The faction reshaping the Labour Party from inside

Last week, Maurice Glasman – the peer who supplied Blue Labour with its intellectual architecture – told the Telegraph that Keir Starmer “cannot conceivably continue” as Prime Minister. The remark was reported as a defection. It is more accurately read as a development inside a faction that has shaped the post-Corbyn Labour Party for the better part of a decade.

As previous Canary coverage of the Mandelson scandal has shown, the moment is one in which the assumptions of the present Labour government are being re-examined across the parliamentary party. Blue Labour’s relationship to that re-examination is now central to it.

An ascendant faction

Blue Labour has been close to the Starmer project since well before the 2024 election. Around twenty MPs now sit in its loose parliamentary caucus. A wider circle of advisers, journalists, and policy figures also move within its orbit. Its arguments – on family, faith, place, immigration, and the limits of liberalism – have given the soft-left of the parliamentary party much of the language it now uses to describe its own discontent.

The wider cultural moment has helped. A prevailing zeitgeist of disillusionment with the excesses of progressive ‘woke’ politics has supplied the faction with a popular grammar for arguments it has been making, in more academic registers, since its founding.

Blue Labour presents itself as the carrier of an older Labour tradition – post-war, ethical, communitarian – that the Fabian and Marxist currents are said to have crowded out. The cultural drift it expresses is real; the disillusionment that carries it is not without cause, and the parliamentary footprint it now commands is more substantial than that of any other distinct intellectual current within the present Labour Party.

A theological refoundation

The intellectual substance sits at a deeper level than the cultural commentary suggests. In The Economics of the Common Good, Glasman reaches past the standard sources of British socialism to Catholic Social Thought, and specifically to the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. He quotes Pope Pius XI:

Capitalism violates right order whenever capital so employs the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice and the common good.

From this premise, Blue Labour derives a theoretical break that distinguishes it from most of the British left. Classical social democracy and the Marxist tradition, on Glasman’s reading, share with their pro-capitalist antagonists a single underlying machinic outlook – one that denies the humanity of workers and treats them as mere factors of production.

Against that, the faction proposes labour as a moral good. Work is “received from the past and oriented towards the future”. The workplace becomes a site of meaning rather than of exchange. Labour is to be conditioned, in Glasman’s phrase, so as to “constrain capital and promote virtue”. Interconnecting systems of fealty, obligation, and mutual patronage are what make the working class.

The Labour Party itself, on this picture, is reconceived as a locus of tradition – something closer to a Church than a parliamentary vehicle. It is, by some distance, the most ambitious attempt to reconstitute British socialism on theological ground in a generation.

What it means in practice

The question that follows is what any of this means in real terms, in the real conditions of the present economic arrangement.

Here the project sits in an interesting position. Blue Labour’s public narrative locates the difficulties of contemporary British politics in moves made by other tendencies: by New Labour’s market liberalism; by the Corbyn movement’s identity politics; by the Starmer leadership’s lack of conviction.

Yet the faction has also been close to the centre of the current settlement, and supplied much of the intellectual texture for the operation that consolidated the party after 2020. The leader whose continuation Glasman now disputes is the same leader whose ascent the faction’s arguments did much to legitimise. How the project navigates that proximity is one of the open questions of its second decade.

The deeper question concerns the tradition Blue Labour claims to recover. The post-Fabian interregnum within which British politics has been suspended is not the consequence of a wrong turn taken by a single tendency. It is a longer pattern – one in which the working class has been treated, across the major currents of British socialism, as an object to be administered by an elite.

Catholic Social Thought is a serious philosophical resource, and the vocabulary it imports changes the texture of the argument. Whether it transforms the underlying relation between the party and the people it claims to represent is a separate, and considerably harder, question.

The shared inheritance

What the faction shares with its loudest critics on the parliamentary left is, on closer inspection, more substantive than what divides them.

The hostility Blue Labour generates is often presented as a quarrel about ends. It can also be read as a quarrel about idiom – about whether the same instinct toward discipline and direction should be expressed in the language of flag and faith, or in the language of progressive administration. Both inheritances belong to a tradition that has, in its various phases, treated the dignity of labour as something to be conferred from above as much as constituted from below.

Within its own terms, Blue Labour is on a marginal ascendency. Twenty-odd MPs is not nothing, and the cultural moment in which the faction’s ideas have begun to find their wider audience is unlikely to recede in the immediate future. Whether the project becomes a refoundation of British socialism – or a redecoration of it – is the question its second decade will answer, and the answer will tell us a great deal about where the British left is heading next.

Featured image via Sky News