Blue Labour is fighting for its future

Labour’s slow fracture is leaving space for organised insurgent factions

It has people everywhere, like the Stasi in East Berlin or the CIA in its Latin American heyday. That’s how its opponents (and there are a few of them in Labour and the government) view Blue Labour and its influence.

It is a faction that was co-founded in 2009 by the peer Maurice Glasman and the academic Jonathan Rutherford (both NS contributors). Though written off as simply the most right-wing coterie of the Labour Party, Blue Labour’s programme is a bricolage of calls for reindustrialisation and lower migration, inspired by Catholic social teaching. Its highest aims are the preservation of national tradition, sovereignty and the dignity of the working class; its enemies are “the lanyard class”.

Inconveniently, the latter class makes up a majority of the following groups: the cabinet, junior ministerial ranks, special advisers, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), Labour Party membership and, on current polling, people who say they will vote Labour at the next election. This is where the friction starts.

But Blue Labour now has influence among senior advisers in Downing Street and the No 10 Policy Unit. When recently accused of briefing against Wes Streeting, Morgan McSweeney’s alibi was that he had spent 90 minutes in a private meeting with Glasman. Similarly, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has declared a “natural affinity” with elements of the group; her asylum announcement was warmly received by Blue Labour MPs.

We’ve been here before. Fifteen years ago Blue Labour briefly enchanted Ed Miliband in the early days of his Labour leadership. Miliband made Glasman a peer, but they quickly fell out, and it’s fair to say their relationship has not recovered.

Written off as reactionary, it is a faction that had lost favour before being revived under Starmer. “Maybe they’re just Blue,” is the withering put-down that can be heard again from Labour figures today.

These enemies are known in Blue Labour shorthand as “Popular Front” types, Labourites who believe the party should hug its unloved left and liberal flanks as a path to winning the next general election. The logic makes sense – Labour is losing more support to the Lib Dems and Greens than to its right. But in our electoral system do all those lanyard voters just stack up in the cities and university towns, leaving the marginal seats for Reform and the Tories? The Labour Party Conference was seen as a positive turning point for the Popular Front strategy while one Blue Labour figure described it to me as an unmitigated disaster. A fight at the top of Labour is brewing.

Glasman thinks it will break out in May when Labour “gets its head absolutely kicked in” at the local and devolved elections. In their aftermath, Blue Labour will try to seize the initiative. The Popular Fronters will likely point the finger at Blue Labour as the architects of defeat, blaming its focus on immigration and crime, which has dominated much of the government’s strategic comms, as opposed to the things the government is spending money on: the NHS and infrastructure. A vacuum lies at the centre. As one Labour MP told me: “I’m a Starmer loyalist. But there’s nothing to be loyal to.”

In preparation for the coming battle, Blue Labour is, in the words of one movement figure, trying to “redevelop our left flank” by talking about economics almost as much as immigration. I’m told there is a policy paper in development that will set out how Thames Water can be brought under the ownership of a new public corporation. This is part of a wider push to dust off the ideas of pre-1945 municipal socialism. There’s also talk of putting the National Grid under the control of the Ministry of Defence. It’s not quite Bennism, but it’s not right wing.

As well as enemies, Blue Labour has some internal allies, such as the Red Wall group of Labour MPs. Because of the seats they represent, these MPs want to see lower levels of immigration and higher levels of investment in the north and Midlands, two large areas of crossover with Blue Labour. There is also the Labour Growth Group (LGG), a larger and more seat-varied caucus. While it has a variety of clashing policy prescriptions for the future of Britain, LGG and Blue Labour are united in “a willingness to accept the system is broken”.

Now Blue Labour is building a bigger political operation. In November Jonathan Hinder and David Smith, two of the group’s MPs, were registered as directors of Blue Labour Limited. It’s another attempt to professionalise and formalise the group’s place in the Labour Party.

I’m told Blue Labour’s parliamentary membership is now into the twenties – its highest ever representation in the PLP. It’s also approaching the 30 MPs that the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) boasts.

Thanks to its adviser influence in No 10 and the Home Office, Blue Labour is less marginal to the life of the government than the SCG – but its chances of growth within the party’s democratic structures are slim.

Blue Labour figures admit they are unlikely to win great victories with the membership (Mahmood’s popularity with activists has nose-dived since her asylum announcement, for example). That’s because, in its view, the PLP and the membership has been largely “captured” by the lanyard class. Turning a historically red party blue is about as hard as it sounds, then.

[Further reading: Your Party rules out co-leaders]