Blue Labour

Forging a New Politics

Ian Geary, Adrian Pabst, Ian Geary, Adrian Pabst

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784534912
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857737816
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following Labour's defeat at the polls in 2015, and at time when the Party is attempting to redefine its meaning, values and even identity, there is an urgent need for fresh thinking. Most people agree that a new start is needed. But in which direction should Labour turn? A crucial conversation is beginning, and it is in this fluid and volatile context that Blue Labour ideas could make a crucial difference. Seeking to move beyond the centrist pragmatism of both Blair and Cameron, and attempting to inject into politics a newfound passion and significance with which people can truly engage, this essential work speaks to the needs of diverse people and communities across the country. Critiquing the dominance in Britain of a social-cultural liberalism linked to the left and a free-market liberalism associated with the right, Blue Labour blends a 'progressive' commitment to greater economic equality with a more 'conservative' disposition emphasising personal loyalty, family, community and locality. It is the manifesto of a vital new force in politics: one that could define the thinking of the next generation and beyond.

PART ONE:

NARRATIVE AND PROGRAMME

Chapter One

The Good Society, Catholic Social Thought and the Politics of the Common Good

Maurice Glasman

The Politics of the Common Good

Blue Labour was born of the desire for transformation and redemption, the very foundation of a good society and the politics of the common good. It was born of a recognition that the existing political economy, the existing system of the welfare state and a dominant financial sector was giving incentives to vice and not virtue, that it was leaving lives untransformed and unredeemed. The task of changing that involves finding another way of talking about the transformation and redemption of our politics, of a new political consensus based upon virtue and vocation, of a strengthening of relationships and society so that we are not dominated by money and public sector managers, so that the City of London and Westminster are not the sole geographical sites of power, and that political and economic liberalism are not the only definers of progress against which all other traditions are viewed as reactionary.

The generation of a new political consensus around the common good is a task of many hands, many different traditions, and we will be required to show an uncharacteristic civility to each other. The Labour, Conservative, Catholic, evangelical and civic republican traditions have not found a decent way of talking to each other, or even among themselves, for quite a time but they are the sources of nutrition out of which a new political consensus will be formed. The reconciliation of estranged interests is fundamental to a good society and to the common good and it is the work of no one institution alone.

The Labour Party has recently spoken a lot about public sector reform, the centrality of relationships, the decentralisation of power, the importance of accountability and participation of people in public life, so that they have some power and responsibility. In this context it is important to recognise that the contours of a new political consensus shared between the Labour and Conservative traditions are almost visible but also that this change will compel us out of our comfort zone. There will have to be coalitions between religious and secular, unions and employers, public and private sector, even Protestant and Catholic so that we can invite our exiled traditions home and have them engage with each other in creating the new institutions, relationships and practices necessary to treasure quality and equality, power and responsibility, virtue and vocation and above all the strange combination of democracy and liberty that distinguishes the English political tradition. Most particularly this concerns resistance to tyranny, understood as an unaccountable single interest that seeks to impose its will on others. The common good is also a retrieval of a political tradition that has served our country well for almost a millennium (the eight-hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta is in 2015), but has fallen into disrepute since 1945. It is time, perhaps, to domesticate the idea of a commonwealth that inspired the Tudor theorists before the Reformation.

It is a quirk of Blue Labour that we are fond of paradox, something that sounds wrong but is right, and in a rationalist, tin-eared and ungenerous Westminster village that has sometimes led us into trouble. Making statements such as tradition shapes modernity, faith will redeem citizenship, trust is the basis of competition, contribution strengthens solidarity, labour power improves competitiveness, decentralisation underpins patriotism can make us sound like highly educated idiots thus giving a new meaning to oxymoron.

Paradox is, however, necessary for understanding the politics of the common good because it will appear that strange people are in alliance, that incompatible ideas are working better together, and that – when these ideas cease to appear paradoxical but obviously right – political consensus change has been achieved. Perhaps the most important paradox is that the old is the new, that in interrogating exiled political traditions we will find the sources of our renewal. We don’t need new policy but a renewed polity which recognises the legitimacy of interests and facilitates their negotiation through renewed institutions that give incentives to virtue rather than incentives to vice. This is the politics of the common good in a nutshell.

