Red Ed, Blue Labour and other Bollocks.

Better Red than Ed.

The current leader of the Labour Party was elected on the basis of his centrist credentials, which contrasted with the Blairism of the preceding 16 years, which were welcomed by the labour movement who were imperative in his victory. The way that Ed Miliband was elected over his brother was not a victory for socialism or even social democracy, but it did signal the end of New Labour. If David Miliband was elected it would have furthered the right-ward shift of the Labour Party which began steadily in the 1980s. The transformation of the Party was taken to its fullest expression under Tony Blair in it's civil authoritarianism, interventionism and all-out market liberalism. In simpler terms, Blairism introduced killing Iraqis for oil to the Labour Party along with kidnapping "terror suspects" and sending them to be boiled alive in Uzbekistan at the pleasure of a regime no better than the Taliban. All the while New Labour only raised the bar on what Thatcher pulled off in the 80s.

The Labour Party is not active in the opening up a space into which the working-class can enter as a political agent for radical change, though the Party looks to pose as providing a means for the working-class to pursue reform of the system. This is more accurate of the Labour Party that was led by Clement Attlee, which achieved important reforms in the 1940s. But it is not true of New Labour and it definitely isn't true of Labour under Ed Miliband. There was a time when the Labour Party consisted of socialists, social democrats and Christian leftists. The particular form of hegemony which was New Labour might be understood as compromised of a neoliberal strand, with a subordinate strand of social democracy which is systematically transformed into neoliberalism. The objective being that the privatisation of public services can be defended as in line with the history of the Labour Party. The Right turn the process of transformation on it's head, neoliberalism becomes social democracy or even socialism, in order to label the leader "Red Ed".

Ed and David are the sons of Ralph Miliband, a committed Marxist intellectual of the New Left, who argued that there are tendencies within the Labour Party that will always betray the working-class and we now know just how right he was. Ralph Miliband stood for a kind of socialism predicated on self-emancipation, without a dictatorship or a one-party state. For the Murdoch press, Ed Miliband is 'red' because he demonstrates some social democratic sympathies when he called for Britain to adopt a "capitalism that works for the people". Even though "Red Ed" still endorses 'Blue Labour', which is not so much a movement as a small collection of intellectuals calling for the Labour Party to address the concerns of a more conservative working-class than it has done in the past. Maurice Glasman has argued that 'Blue Labour' is in line with the role of the Labour Party in British history, the way it has represented working-people and has asserted the role of the ordinary person in society.

The Conservative Socialist.

Maurice Glasman thinks that the Labour Party can defeat the Con-Dem Coalition if it follows the 'Blue Labour' line of becoming more conservative and heavily critical of financial capitalism at the same time. Apparently, Gordon Brown was not 'conservative' enough to secure a Labour victory in 2010. Even though Brown is supposedly an avid reader of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the neoconservative cheerleader of the Bush administration, who thinks that the West has been in a state of moral disorder since the 1960s when traditional values were torn apart by a frenzied youth. In office Gordon Brown was a market liberal and never differed from the orthodoxy established by Thatcher. Then there is Tony Blair, who has been described by Douglas Murray as the "ideal" neoconservative and has also been praised by Richard Perle. This is down to Blair's superb interventionist credentials. Glasman would no doubt argue that 'Blue Labour' was never fully tried under Blair or Brown.

The game Glasman is playing might be called comfortable reaction, it is a game played by the Right in general and also has parallels on the Left. Glasman can criticise Blair and Brown on the grounds that 'Blue Labour' was lost, the Party became ensnared in finance capitalism and ultimately abandoned patriotism. At the same time the values of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity were lost. For Glasman the Labour Party essentially became a liberal party which acted along utilitarian lines under Blair and Brown. Note the absence of any reference to civic authoritarianism and liberal interventionism. Though there is an inkling of truth in Glasman's thesis, the Common Good was lost or more accurately never advocated by Blair. Solidarity was traded in, along with liberty and equality, for an atomised interpretation of society which could easily be reduced to a spiritual and economic wasteland. Further problems emerge when Glasman advocates a "conservative socialism".

The dreaded s-word is only used to "domesticate" the concept, to reassure us that we have moved on and the ideal can now be discarded except in tame variants - e.g. aspirational socialism. The links between Glasman and Labour are at once tribal and parasitic, 'Blue Labour' is window-dressing to put it bluntly. The same can be said of the relationship between the Conservatives and Phillip Blond. Since the end of the Cold War we find that politics are increasingly about management, but there is a need for 'big ideas' in order to effectively manage society. The Establishment has grasped at the most malleable ideas around, there is room in 'Red Toryism' for cuts and room in 'Blue Labour' for race-based populism. The rift between Labour and the unions has been growing for decades, 73% of trade unionists voted for Labour in 1964; in 1974 it was 55% and in 1983 it had slumped to just 39%. Since then Labour has drifted further right-wards and Peter Mandelson has acted to stamp out the influence of unions even more.

Expect Failure.

Incidentally Gordon Brown is currently looking to become the head of the IMF, to the chagrin of David Cameron, it is hardly a leftist position of power in the world. Though Brown has called for financial reform at an international level, which is what is needed to bring the banks back into the realm of 'sanity'. A tempting hypothesis is that the Crash has made room for a tamed liberalism based on Keynesian theories to enter the world stage once more. From here we could be led to conclude that Brown could lead the IMF apparatchiks to challenge their own ideas. Though it could just be that Brown is looking to outshine Blair on the world stage, the war of ego between them have now moved onto the world stage. The fact that the politicians only dug up Keynes in order to save the economy from imminent collapse only to recreate the unsustainable boom of the preceding decade. Brown's pitch might be a capitalism with better management, but in effect it is only to defend the system as it is.


The joke about 'Blue Labour' is that the Party has not been left-wing for almost 30 years. Labour accomplished the most when Clement Attlee was in power from 1945 to 1951, even in defeat the Party went down with the votes of 48.8% of the electorate - the largest proportion ever won by a single party - and only lost because of the First-Past-the-Post system. Old Labour enjoyed such success as it had succeeded in establishing the National Health Service along with a system to provide benefits, care for the elderly and sick. Under Labour the Bank of England, coal, gas and electricity were nationalised. What Labour began in 1945 would last until around 1975 when the social democratic epoch began to be challenged. In those 30 years there was high economic growth, low unemployment and incomes increased alongside productivity. The workers' share of the GDP peaked in the 1970s and has been in decline since the rise of Thatcherism.

It looks like the country faces the usual predicament that there are no viable alternatives to takeover from the incumbents and the result could be a Conservative government in 2015. The Liberals are taking all of the flak for selling out, which is fair enough. But the effect has been to strengthen the position of the Conservatives. The only way Labour will be able to lead a charge against on the Coalition will be if the Party returns to it's left-wing roots. There is no hope of a more 'moderate' Blairism bouncing back. The Labour Party has to shake-off the tenets of Blair, whether it be torture, wars for oil, spending cuts for the poor and tax-cuts for the rich. Only the labour movement can salvage the Labour Party from the abyss and lead a successful campaign against the Coalition. That is the only way Labour can mobilise working-people again. In the meantime, we should bare in mind what Ralph Miliband taught us about Labour - expect failure and we will never be disappointed again.