Whatever happened to Blue Labour?

Ed Miliband has launched his conference with a mea culpa for Labour’s record on immigration. In the midst of all the media hype, one would be forgiven for thinking that he now wants to build a brick wall along the southeast coast.

In fact his careful statement that “if you have a more open economy in Europe, you’ve got to put in the right protection for people, for workers”, promises nothing.

Working class conservatives – the people at whom this rhetoric is aimed – shouldn’t get too excited.

There isn’t a strong enough constituency of support within the Labour Party to turn Ed’s words into policy; the modern party is far too wedded to political correctness for that. For proof, consider the ignoble decline of Ed’s one time pet project – Blue Labour.

Blue Labour, spearheaded by political scientist Maurice Glasman, was an exercise in communitarian populism. Glasman argued that Labour needed to embrace the nascent conservatism of its former working-class supporters.

He wanted to replace globalisation with economic nationalism and a renewed concern for low pay. This was balanced with a paean to 1950s values of faith, family and flag. Where New Labour had been materialist and shallow, Blue Labour would be wholesome and spiritual. That Blue Labour would be critical of unfettered immigration was a logical synthesis of its cultural conservatism and economic populism.

Then Glasman called for a moratorium on immigration. The Guardian, which affects outrage more often than an Edwardian maiden aunt, was predictably appalled. Blue Labour was denounced as semi-fascist and wiped from the collective memory of the Labour frontbench.

Some will argue that Glasman just made a tactical mistake. But the truth is that he never stood a chance of re-orientating Labour towards his brand of small “c” conservatism.

Part of the problem is that the Labour Party’s structures prevent any philosophy, beyond its vague technocratic liberalism, from capturing the party. Conference has been defanged and real issues are no longer discussed. Only competitive internal elections offer a chance to contest ideas and those are very rare.

More importantly, the anti-immigration hawks lack a demographic base within the party. When Labour started to shrug off socialism in the 1980s, it replaced redistribution with “equality and diversity” – social regulation that would make Britain a competitive yet more tolerant country.

Its contemporary ideological roots lie in the cosmopolitanism progressivism of the urban middle class. It is true that the Parliamentary Labour Party still has a few oddball Proletarian conservatives (bowtie wearing Welsh MPs, former miners, even an ex-priest) but not enough to challenge the status quo.

In the aftermath of the 2005 election – when it felt like Labour might be in power for a thousand years – I and a group of friends were charged with drawing up a manifesto for South East Labour. Voters are more Right-wing down here, and we hoped to create a brand of C2 populism that could stop the region going back to the Tories.

Our model was the Blue Dog Democrats in the US – evangelical or hawkish Democrats who had won races in ordinarily Republican states by stressing their conservative values. This strategy had contributed to the 2006 Democratic landslide.

But our project went nowhere. It is all very well to talk generally about social conservatism, but our concrete policy proposals were inevitably too controversial (my idea for a volunteer border patrol was not popular).

The only place in the country with a robust socially conservative group of MPs is the North, and Labour is stronger up there and in no need of rebranding. Down South, the constituency parties have retreated to their core of educated middle-class supporters.

Where Labour needs conservative populism the most, its appeal is lowest among its actual members.

We also noticed that the Blue Dog project had stalled. The Blue Dogs were lauded so long as they won local races, but when it came to playing a larger role in the national party, they were ostracised.

The frustrated ambitions of Senators Joe Lieberman, Mark Warner or Evan Bayh testify to the power of liberal lobbyists. In 2010, many of those Blue Dogs were wiped out in the congressional elections because they were tarred with Obama’s radicalism. The Blue Dog brand wasn’t strong or popular enough to stand up for itself.

Likewise, in Britain there is no point being a socially conservative Labour MP: your constituency party will hate you and the leadership will have nothing to do with you. And you’ll lose your seat anyway because the national party is so unctuously liberal.

Blue Labour never stood a chance, and neither does Ed’s flirtation with the immigration issue. The resistance he will face from his party will be overwhelming, and the voters will accept nothing less than tough limits.

It is pleasing that Labour is engaging in serious debates about history and culture, but the national party lacks the intellectual and political resources necessary to implement their conclusions.

For the moment at least, Labour is staying red.

Dr Tim Stanley is a research fellow in American History at Oxford University. His latest book, a biography of Pat Buchanan, will be available from February 2012. Visit his personal website at www.timothystanley.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.