Checking in on the family

In 2010, as Labour began what would become fourteen years in opposition, a group of academics, political strategists, thinkers, and politicians attended a series of seminars in Oxford and London. From those seminars came The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, a collection of papers and commentaries edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White. It set out the stall of what would become ‘Blue Labour’, and sparked extensive debate within the party.  

In his contribution, Glasman put forward his interpretation of the Labour tradition through an original metaphor of the family. Both at the time and since the gender politics of this metaphor have been noted and critiqued. Still, it provided a useful way to make sense of the party’s history. Today, as Blue Labour enjoys a seeming resurgence, it is a useful exercise to return to this metaphor, and to check in with how the family is faring today. Doing so can help us take stock of Labour’s current and future challenges, and offers lessons for both the party as a whole and its communitarian strands. 

Meet the family 

Glasman looks back to our Aristotelian ancestors with their notions of the Good Life and the Common Good; the villagers and artisans who resisted the enclosures in the name of custom, and challenged Royal Prerogatives in the name of Parliament. This puts Labour’s roots in a tradition of resistance that is both reforming and traditional. Our grandparents: the Catholic and non-conformist churches, the skilled workers of the 1889 dock strike. The parents: a middle-class Fabian Mum, and a working-class Common Good Dad.

Glasman’s account seeks to demonstrate the persistent tensions running through Labour’s history. Ours is a movement that is Aristotelian, yet defends the rights of free Englishmen, whose activists find power in each other, yet also seek to extend the role of the state. It is on this latter point that Glasman’s account is most heterodox: for Glasman, the great break in Labour history came when the Fabian Mum won out against the Common Good Dad, and state managerialism – later reinforced by Crosland’s revisionism – decisively triumphed over localism and mutuality. 1945, in this telling, was not an apogee but a wrong turn.  

We can extend Glasman’s suggested family tree downwards. In responses from the 2010 pamphlet to his essay, we meet James Purnell’s New Labour son. He is upwardly socially mobile, and empowered by his ability to navigate the twists and turns of a market economy. One lesson he can teach us is “that we should trust people to make their own decisions; just as its true that they can’t do that if the market or the state turns them into commodities”. 

We also meet Anthony Painter’s daughter of the progressive New Labour son. “She’s ethical as a form of self-expression”, Painter reports, “rather than social instinct, materialistic but not mass market, she has the intellectual self confidence to tie you up in knots, she socially participates on and off line… New Labour son is just as bewildered when it comes to her as his mum and dad were with him. She’s certainly socially liberal and if things play right she may become radically liberal also.”

The challenge of the younger generations

Today, we should be thinking more carefully about the progressive son’s daughter. If Keir Starmer partially renewed the union between the Mum and Dad in the 2024 election, and brought the progressive son along with them, the daughter might have voted Green or been begrudging about her Labour vote. Perhaps she just liked the local candidate. This disillusion may be fine for now, but it will pose a problem for Labour further down the line when she moves out of Hackney to a town where Labour votes are carefully counted rather than weighed. 

We might find more trouble in store when we learn about the daughter’s younger siblings. Let us imagine she has a younger sister and brother. Her younger sister shares the same values as her, but they’re turned up a notch. Identity is not just important, it is essential, the prism through which to view both the self and society. It is not something shared with a collective, but broken down into endlessly smaller segments, such that the notion of a “community” loses its meaning as something that can bring people together. It is replaced by narrow lines of ever-further division, valorising specific experiences based on immutable characteristics rather than what might be shared.

What separates her even more keenly from her elder sister is that her life isn’t really a question of online/offline. It’s online, all the time; socially, professionally, in all ways that count. Comparison is constant throughout adolescence. Narrow communities are affirmed, and provide her and her friends with a degree of meaning, yet their virtual basis is more realised than their social one. Is she happy? No. Her mental health is a constant challenge. 

Her brother is no better, though his challenges are different. He has heard that the things he thought a man should do or feel are now toxic. It makes him confused, and a little lost. He worries people judge and sneer at the things he likes, that they are not enlightened or befitting of the true twenty-first century man. He too turns to social media and spends much of his free time gaming. Online, his narrow identity is confirmed. He finds others who are a bit lost, who feel like society looks down on them. They then find people who tell them it’s okay, it’s not them. It’s feminism, it’s the woke left. Is he happy? No. He’s similar to his sister in this respect. It’s just that one of their Instagrams or TikToks will focus on whatever the latest cause of the liberal left is that week, whilst the other’s will be whoever has spoken to those lost boys, be it Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. As for voting? It will be Reform or staying home. 

Family tensions 

It is a daunting task to construct a politics that can keep this family together. Not only in terms of forming a government, but also in terms of the purer politics of forging a common good. 

On the former, Starmer managed to reunite the family to win the 2024 general election. That he did so is in part down to good fortune, but it is impressive nonetheless – after all, it is a task most Labour leaders do not achieve. Yet the shaky foundations of this majority meant it was always liable to topple over, and it is beginning to wobble already. Focus has predominantly been on the threat of Reform who are trying to win over Common Good Dad and are having some success in doing so. Labour do need to address this, but they cannot be myopic in doing so: we also need to worry about the grandchildren. 