What’s Going On? The crisis and the challenge to Conservatives and Labour

In order to give some definition to what a good society might look like as a means of locating the common good it is perhaps best to ask Marvin Gaye’s question of what’s going on before we move to Lenin’s subordinate question of what is to be done. I continue to be shocked by how Leninist our political class has become, how eager to engage in repetitive activity and how unwilling to reflect on where we find ourselves and why.

What’s going on is that society is disintegrating in the face of the state and the market which are characterised by centralisation, concentration and commodification. Ugly words and ugly realities, but I can’t find adequate alternatives. Both the market and the state centralise power in the name of efficiency and justice.

It is the tragedy of the conservative tradition since Burke that they have been unable to comprehend that the market centralises power, concentrates wealth and commodifies human beings and their environment. It has led to unaccountable power and the crash of 2008, that long-forgotten moment of clarity when the banks received the biggest subsidy in our national history, which was indicative of how dependent we had become on an avaricious and volatile banking sector with no alternative source of value in our economy. There has been a decimation of our regional banking system: not one of the demutualised building societies still exists as an autonomous institution. Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, Halifax, the Midland Bank, all dissolved into the City of London and the big six. Without constraints capital turns to oligopoly.

Equally important for the conservative tradition is that capital, through its pursuit of maximum return on investment, exerts tremendous pressure to turn human beings and their natural environment into commodities that are available at a price in fluctuating markets. Unless there are countervailing institutions with genuine power that can resist this there will be the systematic demoralisation and deceit that led to the financial crash. Without institutions such as families, churches, the army, universities, vocational colleges, professional associations and schools, that are founded upon a non-pecuniary definition of the good, that promote character, honesty, loyalty, skill and faithfulness, that create virtue and incentives to virtue there will be no space between the individual maximiser and the external aggregator, the market and the state. There will be no society at all.

The Big Society foundered on its inability to understand tradition and institutions as embodiments of the good, as countervailing forces to vice. It put all its eggs into the volunteering basket and the message got scrambled. That is the challenge of the common good. It is time for the conservative tradition to recognise the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the market that manifest themselves in poverty wages, usurious interest rates, the disintegration of skills and the subordination of character to the temptations of cheating and greed. There is a need to rediscover the virtue of institutions, local tradition and relationships rather than an exclusive concern with maximisation of returns and quarterly balance sheets. Our economy has been voided of value and fuelled by debt. A good society and a common good requires a change towards value and vocation.

This leads to the challenge to Labour and its uncritical turn to state administration and public spending as a default orthodoxy. In an almost exact parallel to the degradation of what is noble in the conservative tradition, Labour has, at times, been unable to understand how the state can undermine responsibility, agency and participation; that redistribution without reciprocity is just another form of domination and leaves its recipients untransformed. The Labour movement was born in opposition to the free market economy and the Poor Law State and under New Labour, it seems that we forgot both. I have received an astonishing degree of abuse for suggesting that the biggest mistake was the 1945 government – centralising, dominated by public sector managers and impervious to the traditions of labour and their organisations.

Germany went a different way after the war, building its approach around Catholic Social Thought and a form of social democracy that was social and democratic. It embraced subsidiarity and federalism in its politics, a radical form of decentralisation that enabled responsibility and power to be exerted at a local level. It endowed and established regional and sectoral banks that were constrained not to lend outside their region. They developed a partnership model between capital and labour in its corporate governance system that allowed for cooperation and conflict in the negotiation of interests and they retrieved a conception of vocation in their labour market entry that allowed for the preservation of status and skill and the reproduction of knowledge. Family, place and work were all recognised and honoured in a way that they have not been in England since 1945. We won the war, but have lost the peace.

The Good Society and the politics of the common good need to look soberly at vice and virtue and how to give incentives to the latter and not the former, as has been the case until now. Labour needs to repent of its exclusive reliance on an administrative state and the redistribution of money often through transfers to the private sector. Relationships, responsibility and reciprocity should be the guiding principles of welfare reform where contribution plays a central role in the renewal of solidarity.

1945, 1979 and 1997 were all false dawns that led to centralisation and demoralisation in our polity. We have an economy built around debt, a stagnation in wages, a deficit that refuses to shrink, a disaffection with politics, a degradation of previously trusted institutions amidst a backdrop of a generally subdued howl of powerless outrage. That is the background that frames the discussion of what needs to be done.

