In Margaret Thatcher’s final TV interview with Brian Walden – newly dramatised by Channel 4 – she remarks at one point: “Let us get down to the success we have had, the way in which people now copy ‘Thatcherism’, as they call it, the world over.”
Keir Starmer, if we take him at his word, has no ambition to repeat this boast. “There is no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be!” he declares in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s illuminating new book Get In. Starmer duly used his first speech as Prime Minister to vow to lead a government “unburdened by doctrine”.
Yet governing without an overarching philosophy, as Starmer has found, is hard. Civil servants and ministers lack direction. Voters struggle to know who and what you stand for. The government comes to resemble a random announcement generator.
And politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Since the start of the year, a contest has begun to define the government’s ultimate purpose. Rachel Reeves’ recent speech on the economy offered a one-word answer: growth. Policy is being reoriented to meet this objective: a third Heathrow runway, a blitz of environmental regulations, the potential approval of the Rosebank North Sea oilfield (though note Ed Miliband’s insistence that all plans will have to meet “strict carbon budgets”).
The renaissance of Blue Labour – which fuses left economics and social conservatism – is another sign of this quest for direction. Dan Carden, a former member of the Socialist Campaign Group, has established a parliamentary caucus along with three other MPs: Jonathan Brash, Jonathan Hinder and David Smith. “The core of Blue Labour is to meet the public and working-class communities where they are and prove that we can deliver on their concerns,” Carden told me (last month he became the first Labour MP to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs). He added that “to truly move into this area there’s going to be a big challenge to Treasury orthodoxy”.
A separate but related project – the “Future of the Left” – is being led by the Blue Labourites Jon Cruddas, Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford at the Policy Exchange think tank. Last week Rutherford and others met several of Starmer’s aides, including his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, at No 10 for the first in a series of planned sessions (this one focused on immigration and social cohesion).
Blue Labour came to prominence during Ed Miliband’s leadership (see Rowenna Davis’s fine Tangled Up in Blue for the backstory). Glasman, its iconoclastic founder, drew on influences including Aristotelian philosophy, ethical socialism, Burkean conservatism and German industrial democracy.
Until recently, some in the party – both on the Blairite right and the progressive left – hoped they had heard the last of Blue Labour. But that was never likely. During Starmer’s time as opposition leader, the group maintained a subterranean presence – not least through its ties to McSweeney.
The Irishman is politically astute enough to avoid easy factional definition. But his affinity with Blue Labour’s patriotic communitarianism is natural. At last year’s party conference, McSweeney delivered a 45-minute speech at an event hosted by donor Gary Lubner. Those at the private gathering recall his excoriation of Labour councils for betraying working-class girls by turning a blind eye to grooming gangs.
“Morgan is one of ours, we love him,” Glasman told me (the pair first met during McSweeney’s time fighting the BNP in Barking and Dagenham).
A succession of events – the return of the grooming gangs scandal, Donald Trump’s election and Reform’s ascent – have combined to thrust Blue Labour to the centre of the political stage. As they gaze across the progressive world, Labour strategists see an army of the defeated and the soon-to-be-defeated. “There isn’t much left in the left,” one laconically observes.
The Democrats have been routed, Canada’s Justin Trudeau has resigned, Germany’s Olaf Scholz is heading for defeat this month and Australia’s Anthony Albanese trails the right (an exception is Denmark’s Blue Labour-esque Mette Frederiksen who Starmer met last week, discussing “the shared challenge of migration”). In this cold climate, a No 10 aide speaks of nothing less than forging a “new left” for a “new age”.
What might that look like? A clue was provided at the cabinet’s six-hour away day last Friday. “Progressive liberals have been too relaxed about not listening to people about the impact of it,” Starmer declared of immigration – one of his most Blue Labourish statements yet. Labour annexes a phrase from Trump to describe those voters it wants to win back – “the forgotten men and women” afflicted by economic and cultural insecurity (8 per cent of the party’s 2024 voters have defected to Reform).
Is this now a Blue Labour government? Don’t be surprised if an array of headlines proclaims as much over the next week. But all sides suggest the reality is more complex – not least Glasman himself.
When I spoke to the Labour peer – smoking cigarettes in a book-lined living room – he described himself as “angry” rather than encouraged (and not only because his beloved Tottenham Hotspur had just been knocked out of the FA Cup).
“You and I have seen this before,” he said in reference to Miliband’s past flirtation with Blue Labour. “They’re still going ahead with the Chagos deal, they’re not grasping any form of industrialisation, particularly around Ukraine and defence, where we could go into a really serious position as the leading military power in Europe”.
Of Reeves, who has worked with Blue Labour thinkers at points in her political career, Glasman declared: “Rachel Reeves seems to have forgotten entirely our last conversation about ‘securonomics’ and the ‘everyday economy’. Now she’s just a drone for the Treasury. There’s no vision of economic renewal and no idea about how to renew the faraway towns.” (A recurrent complaint in soft left and Blue Labour circles is that the Chancellor has been “captured” by Whitehall’s most formidable department.)
Glasman’s verdict on Richard Hermer, the Attorney General and a decades-long friend of Starmer, was yet more blunt: “He’s got to go. He is the absolute archetype of an arrogant, progressive fool who thinks that law is a replacement for politics… They talk about the rule of law but what they want is a rule of lawyers.”
With characteristic pugnaciousness, Glasman has alighted on the tensions that run through this Labour government. At the cabinet’s away day, ministers were warned that there would be no extra money – leaving unprotected departments such as the Home Office, justice and local government facing real-terms cuts. Some in Labour fear that an austere Spending Review this June could gift victory to Nigel Farage at the next election. (Two of the cabinet ministers who previously protested to Reeves over cuts – Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood – have Blue Labour connections.)
Among MPs, there is enduring anger at Reeves over the winter fuel cuts – blamed for Scottish Labour’s polling collapse – and concern that the north is being “left behind” by a traditional growth model centred on the south-east.
The discontent over Hermer – held responsible for the £9bn-plus deal to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – is similarly real. Insiders accuse him of acting as an “independent human rights adviser” rather than “the government’s lawyer” and frustrating ministers merely out of fear of going to court. In a podcast released before he entered government, Hermer described slogans such as “control our borders” as not only “distracting” but “dehumanising”.
As Labour grasps for direction, how will such contradictions be resolved? Perhaps only with an anticipated cabinet reshuffle will the government’s political definition become clear. Hermer’s fate – now a proxy for the struggle between liberal Labour and Blue Labour – will have to be settled. Miliband – perhaps the cabinet minister with the clearest ideological world-view – will either be newly emboldened or marginalised. Starmer, this most shape-shifting of political leaders, will emerge in a new form.
In 1995 – in a remark once approvingly cited by Miliband – Thatcher declared: “Consensus doesn’t give you any direction. It is like mixing all the constituent ingredients together and not coming out with a cake… Democracy is about the people being given a choice.”
To Starmer’s cabinet critics, a pudding without a theme is precisely what the government’s first six months in office resembled. That, all sides agree, must change – and that is why the battle for Labour’s soul has begun.
[See also: Britain is trapped in the Long Seventies]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation