Blue Labour is an emerging position within the Labour party that calls for a politics of the common good in which churches, mosques, synagogues and other religious traditions have a vital part to play. In a recent Observer article, Maurice Glasman, the figurehead of Blue Labour, said: "Labour needs to recall its vocation as the democratic driver of the politics of the common good, a Labour politics that brings together immigrants and locals, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and atheists, middle and working classes."
This is exactly right. But it is easy to miss the simultaneously radical and conservative nature of what is being said and its implications for Labour.
To understand these implications we must set Glasman's statement within a broader context. A characteristic feature of all modern political theories, including socialism, is that they see tradition as the enemy of an emancipatory politics rather than the basis of it. What is of the past must be rejected and only what is new or modern offers hope of a better future: hence "New" Labour was by definition assumed to be better than "old" Labour.
Something as hopelessly tradition-bound as religious beliefs and practices can only ever appear as a threat to what is "progressive". By contrast, Blue Labour sees traditions – whether the customary practices for governing common land, the medieval working practices of the Billingsgate porters, or the religious traditions of Christianity – as having something to contribute to the formation of a just and generous common life. To some this smacks of nostalgia. It is not. It represents a profound realism about democratic politics.
Before proceeding further, I should declare my hand. I am a fellow traveller in the Blue Labour camp, having worked closely with Glasman over the past five years on a number of projects, including our joint work with Citizens UK.
One of the insights born out of this work is that there is a connection between archaic and diverse historic institutions, traditions and customary practices and the ability to tend democracy and resist centralising and technocratic forms of modern power. Democratic politics, if it is to be something more than an elite-driven, top-down, technocratic exercise requires turnout: it requires people to act together on the basis of what they care about. The demos is not an ochlos, or crowd, in which each does their own bidding; it is a body of people undertaking common action in pursuit of shared goods. And the only real power democratic citizens have is the power of association or relational power: the ability to turn out and act together. Yet people will only act together on the basis of what they hold dear, what gives them a sense of belonging and that in which they discover purpose and meaning.
Conversely, if a democratic politics of the common good is to emerge, the particular loves and interests of the few must be drawn together into a broad-based politics of the many. And this broad base needs to identify and negotiate a regional, national and international platform of mutual interests. That is the hard work of party politics. The Labour party did this and then, since 1945, it seems it progressively alienated itself from the constituent elements of its broad base and so became an elite-driven, top-down, technocratic party machine. Blue Labour holds that the renewal of any democratic party comes from rebuilding a broad base and the concerns and moral visions that shape diverse constituencies. This should be an obvious point: only there are a remarkable number of people immersed in the "Westminster village" and its media and corporate entourage who assume that politics is a pursuit best left to educated "experts" rather than the negotiation of a common life by ordinary people with multiple loyalties and diverse interests.
The Labour movement is often associated with socialism. However, in its early history at least, the movement did not demand commitment to any ideological programme. Methodists, Roman Catholics, Jews, anarchists and a host of others who never considered themselves socialists were involved in the development of the movement and the formation of unions, co-operatives and diverse other institutions. What it did demand was solidarity and loyalty to one's fellow workers and a set of practices for organising corporate political action and co-operative forms of self-help. As a movement, what it represented – and this is echoed in contemporary community organising as a mode of democratic citizenship – is the assertion of the priority of social relationships, the upholding of common values, and the value of a common life over and against their instrumentalisation and commodification through political and economic processes.
In the British context it can be argued that Labour's ideological porousness becomes increasingly obscured by the demand for conformity to a narrow spectrum of ideologies, ranging from Fabianism to Marxism. As articulate theories rather than practices of organisation and common action, these theoretical programmes battled to determine what Labour stood for as a party.
However, these theories were state-orientated and elite-driven political programmes that delegitimised the much more "catholic" grassroots movement of self-organising affinity groups. A renewal of Labour as a genuinely democratic party demands a renewed openness to a broad range of influences, some of which are very traditional. Beyond this pragmatic point is a paradox that confronts progressives: traditionalism can often provide the basis for a challenge to the power of money over our common life.