Catholic Social Thought

There is no more reasonable tradition from which to begin an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Big Society and no more fertile terrain out of which to begin to fashion a politics of the common good than Catholic Social Thought. It provides durable materials, appropriate practices and profound insights in a synthesis that can challenge and defeat the combination of economic and political liberalism that has subordinated diversity to homogeneity, institutional mediation to individualised care packages, vocational training to transferrable skills and neglected entirely the conditions necessary for flourishing markets and democracy. Above all, it offers a system that challenges the debt and demoralisation that are the twin characteristics of the prevailing economy. It preserves and renews an approach which places institutions and tradition as necessary aspects of modern life and combines this with a robust and subtle conception of vocation, virtue and value, which are the missing practices in our economy and state.

In articulating the necessity of a balance of power between interests within institutions which pursue internal goods, Catholic Social Thought offers the possibility of a common good which is not an aggregate of prevailing interests, or a median point between conflicting views, but a negotiated ethical position that is built upon institutions, interests and practices in which the balance between tension and cooperation is always alive. It is redemptive but anti-utopian in that it views relationship, tradition and vocation as constitutive of a meaningful life but does not posit a world in which negotiation and tensions between interests have been overcome.

The fundamental insight is that while both a market economy based upon private property and price-setting markets, and a state based upon the rule of law and its enforcement are seen as necessary and a condition of justice and prosperity, they are also seen as a profound threat to a fulfilled human life and as sources of power that can dominate people. The tragic paradox of Catholic Social Thought is that while there is no alternative to capitalism, capitalism is no alternative. Also, while there is no alternative to the state, statism is no alternative for it is also, potentially, a collectivist instrument of oppression that can overrule and subordinate traditional institutions, which uphold a non-pecuniary good. The double paradox was resolved by a commitment to the strengthening of that which all forms of progressive social science insisted was doomed, namely society. Society, through the development of institutions built around the preservation and nurturing of status, solidarity and subsidiarity, of reciprocity and responsibility, could mediate the logic of both state and market which was to subordinate all self-organised societal institutions to their mutual sovereignty. Democratic decentralisation played a constitutive role in the formation of Christian Democracy as a political movement. This is a radically different idea to that of the Big Society and is, in fact, far more constitutive of the Labour tradition.

It was the threat to the possibility of a moral personality, of the dignity of the individual that led to the politics of the common good that would distinguish Catholic Social Thought, and the threat came from both capitalism and statism. The threat can be summarised as commodification in terms of capitalism, and collectivisation in terms of the state. Commodification refers to the process through which something that is not produced for sale in the market, human beings and nature for example, a body or a forest, are turned into tradable commodities with a price. The logic of capitalism is to achieve the highest possible rate of return on investment, which asserts a relentless pressure to create commodity markets in labour and land. In the 1830s in Britain vocational status and customary practice were subordinated to freehold title and clearing markets in the economy. Vocational traditions upheld by institutions and land holdings held by custom were viewed as an impediment to justice and efficiency. They were abolished in an alliance between the state and the market that imposed the dispossession of enclosures and the exploitation of industrialisation. The understanding of the way in which capital has a tendency to centralise ownership is well understood within the tradition and was institutionally mediated by the generation of local banks bound by trust to region or sector.

The state, through the demand of impartial administration, also generates an imperative to homogenise procedure and undermine relationships through its collectivist logic. The state can destroy those institutions of the body politic that allow reciprocity and responsibility to be strengthened if it is the exclusive instrument of delivery.

Catholic Social Thought, in other words, argued that those things held to be impossible under conditions of modernity – a sense of place and of human-scale institutions that was pursued through subsidiarity, a continued emphasis on vocation and vocational education and the pursuit of a balance of interests on the boards of companies and welfare institutions – preserved a sense of status that interfered with the prerogatives of capital and its managers from the point of view of classical economic theory and class consciousness for Marxists. A common good underpinned by a diverse range of decentralised democratic institutions embedded in the economy was the distinctive Catholic response to the twin perils of the state and the market, commodification and collectivisation. This was summarised under the heading of solidarity in which a common good was forged through common institutions that were diverse and decentralised in form.

It was Lamennais, a Catholic intellectual and activist who founded the journal L’Avenir in Paris in the 1830s, and not Marx who first coined the phrase ‘proletariat’ to refer to a class without status, assets or power and asserted the importance of mediating institutions that could preserve a sense of honour, skill and belonging in a dehumanised world, which was also a disenchanted, secular and rationalised world. Further, and most importantly of all, Catholic Social Thought remained faithful to a theory of labour value, labour understood in terms of experience, skill and expertise, rather than simply physical energy and time, that was held to be anachronistic and antithetical to the division of labour and managerial rationalism. Catholic Social Theory wagered everything on the relevance and strengthening of that which was held to be rationally impossible and it won. Further, its victory belongs to reason.

Both state and market were held to be necessary and wicked, capable of exploitation and oppression as well as justice and prosperity, and in that tension Catholic Social Thought has generated a unique gift to the modern world: a balanced view. There is not only a distinction to be made between society and the state, but also between society and the market economy, and most importantly, finance capital. It is impossible as well as wrong to have two contradictory systems, one based upon unmediated collectivism and the other upon unfettered individualism. Catholic Social Thought, through the idea of mediation and subsidiarity, represents interests through democratic institutions in the economy and the welfare system thus giving substance to the notion of society, making it not only bigger but more robust and less open to being preyed upon by the state and the market and their mutual desire for unfettered efficiency through the exclusion of institutions.

The reintroduction of institutional mediation is the task of a contemporary statecraft that seeks to generate a common good. The combination of finance capital and public administration, the market and the state, the public–private partnership, which has been the dominant driver of employment and growth over the past 30 years, has not generated very much energy or goodness. Of the £1.3 trillion lent by banks in the British economy between 1997 and 2007, 84 per cent was in mortgages and financial services. The practical predicament we confront is that in the combination of household debt and debt held by our financial institutions we are indeed a world leader and this ‘competitive advantage’ has been building for a long time. Private indebtedness was the most recent method by which we borrowed against our future to serve the present and it has reached its limit.

The theoretical predicament is that on their own, neither a Keynesian nor a neoclassical approach has the conceptual means of understanding the importance of institutions; of vocation, virtue and value in generating competitive advantage, reciprocity as the foundation of good practice and the importance of long-term relationships between capital, labour and place in generating growth and innovation. Catholic Social Thought gives us both a plausible explanation of crisis and a genuine alternative that can guide action.

The assumption that globalisation required transferrable skills and not vocational speciality, that tradition and local practice were to be superseded by rationalised administration and production was mistaken. The denuding of the country and its people of their institutional and productive inheritance by the higher rates of returns found in the City of London, and then the vulnerability of those gains to speculative loss, is the story we confronted in 2008. Further, the practic...

Table of contents

• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION Why Labour Lost and How It Can Win Again
• Introduction Blue Labour and the Politics of the Common Good
• PART ONE: NARRATIVE AND PROGRAMME
• 1 The Good Society, Catholic Social Thought and the Politics of the Common Good
• 2 The Blue Labour Dream
• 3 A Blue Labour Vision of the Common Good
• PART TWO: LABOUR – PARTY AND POLITICS
• 4 Blue Labour: A Politics Centred on Relationships
• 5 Community Organising and Blue Labour
• 6 Blue Labour and the Trade Unions: Pro-Business and Pro-Worker
• PART THREE: POLITICAL ECONOMY
• 7 The Common Good in an Age of Austerity
• 8 ‘Civil Economy’: Blue Labour’s Alternative to Capitalism
• 9 Globalisation, Nation States and the Economics of Migration
• PART FOUR: ALTERNATIVE MODERNITY – ON NATURE, PROGRESS AND WORK
• 10 Nature, Science and the Politics of the Common Good
• 11 The Problem with Progress
• 12 Meaningful Work: A Philosophy of Work and a Politics of Meaningfulness
• PART FIVE: LABOUR’S RADICAL ‘CONSERVATISM’
• 13 Labour’s ‘Conservative’ Tradition
• 14 The Gentle Society: What Blue Labour Can Offer Conservatives
• PART SIX: FAITH AND FAMILY
• 15 Vision, Virtue and Vocation: Notes on Blue Labour as a Practice of Politics
• 16 The Labour Family
• Conclusion: Blue Labour – Principles, Policy Ideas and Prospects
• POSTSCRIPT TO THE NEW EDITION Blue Labour and Common Good Politics