Old Labour, new Labour, blue Labour: A summary critique of Labour Party factionalism

By Cianan Sheekey

Architect of Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman, has claimed that Starmer’s current chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is “one of ours”. Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Factionalism. Don’t we all love little cliques of self-indulgent, like minds scheming against other similar, if ideologically distinct, caucuses? While every political organisation accommodates a catalogue of opinions, some parties suffer more than others. Too much variation in viewpoints breeds factionalism, culminating in a lack of collective cohesion, eroding the notion of unity fundamental to the idea of a political party. Sparse examples depict this phenomenon better than the UK Labour Party.

While it is partially inaccurate to homogenise internally divided factions within themselves, understanding the rifts within Labour provides an analytical scaffold to critique these groups' broad ideals. While conflating Blairites and Brownites under the title of ‘New Labour’, for example, overlooks the well-documented divisions (and coup) between the two colossi, further subdivisions of these groups broaden the analytical task of this article far beyond its word limit. With enough of this allocation already wasted, let’s talk factions.

Oddly, the narrative of Labour divisions begins with New Labour, for its counterpart, Old

Labour, was only born out of linguistic necessity. It is easiest to explain these two rivals

simultaneously, for the former serves as the pragmatic child of the latter. Old Labour rejects overt capitalism, instead opting for a commitment to socialist economics, historically manifested through Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution. New Labour, faced with the apparent realisation that the political landscape of the 90s couldn’t

stomach such a commitment, instead embraced the wealth-generating power of capitalism as a means of funding and distributing affluence, scrapping Clause IV in the process. New Labour’s thinkers deemed such a measure unscrupulously necessary to prevent leftism from the perpetual torment of outdated, backwards-looking, reactionary thinking.

Blue Labour, however, highlights a weakness in the typical spectrum assessment of ideologies. It is indeed to the right of New in its social policy, yet it maintains a commitment to deeply intense, local, leftist economics.

Other differences derive from this core clash. Old aims to expand the state, possessing a committed focus on internal affairs and bastioning the cause of unions whilst encouraging and maximising welfare. New instead depoliticises state institutions to restrict the size of Britain’s bureaucratic appendages, holds a globalist fixation, facilitates but does not champion trade unionism, and promotes workfare, not welfare. Then there’s the odd one: the fly in the ointment, the bizarre skeleton in Labour’s closet: Blue Labour.

Considering the political alignment of Labour’s factions through the traditional spectrum

approach, it is obvious that New sits to the right of Old. Given that placing the word ‘blue’ before anything within the UK implies it is more conservative, it is not an unreasonable assumption that Blue sits even further to the right of New. Blue Labour, however, highlights a weakness in the typical spectrum assessment of ideologies. It is indeed to the right of New in its social policy, yet it maintains a commitment to deeply intense, local, leftist economics. The ‘blue’ in Blue Labour refers not to a desire to stand for Tory hues, but rather an overwhelming feeling of malaise regarding the Party. Self-describing as a set of radical conservative socialists, it’s as if, in a defeatist strop following the 2010 election defeat, Labour’s weirdest and wackiest attempted to triangulate paradoxical buzzwords, praying it would somehow break ideological boundaries. Blue Labour is a truly odd entity, standing for conservative social values, such as being more antagonistic towards migration than the rest of Labour, yet more localised, individual-oriented economic structures akin to systems of

exchange entertained within anarchist circles.

Blue Labour does, however, hold an undue amount of political relevance. While pointing to a figure of Old (Attlee, Benn, Corbyn) or New Labour (Blair, Brown, Mandelson) is

comparatively facile, notable Blue Labour figures are not difficult to find. Ed Miliband is a

prominent example - the former Labour leader having penned the foreword for the Blue

gospel, entitled The Labour Tradition and the politics of paradox, as well as having

championed ‘one-nation’ Labour; a pathetic act of sloganisation dropped even before the 2015 general election for not connecting with ordinary voters. Further, Labour peer and architect of Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman, has claimed that Starmer’s current chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is “one of ours”, implying a surprisingly close relationship between Blue Labour and contemporary Labour leadership.

Regardless, Blue Labour’s role remains minimal compared to the big two; after all, it only officially contains four MPs. Ignoring Blue Labour for now is likely the best course of action - they possess neither the numerical nor theoretical prowess to provide much of note. Given that their politics appears to have been concocted in a defeatist downward spiral, mounting nothing more than a vapid challenge to established politics, perhaps it would be better if this weird skeleton remained in the closet.

Returning to the big two, we are faced with the issue of compromise. Whilst Labour Old and New largely recognise what the other seeks to represent, they often struggle to reconcile due to mutual accusations of betrayal. Old perceives New as traitorous to the values the Party was founded to represent, whereas New sees Old as failing to adapt its values to represent the desires of contemporary classes. Interestingly, Old Labour, despite more definitively reflecting a socialist lineage abhorred by the notion of preserving the status quo, defends its early-to-mid 20th-century values so vehemently that it proactively resists change. Such preservation of a historic value structure is practically conservative. Maybe Blue Labour isn’t the only cohort of conservative socialists in the Party.

In recommending an element for which Labour ought to unify, the answer is painfully

apparent; New Labour is the foundation through which Labour ought to be perpetually

constructed. Modernising the Party is the only way to retain widespread relevance, and

recent electoral history proves it. Following the phraseological death of New Labour post-2010, Labour has had three epochs: the Blue One-Nation era under Miliband, the Old era under Corbyn, and the New(ish) era under Starmer - only one saw Labour return to government.

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis - times change, and we [ought to] change with

them.

Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images