Taking Back Control? The Political Economy of Blue Labour

Blue Labour has carved out a rare space for sustained intellectual work in a Labour Party often bereft of, or resistant to, new ideas. Whether or not one accepts its prescriptions, it remains among the few factions within Labour able to claim a coherent political philosophy. Its proponents advance a distinct, and often divisive, vision that draws on cultural conservatism and opposition to high levels of immigration to challenge the party's predominant progressive orthodoxies. As a result, Blue Labour is more often associated with a brand of social conservatism than with the economic arguments that underpin its worldview. Yet members of the new Blue Labour parliamentary staff network have insisted its ‘economic populism’ is ‘more important than its cultural elements’.[1] So, what is the political economy of Blue Labour? Has it evolved, and how populist is it?

A central focus of the faction’s thinking since its founding has been to restore a sense of ‘control’ to ‘ordinary people’ and empower the working class. In a 2011 collection of contributions outlining the Blue Labour philosophy, The Labour Tradition, there was a recognition that this must involve both greater democratic control of the state and some ‘control over one’s working and daily life’. This concern with control is also apparent in this year’s Blue Labour re-issue of Labour Together’s 2022 document Labour’s Covenant, chiefly authored by Blue Labour intellectual Jonathan Rutherford. The theme runs throughout, from government ‘control over reconstruction’ to giving ordinary people ‘control over their government and their own lives’.

For Blue Labour, ‘society is threatened as much by an overmighty market as it is by a domineering state’[2], but proposals for empowering the working class to resist such forces have shifted in the years between these two publications. In The Labour Tradition, Maurice Glasman insisted on a ‘commitment…to forms of mutual and co-operative ownership’. And Stuart White, who has since disassociated himself from Blue Labour, wrote in his contribution to the collection that ‘radical politics must take the ownership of property seriously’. This early work conceives of working-class control of economic assets as immediate and independent of public institutions or politicians. Hence the emphasis on a mutualised economy; on worker-owned enterprises, credit unions, and co-operative housing associations. One product of this view was Glasman’s involvement with the Dover People’s Port campaign in 2012, which sought to transfer the whole port into community ownership as part of a community land trust.[3]

During the Corbyn years, Blue Labour went quiet. Culturally, it was at odds with the liberal cosmopolitanism of those around the Labour leadership, and it rejected the Party’s endorsement of a second referendum on EU membership in 2019 – a decision that Glasman lamented ‘marked the end of the road for Labour in its heartlands’[4] . Nevertheless, elements of the ‘radical, social democratic economic programme’[5] of John McDonnell’s agenda aligned with Blue Labour’s aim of creating a more ‘equal relationship between state, market and society’. In particular, the push for Alternative Models of Ownership that emanated from the Shadow Chancellor’s office in 2017 seemed to resonate with Blue Labour’s desire to redistribute ownership and control, shifting it away from bosses and bureaucrats, towards workers and communities.

Since 2019, when divisions over Brexit peaked, Blue Labour’s emphasis on control has become divorced from the issue of ownership. This is partly a product of Glasman’s exaltation of parliamentary sovereignty, as an antidote to ‘distant bureaucrats and judges’.[6] Critically, parliament is also understood as the central institution of a new politics that lays down the law to the market. This, it is argued, can reverse the trend of the past 40 years in which democratic politics has retreated in the face of market logics; 40 years in which the demands of foreign direct investment and the needs of business, increasingly owned from abroad, have set the legislative agenda.  Glasman’s support for the Leave campaign rested in part on his view that the European Union placed key economic questions beyond the control of sovereign states. Indeed, Blue Labour was early in advocating industrial policy, currently in vogue globally, and now calls for ‘policy to support industries of critical national importance, and regional policy to ensure all of Britain benefits.’

In Rutherford’s Labour’s Covenant, control over the economy is still something that needs to be reasserted. But The Labour Tradition’s former vision of such control being exercised directly by working class communities, within a mutualised economy, has now slipped from prominence. Instead, business actors and political institutions are emphasied. The text gives consideration to economic issues at both the ‘national’ and ‘everyday’ levels. At the national level, there are calls for ‘decentralised institutions’ that can ‘boost self-sufficiency’, and for regional investment banks; ‘local partnerships between business and industry’ will be at the heart of industrial innovation'. This amounts to a vision of decentralised corporatism, ‘a social partnership between unions, employers’ associations, local authorities and ministries’.

Rutherford’s reflections on the everyday economy highlight the importance of secure employment, healthcare, housing and family benefits. A theory of community wealth building and the importance of anchor institutions is also present. ‘Ownership’, however, is mentioned only twice, discussed as something which, along with ‘economic decision making’, needs to be ‘aligned with local communities.’ When firms themselves are discussed, it is in the context of a new Companies Act to promote stakeholder capitalism.

Given the domination of the economy by unaccountable forms of global capital today, much of this would be welcome. However, where public influence is to be exercised, it will be mediated by politicians and bureaucrats. Unlike earlier, more radical iterations of Blue Labour’s political economy, this vision does not amount to a redistribution of ownership. While there may be some limitations placed on capital’s ability to shape society to its own ends, this is a long way from a programme of Alternative Models of Ownership.

Elsewhere, in the recently issued Blue Labour programme, ‘What is To Be Done?’, ownership appears only in relation to the public ownership of utilities. There are elements of neo-Bevinite muscle and neo-Croslandite welfarism here, with the market sublime of the Blairites decisively cast aside.[7]  Yet while this may lead to a reconfiguration of economic control, it does not in any significant way relocate it or place it in the hands of a wider section of society. Even the proposal to include workers on boards does not question ownership or amount to worker control. To put it simply, Blue Labour’s new programme is in danger of expanding an administrative state and a professional managerial class that Blue Labour openly disparages. This, then, is a contradiction, as well as a departure from the earlier approach taken by Blue Labour with its emphasis on more direct forms of working-class control of assets and firms.

However strong Blue Labour’s disdain for the cosmopolitanism of the Corbyn era, it would do well to acknowledge the enduring resonances between McDonnell’s economic vision and its own. The prominence of Dan Carden in the parliamentary caucus and the presence of other former Corbynites in new staff networks offer hope to those who would wish to see the revivial of a more radical approach to questions of ownership.

Perhaps it is this possibility, and the scope to discuss ideas, that has fed the enthusiasm of those staffers, because at present there is not much about Blue Labour’s economic programme that is genuinely populist, in the sense of putting power back into the hands of working-class citizens and communities. Instead, it offers a reheated corporatism, with a little local flavour.

Nevertheless, it is possible to detect an enduring radicalism. Blue Labour retains the aim of making ‘the country anew’, of ‘restoring local community life’, and ‘forging social unity’. Significantly, it still professes a pride ‘in our multiracial democracy’ that reveals a willingness to reckon with social realities rather than a retreat into the nostalgia of which it is so often accused. In this, its outlook could be summed up by a reworking of an old conservative maxim: for things to change, we must embrace tradition. The challenge is to turn this from an object of intellectual and professional fascination into an effective popular politics – a task that will demand a more forceful engagement with questions of ownership and control. 

Sean Irving is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/06/meet-the-blue-labour-bros
2. https://www.bluelabour.org/about-us
3. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/11/blue-labour-maurice-glasman-and-fight-peoples-port
4. https://www.bluelabour.org/home/a-christmas-letter-from-maurice-glasman
5. https://labourlist.org/2021/07/the-labour-left-can-no-longer-afford-to-ignore-blue-labour/
6. https://www.bluelabour.org/home/what-is-to-be-done
7. https://renewal.org.uk/blog/bevin-crosland-or-blair-labours-rival-political-economies-2/