Blue Labour's blindspots

Ideological rigidity, McSweeneism and the identity politics of the right

The New Statesman published an anonymous memo circulated to Labour MPs by someone who sounds like Jonathan Ratherford, one of the fathers of Blue Labour*.

It is a partial reappraisal of the McSweeney thesis, itself 70% Blue Labour and 30% New Labour: the left has been taken over by the sensibilities of the highly educated managerial class and has demonised the concerns of the voters it is supposed to represent. It focuses on two cohorts of people, the English revolting because of illegal immigration and what it calls the new left Anti-zionist coalition between Muslim independents and the ‘bourgeois left’.

*Blue Labour: the socially conservative, patriotic but economically left-wing wing of the Labour Party.

Nobody likes an ethnocentrist

The blind spot of Blue Labour is not recognising zionist ethnocentrism as identity politics where the concerns of one group demand to overshadow wider party and country interests.

Three-party and country interests are specifically overlooked:

1. Muslim people feeling like we don’t care about muslim lives as much as we do about Jewish lives (here is where Shabana Mahmood should have been given a lot more space- I’d back her for PM, she’d save us from race war).

2. Aligning ourselves with an international ally that has discredited itself and broken international law. Genocide is disputed by some (who I believe will be proven wrong) for the time being, but ethnic cleansing is self-evident.

3. Helplessly watching said ‘ally’ create a new refugee crisis, which the already impotent international community will be asked to cough up for.

Anti-semitism can’t be the government’s main focus any more than islamophobia. The economy should be their main focus and the only one they can solve. Bar jailing and deporting criminals and terrorists, which they are already doing and with my blessings should do more of, illiberal measures targeting people who have not done anything threatening, like arresting grannies holding placards, is not defeating anti-semitism. It is making a mockery of the cause.

When you use anti-semitism to shut down uncomfortable criticism of Israel, the average non-partisan person cringes. Maybe they can’t articulate why exactly they find this uncomfortable, but they get a deeper sense of someone trying to manipulate them, in the same way, say, a corrupt boss woman used accusations of sexism during the height of #MeToo to advance her own career by taking out the male competition.

Do people riding the wave of a genuine grievance (violent misogyny, threat to Jewish lives) make these grievances false? No, but people don’t like being guilt-tripped into taking sides on a highly political issue. The boss woman uses sexism (real societal ill) to advance a political agenda that benefits her, to little benefit for women at large. The inscrutable pro-Israel activist uses anti-semitism (real societal ill) to control a debate towards policies that British people don’t benefit from, or support (selling arms to Israel, soft touch on Netanyahu).

The result of this abuse of the goodwill of idealistic and polite moderate voters is radicalisation or moral disgust leading to apathy.

Why is Blue Labour hellbent on ignoring Israeli ethnocentrism, despite its raison d’être being moving away from identity politics?

Perhaps unconsciously, anti-semitism could be a cover to speak about their main concern: the threat of Islamic radicalisation and ethnonationalism. But, by continuously framing their rhetoric around defending zionism Blue Labour (which is not representative of the goverment) is recreating the callous bias of identity politics by never seeing any legitimacy in Palestine protesters in the same way they so generously do for Tommy Robinson marchers.

“Are you suggesting we can’t talk about the unique and rising threat to Jewish life?” No, of course not. I am suggesting that BLM activists had perfectly good examples of brutal racism throughout the US to point to; they took it too far, allowed corruption to creep into their movement, promoted the indefensible (violence) and bullied people, and look where we are now.

The thing Blue Labour should want to stump out is not ‘anti-zionism’- itself a contested term, but ethnocentrism be it by blood thirsty Israeli politicians clinging on to power while wrecking havoc for everyone else, white nationalist skinheads who have finally found an excuse to legitimise their racism or islamic fundamentalists who feel no affinity to their non-muslim neighbours and use their religions as a shield for their regressive, illiberal attitudes. All fascists matter!

We don’t need to buy Farage’s populism; we have populism at home.

Big John should be our north star. A dignified patriot. Reform are cranks. Copying them is fake and lame.

Immigration policy should be done and not heard because, in reality, there is no such thing as humane border control. Immigration controls suck, but they are necessary.

When the interwar Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and the father of Modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, signed the Lausanne treaty, which sealed the fate of almost two million people, they wrapped it in humanitarian language. Venizelos was a darling of liberal Europe and a true statesman of the type no longer in fashion. The situation between the young state of Greece and the Turkey rising from its Ottoman asses was untenable. His signing off on the ethnic cleansing of his fellow Orthodox Christians from Anatolia, and the innocent Muslim inhabitants of modern Greece, brought untold pain to the already persecuted families who lost their entire livelihoods, and many their literal lives, on the forced journey out of Turkey. But what was he supposed to do? The war had to end; Greece was poor and exhausted, and its army was humiliated. Turkey wanted its pound of flesh, and Ottoman Christians- Pontic Greeks- were hunted by the Turkish army. The people of Greece did not want to receive the influx of refugees, savaged by war and persecution. They felt poor enough as they were; Sharing with newcomers, who they did not identify as Orthodox Roman siblings but as Turk-spawns who didn’t even speak Greek, was a generosity Venizelos forced upon them.

