Blue Labour: Reactionary, Unrealistic and Illiberal

Chuku Umunna on Blue Labour:

At the root of this is a belief in our innate mutual dependence. We believe individuals should be given the freedom to flourish, thrive and prosper, not just economically but in spirit and heart too. This can only be achieved in the context of a strong, cohesive society supporting each of us and our families in that endeavour, promoting the common good.

What sounds like the sort of typical blandishments and empty cant that you might expect from a politician from any one of the main parties is actually a front for a more controlling and dangerous ideology.

First up, the use of the word “dependence” is concerning. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that we are mutually interdependent. But the point is that it is interdependency. I may be dependent to some extent on the people around me but in other, no less important, ways they were dependent on me. The problem with phrasing the debate in terms of dependence is dependence automatically sets up a hierarchical power relation. If we are dependent on others with that dependence being in some reciprocal, then they have power over us. And that is the sort of mindset that has created a culture of welfare dependency among many people in our country.

Also, I get very uncomfortable when people – especially politicians – talk about the common good. Because, in short, it doesn’t exist. In a modern, plural, diverse and multi-cultural society the common good is a nonsense. A community as wide as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be able to find no consensus on what constitutes the common good. Hell, you’d struggle to find such a consensus on the common good in most families and friendship groups. And such diversity is fine; it allows people to have choice about the different ways in which they can live their lives.

But when a politician talks about the common good, you want to be asking them who decides on the common good. Because the answer will be them. And this is exactly what is happening here. There is no common good; we are simply seeing another politician saying what they think is good should be the conception of the good that everyone has to live under. What makes it worse is there is no pitch, no attempt to sell a common good to the people to create a consensus around it. No, this is what parties of all shapes, sizes, colours and creeds do – they try to force their conceptions of the common good on everyone else without really debating it. So this isn’t a politician explaining what he thinks we have in common with each other, it is a politician arrogantly assuming that his conception of the good life is one that everyone else should comply with.

And his whole mindset is accurately portrayed in the first line when he talks about people should be given freedom. The arrogance is so strong that it is almost audacious – you can only have freedom if someone Umunna decides to give it to you.

But this isn’t that surprising for a Labour politician – after all, they spent a large proportion of their time in power telling you how to live your life. What is surprising, though, is reading that a Labour party member like Umunna is actually a conservative at heart:

Glasman has been accused of indulging in nostalgia, which some cite as the “blue” in Blue Labour. This misses the point. When the case is made for the conservation of certain cherished national institutions such as our forests, the post office, Dover Port or, in London, the Billingsgate fish market porters, it is not made for tradition’s sake but because these institutions are part of the social fabric of our country that bind us together – they institutionalise our social democracy for future generations, something we failed to do sufficiently enough in government.

This has little to do with the Labour movement, and little to do with socialism. This could almost be the voice of the father of British conservatism, Edmund Burke, talking. Except it is arguably more reactionary than anything the deeply conservative Burke had to offer. Because this seems to be calling for the preservation of aspects of British life that have actually, in some cases, had their time and ended. Umunna is basically calling for certain, cherry-picked aspects to life to be preserved even in the face of overwhelming change. That is more than conservative. It is, as I’ve already mentioned, reactionary.

Of course, a case can be made for preserving, say, the forests. But it is a case that needs a more compelling logic than “it’s good because I happen to have deemed it a cherished national institution”. Again, there’s the problem of who chooses what is a cherished national institution. For some people, it might be the Church of England. Yet for others that might be the opposite of an institution that is cherished. Others still might not care in the slightest about that institution. The point is that the classification is based on subjective judgements and far from the sort of beliefs that everyone holds. The classification is very much in the eyes of the beholder, which leads us to question exactly why Umunna’s perception of a cherished national institution should be allowed to dominate over other opposing views.

Furthermore, the idea that these institutions “bind us together” is also problematic. Partly because, say, the fish porters do precisely nothing to bind me to anyone else in this country or beyond, but also because negative parts of life can bind people together just as surely as positive ones. The Blitz, for example, helped to bind many people together. Does that mean that we should recreate the circumstances when, on a nightly basis, death fell from the skies? Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that Umunna’s arguments needs to be a little stronger that spurious, contestable claims about his own cherry-picked institutions creating a sense of community.

For me, “flag” talks to a sense of nationhood and togetherness. I was roundly condemned by some (on the Left) on twitter for attending street parties to celebrate the Royal Wedding in my constituency. I make no apology for doing so and am proud of the events that took place in my area. Thousands attended and what I witnessed was not some doe-eyed, adulatory worship of the Royal couple but a sense of pride in our country and a delight in the excuse to coalesce, relate, mingle and share some time with neighbours one often only sees in passing.

It strikes me that this is very much a pitch for typical conservative voters; it is all about national pride and preserving stuff associated with rural and/or disappearing parts to British life. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work, mainly because Umunna is having to project his own interpretations of events in order to make his arguments work. There is simply no evidence that the people who celebrated the Royal Wedding in street parties did so through some sort of sense of national pride. Some may have done it for exactly that reason, to be sure, but others might have done simply because they had the day off. Others still may have done it to follow a trend. Yet more people may have held a party to express republican sentiments. In order to make a shaky case for a nostalgic, self-serving pseudo-conservatism, Umunna is giving himself some sort of omniscience that he clearly does not, and cannot, have.

Furthermore, the line about spending “some time with neighbours one often only sees in passing” just doesn’t work. You may see your neighbours all the time; you may seldom see them. But the fact that you may or may not have spent some time with them when the Royal couple dominated the TV screens for a day means next to nothing, since we choose the relationships we have to a large extent. You choose your own community of friends. If that includes your neighbours, then that’s ‘cause you’ve chosen it. If it doesn’t, then the same logic applies. We don’t need an event like the Royal Wedding to create a sense of community among neighbours; that happens if we want it to happen.

There’s a sense in which Unumma wants to foist a sense of community on people regardless of whether they want it or not. In that sense, I suppose, his project is very socialist – it wants to remake community and society in the image of what he believes is good, and what he believes is right. What is unpleasant, illiberal and dangerous about his logic is the extent to which it removes your right to choose the way in which you life your life. This Blue Labour nonsense – itself a dull rip-off of the equally odious Red Tory conception of Philip Blond – has little to do with freedom. Instead, it has everything to do with a state led by nostalgic idealists like Umunna nudging, cajoling, rebuking and even forcing you into doing what they think is right. As such, it is very much a continuation of what has gone before – business as usual for modern politics – on the grounds that you are treated like an infant by paternalistic politicians who have the arrogance to think they know better than you on the absolutely fundamental question of how you live your life. The fact that it is presented in a soft way with nice, nostalgic images should not disguise the fact that this is very different to any meaningful manifestation of liberty.