Ironically, what now unites the Labour Party is the conviction that this government has no unified plan. The fear that their leader has lost the country – and the Parliamentary Labour Party – makes for a particularly unfestive party season. Perhaps Reeves’ Budget has bought the government time. Maybe Starmer’s role in negotiations over Ukraine restores faith in his leadership. But these are mere glimmerings in an otherwise quite bleak midwinter. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Labour is governing minute to minute, locked in an infinite Christmas present, unable to grapple with the past – how they arrived here – or the future – how to move forward.
At such a critical moment, the future belongs to those who sound convinced of what they believe, with a goal and a strategy for realising it. But this requires Labour to resist its natural tendency to turn in on itself and instead to build a new platform across factions.
In my new paper, Soft Skills, Hard Labour, I argue that restoring confidence depends on building a programme that draws on the combined strengths of both the soft left and Blue Labour.
What is needed now is a serious engagement with the shifting tectonic plates of a new political era, but in conjunction with a commitment to pluralism and compromise. Blue Labour offers the former, the “what” of politics; the soft left the latter, the “how”
I’ve spent the last eight years working on “progressive alliance” politics at Compass and am now involved in the Blue Labour-influenced Future of the Left project. I’m all too conscious that recent quarrels between these factions have been a distraction – mostly rhetorical spats with an overdependence on the descriptors “soft” and “hard”.
The problem has been that quarrels between the soft left and Blue Labour have been dominated by two louder, more rigid strands within their coalitions, those I call rights-based liberals (from the soft left) and rules-based majoritarians (from Blue Labour). Rights-based liberals derive their orientation from universal conceptions of human rights which, though well-intentioned and historically significant, are perceived by the public as abstract and externally imposed. Meanwhile, rules-based majoritarians, the punchiest wing of Blue Labour, speak the language of order and authority, a tendency that leans towards authoritarianism.
My argument is that both these strands swerve the messier work of democratic coalition-building. Both derive their moral authority either from an abstract adherence to “equal rights” or a similarly opaque invocation of “the people”. What they share is the refusal to engage in the slower, patient work of constructing a democratic consensus.
My paper seeks to identify those overlapping strands of both the soft left and Blue Labour who instinctively share the democratic instinct to carry people with them. These common strands are found among those I call the “democratic communitarians” within the soft left and, within Blue Labour, the “postliberal democrats”. Both are receptive to the public mood, focused on working with the grain of public opinion and prepared to go long.
In the philosophical contest between the right and the good, both groups are inclined to invest in the common good. Of course, any sense of the good is messier and harder to agree upon; it is most easily generated in actual places by specific people, through relationships, and is finely attuned to local environments. While it is possible to articulate a version of the Good Society at the level of the nation state, the idea thrives in localities. The Good Society doesn’t have to mean small, but it does mean grounded, and being firmly anchored allows you to be bold.
Without denying differences, it appears that both democratic communitarians and postliberal democrats can find common ground in recognising that now is a moment for the politics of the particular. Many acknowledge that we are living in a postliberal era, one in which the universal aspirations of liberal democracies that have provided a powerful rhetoric in recent decades are now being checked. Brexit and Trumpism may have been extremely uncomfortable for the liberal left, but whoever said that democracy was about feeling comfortable? What must surely unite democratic communitarians and postliberal democrats is attentiveness to both public feeling and the historical contingencies of the moment.
As Julian Coman has recently argued, two Labour figures are already demonstrating this potential for the renewal of a democratic Labour politics. The Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has been lauded for his clarity and quiet sense of confidence, but it is his sustained commitment to a “place-first” politics that offers Labour an appealing vision. Burnham has invested in the basics of a good life, returning Greater Manchester’s bus system to public ownership after decades of failed privatisation – evidence of a politician who understands the importance of foundations.
But this is not just about place; it’s also about pace. Burnham could only move forward with an integrated transport system once he’d first made good on his promise to take back buses. Burnham is steadily reviving democratic municipalism, seeking to re-establish trust between citizens and local government and maintaining stability amid technological change. Public trust founds bolder policies.
So far, so municipal socialist. But to retain broad public support, such a politics needs boundaries and conditions. Shabana Mahmood’s recent immigration reforms have caused consternation amongst the progressive left. But her assertion of the need for “order and control” reflects the same instinct Burnham has: for people to commit and contribute to a sense of national community, limits are necessary. Mahmood has argued that, far from abandoning compassionate immigration and asylum policy, tightening the rules will give the British public that sense of control that is the prerequisite for it.
Both figures echo the infamous Brexit slogan which called for collective power and democratic agency. Progressives in the party urge Labour to be more ambitious – to talk big and build high. But the ground is shifting beneath their feet. This moment calls for a politics of boundaries and a sense of pace, without which democratic faith dissipates.
The need now is for a left version of the politics of the particular, one that incorporates the pluralism of the soft left and the groundedness of Blue Labour and which embraces the public need for political competence, confidence and clarity. It finds form in greater devolution, circular local economies, restored civic institutions, public housing, public control of basic amenities, strengthened trade unions and a strong sense of national interest. As we approach the second half of the tumultuous 2020s, Labour’s hope lies in a communitarian politics that asserts that, for politics to be radical, it must be rooted.
[Further reading: Blue Labour is fighting for its future]
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