Review: Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good”

“For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.'”

Allow us to imagine for a moment the British Labour Party as a human being. We know that it is immensely dysfunctional, prone, of late, to adventurism (consider Iraq), grandiosity (think an end to boom and bust), and self-loathing (recall Owen Smith’s bid in 2016 to topple Jeremy Corbyn and the formation, in 2019, of Change UK). But what kind of parents would it have? Is this internal disharmony just a blip? Or would they be dysfunctional too? Did, in other words, Labour’s parents “f— them up?”

According to Maurice Glasman, the theorist of Blue Labour, Labour is “the child of a cross-class marriage between a decent working class dad and an educated middle class mum.” The dad was the trade unions, the cooperative movement, and building societies and mutuals. The mom was the intellectuals: the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and members of the Anglican clergy. The dad was Aristotelian, in favor of tradition and the common good, the mom Platonic, radical, and progressive.

“The problem in the marriage,” Glasman averred, “was clear from the start.” Disempowered at work, since Labour failed to push for democracy in corporate governance, and in the home as well, since nationalization, implemented by technocrats, became the exclusive form of social ownership envisaged by Labour, increasingly, the dad was subject to the mom’s abuse.

In 2011, when this was written, Glasman counseled that the grandparents ought to step in to help rebuild love and reciprocity within the relationship. Now, three unsuccessful elections later, he advocates something different. He is more trenchant in his criticism of the mom’s behavior. Moralistic, universal, and abstract, under the influence of the mum, Labour has, in effect, been liquidated, he argues in his new book Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good. The dad must, in short, assert his influence anew.