As mentioned earlier, the relative disillusionment of some younger voters with Labour is not yet an electoral issue. Most will vote tactically where they need to, and those who will not probably live in urban seats where Labour enjoys comfortable majorities. One day, however, it is likely that those voters will move to seats that are more likely to swing from election to election. This could benefit Labour, as it already has in some seats. But if these voters’ disillusionment is not assuaged, it could pose future problems. 

One of the key lessons Labour should take from the last few decades is to never take a group of voters for granted. We saw this in 2019 with the collapse of the so-called ‘Red Wall’. In the task of winning back the Dad, there were points where Labour risked alienating the granddaughter. The same could become true again in the attempt to win back him back from Reform. There may well come a point when her disillusion becomes apathy and then opposition, which could cost Labour longer term. 

For the grandson it is a different problem. There is a divergence between young men and women on social values, with the former being more conservative – or in the UK’s case less liberal – than the latter. The validation the grandson has found online could yet find an electoral outlook should a party mount a sufficiently credible appeal to that demographic. Speaking to young men suggests Reform have already begun to mount such an appeal. Labour’s coalition could be pulled apart within the family’s generations as well as across them. 

Keeping the family together

In Labour circles it is too often assumed that family tensions must end with a divorce. We are told we must pick a side. Do we want to win back the Dad and the younger brother, and send the daughters packing, or vice versa? I accept that in politics choices have to be made, but this is a counterproductive framing. Bridging between these two sides of the coalition is what makes Labour, well, Labour. So what can we do? Where might we find common ground? 

Sociocultural issues are the biggest point of tension. Attempts to win back Common Good Dad through tough rhetoric and restrictive policy on migration risk alienating Labour’s liberal support. What this means in electoral terms will depend on the geographical distribution of these voters and the extent to which highly efficient anti-right tactical voting (as seen in the 2024 election) continues. To maintain a broad coalition, liberal voters are going to have to feel a degree of discomfort. If politics is about choices, it is also about compromise. What Labour must not do, however, is make people feel as though the party actively dislikes them. It must give them something to make compromise feel worthwhile. 

A focus on economic issues can help to bridge the gap. As Steve Akehurst shows, Labour’s wobbly wings have more to agree on when it comes to economic issues: there is widespread support for taxing the wealthiest and redistributing economic power.This is surely a case for both sticking to and more actively trumpet the government’s plans to strengthen workers’ rights, as the TUC have recently done in Clacton. These issues speak to working-class men and women as well as to progressive activists.They also could and should lay the basis for an economic narrative that it is a little more ‘levelling up’ than the current mantra of ‘growth, growth, growth’. 

A strengthened communitarianism 

For Labour’s communitarians, the younger siblings also present a specific challenge on the more fundamental level of ideas. What might be instinctive to us is quite alien to this generation. Conceptions of community – particularly those of place – are not really part of their everyday experience as they were for older generations. There are fewer and fewer bridging institutions, shared moments or indeed shared spaces. Even the notion that ‘we’ might often be more important than ‘me’ runs counter to the outlook of a generation raised on a diet of socioeconomic individualism. 

Spatial and digital divisions pose electoral problems, but they also erode our common life. We should return to James Purnell’s maxim “that we should trust people to make their own decisions; just as its true that they can’t do that if the market or the state turns them into commodities.” If much of what is driving division, alienation, and disconnection is the behaviour of social media platforms that are commodifying people, then are their decisions really free? Without radical action to counter their effects, we risk being led by tech companies into a spiral of atomisation. 

There is thus a need for a more confident communitarianism – one that more actively seeks to construct and protect a notion of the common good, even at the cost of running counter to people’s current revealed preferences, and to the individualistic norms they have become accustomed to. We know that an atomised life lived primarily online does not make people happy, and that it risks rendering any common life obsolete. We also know that in many areas – such as smartphone use by children and young people – collective action problems are preventing people from making changes they instinctively know are right. 

Alongside a bolder economic policy that prioritises dignity in work, we need to fight back against trends which we have too often accepted as inevitable. We should be working to create a new generation-bridging institutions that can bring people together. We should be making sure that money and powers are available for communities to protect the shared spaces where people of different backgrounds can meet each other. We should finally take cohesion and community seriously as goods that need to be cultivated, not merely as resources to be relied on in times of crisis. Doing so might enable the different parts of Labour’s family to understand each other a little better, and to be more open to the give and take that will be needed to make our country a better place for all. 

Don’t forget about the family 

Checking in with the family highlights how things have developed since the Politics of Paradox was first published. Many of the arguments of Glasman’s paper have been vindicated, and I would contend that Starmer’s success in 2024 was a product of his ability to reunite much of the family. The challenge for Labour now is to navigate its tensions and construct a politics that keeps it together. 

This will take strength and courage, and a willingness to shape events as well as to be shaped by them. Most importantly, bold economic policy and assertive communitarianism both offer a chance to foster compromise within the family that a focus – real or perceived – on sociocultural issues cannot. Come the next election, there might not exactly be harmony, but we can at least aim to ensure understanding. Such understanding can keep the family together as we work to improve the country.  

Josh Westerling works on policy and advocacy for Power to Change. He writes in a personal capacity.