The treatment of borders, immigrants, and refugees has always been brutal by necessity, but political leaders must learn to weave empathy into their rhetoric. Starmer did this in his speech at Labour conference, especially in the part below, but the whole framing of immigration by Labour has been wrongheaded for the last decade:

I was taken to a street to meet a woman who I was told had strong views on immigration… as we sat there, she got out her photo album and showed me pictures of her at the wedding of her Asian neighbour. She was proud that she was her neighbour and her friend. Now – I’m not the most patient person, as my family will tell you. I started thinking – what is going on here.
And then we finally got to it. She told me that a group of men from Eastern Europe had recently moved into her street. They sat on her wall. Didn’t put the rubbish out at the right time. And spat on the ground. To her that broke the little but important rules of her street. She didn’t like it. Then I realised what was really happening. She – an ordinary, working class, woman in Oldham, a Labour voter, felt that she had to prove to a Labour politician that she wasn’t racist before she could even bring up the issues in her community. Whatever our intentions – we had become a party that patronised working people There are still some people who cannot listen in good faith on this issue who say we can ignore the crisis in our asylum system so long as we get the economy moving. I have to say to those people very directly. We’ll tackle this issue. The British people are not unreasonable, they are pragmatic, compassionate and tolerant.

I agree. British people at large are not unreasonable. They are open-minded, considerate, and polite. That’s easily observable to anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear.

What about the little Union Jack and St George’s flags that the cabinet was made to wave around during his speech? Isn’t that playing into Reform’s narrative?

No, because they are just a bunch of cute lil flags and the result is that squeamish lib lefties revolted against them on the TL and then people like me got to George Orwell the hell out of them, i.e. explain why patriotism is compatible, nay necessary for, socialism.

Who will think of the middle class?

Ben Ansell argues that appealing to the Reform vote is fruitless (which is the implicit meaning of the memo and McSweeney’s strategy).

He goes through the data on voters who have moved from Labour and the Conservatives to Reform and puts meat on the bones of Labour’s soft left argument that Labour is haemorrhaging a lot more voters to the Greens, the LibDems and the Gaza independents than it does to Reform.

He explains that the 'profile’ of the type of voter Reform is attracting is different. They are more social conservative than any party, which rings true with data we have from pretty much anywhere. As Matthew Yglesias argued a few weeks back, the popularity of anti-immigration parties everywhere is down to a very loud cohort of voters being a lot more right-wing on these issues than any mainstream politicians.

Ben says that on economic policy, Reform voters ‘don’t care’, which is probably just an unfortunate turn of phrase and not what he actually means, but what I have seen from polling is that, in fact, Reform voters are deeply divided on economic policy, much like the fusionist right-wing coalition in the US.

You see above the division between those who depend on the state and the NHS and those who feel burdened by the taxes that fund it.

By Ben’s analysis, the no-brainer for the Labour party is to swing to the left (or maybe liberalism?) and dominate the centre-left space, hoovering up votes from pretty much everyone.

While I agree on Labour needing to stop spitting on its base, I have three worries:

1. Reform is becoming more respectable and attracting intellectual energy that Labour has failed to incite.

2. The McSweeney thesis of left-wing dysfunction stopping progress is true.

3. A lot of Reform voters will be first-time voters, or people who have not voted in a long time (because voting for a new radical party is exciting).

I have watched in horror as intelligent young people consider working for a Reform government. Some on the left would like to claim the problem is people like me uttering a Reform government into existence by pointing to things like this, or for acknowledging at all that such a thing as ‘intelligent person who works for Reform” exists. These are not serious people; they are modern Chamberlains cosplaying as Churchills.

Nobody likes a meanie

The McSweeney obsession with rooting out the left is off-putting to the vast majority of Labour members. McSweeney acknowledged that with his strategy, arguing that in Labour Together’s attempt to make the party a winner again, they should not spook the reasonable lefty voters, which they referred to as ‘idealists’ and which in the broader party are also part of what we call the ‘soft left’.

As degenerate as I find their tactics (I could never be on board with kicking a former leader out of his own party, let alone uncle Jezza, yes even Ramsay McDonald I would probably spare) I came to a terrible conclusion recently. People like me should be grateful to people like McSweeney. I know that fringe lefties could very easily twist a lot of the policies I want to push for in the party as not being left wing enough. I am woke to be sure, but also a heterodox lefty, and agree that the left has been cannibalised by social and identity issues over economic empowerment. Policies on immigration, welfare and energy, which need to happen, would face big resistance from members. McSweeney et all are right that ideological rigidity is an obstacle to policy making, which requires compromise on an industrial scale.

Blairites, by acting with deranged vengeance towards the Corbynites, have made people like me look romantically socialist. Never mind the schizophrenia of my policy positions that do not fit any one faction.

A mentor of mine says this is why I am a natural-born politician: I have a pathological need to never hurt anyone’s feelings. It is a massive handicap and liability, obviously, and this is why he believes I need ruthless people around me who will run over stray dogs if it means not crashing a bus full of kids.

But my broad church Labour movement is a dysfunctional one. McSweeney is right that the party has often been held hostage to interest groups that did not care about what the voter wants, forcing Labour MPs to always look to the loudest members for approval rather than to the country they seek to serve. But selfish arsonist interest groups are not the monopoly of the left.

If listening to the voters is what is most important, and going light touch on Netanyahu starving children is disastrous for Labour’s electoral fate, shouldn’t that be a clue? Or keeping Mandelson in post, or giving Ali a pass, or or or… a number of other misgivings hostile briefings are pinning on McSweeney, but I am not buying it.

Is this not ideological rigidity too, impeding electoral success and damaging British interests?

Blair though right wing compared to the party base was tolerated because he won. He was popular and confident and did not neurotically micro manage the party. If the modern Labour right can neither read the room nor deliver competent technocracy then they have no business sermonising on ideological rigidity.