reform. The only thing achieved by adopting this Blue Labour strategy is to increase the salience of immigration as an issue and legitimise Reform’s framing. Furthermore, polling demonstrates that attempting to go after Reform, by adopting their framework and policies, alienated Labour’s core vote rather than entrenched it. Indeed, as former Corbyn adviser Simon Fletcher noted in an article for Byline Times, ‘recent research from Persuasion UK concluded that there are approaching three or four times as many 2024 Labour voters who are considering switching to the LibDems or Greens than those to Reform, with about 11% of the Labour vote shown to be ‘Reform curious.’ The core Reform vote is, by contrast, solidly anti-Labour.’ As such, it makes little strategic sense to focus so single-mindedly on Reform voters, and Labour is better off focusing on delivering for its core vote.
Indeed, in this era of multi-party politics, where all parties are below 30% in the opinion polls, the sensible strategy for any party is to attempt to retain and placate its core support. On the other hand, Labour has failed to deliver its manifesto pledges, watering down the popular Employment Rights package, and the once-heralded GB Energy has faded into near-obscurity in government messaging. Furthermore, in the removal of the Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners and the savage £5bn in disability cuts planned, Labour has done nearly everything possible to alienate its base. Labour supporters will not return to our party due to a doubling down on anti-immigration sentiment, or merely an acceleration of our current trajectory, with Starmer saying that the results should push Labour to go ‘further and faster’ on its plans. Instead, the only sensible thing to do is to change course. People voted for Labour for two main reasons: To improve the NHS and to improve living standards. For the party to survive, we must deliver on those key issues, instead of acquiescing to Reform’s outrageous framing.
This survival, however, is not possible with these current policies, of allowing industrial decay in Grangemouth and Port Talbot, of accept huge rises in water bills and refusing to nationalise the industry, and keeping the horrendous two-child limit in place, which has brought a further 30,000 children into poverty since the election, to name a few.
Blue Labour is right on one thing: we need to scrap these arbitrary ‘fiscal rules’ and deliver for the British people with investment and public ownership. However, their insistence that Labour must move even further to the right socially, and, in so doing, further legitimise Reform, is not a serious strategy.
These elections have shown that when we play by the far-right's rules, we lose. For instance, we cannot beat Reform on an issue like housing if we accept the hysteria around hotels. Instead, the way we beat the far-right on an issue like this is by noting that the reason young people can't get on the property ladder is not because of immigration, but because of greedy landlords and complacent home building. And, in Government, instead of placing blind trust in private development, we embark on mass social housing programmes, and rein in predatory landlords with rent controls. Only when we challenge the far-rights narrative can we succeed.
We must deliver on the people’s priorities, and the priorities of Labour supporters, instead of promoting policies that, in an attempt to attract Reform voters, haemorrhage our own base.
Instead of stealing Reform’s clothes, we can only succeed, or indeed survive, by blazing our own trail - speaking up, not for Blue Labour, but for real, and red, Labour values.
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