Blue Labour v Reform: The Pro-Worker, Anti-Woke Plan To Beat Farage

With Reform riding high in the polls, many new Labour MPs are deeply anxious about the threat posed by Nigel Farage. To fight him off, some of them – along with Keir Starmer’s No 10 – are turning to a tradition that had been only recently rejected by the party: Blue Labour.

In the context of Reform UK and Trumpism, the socially conservative, economically left-wing group is re-emerging as a force. It had exerted influence during the Ed Miliband years but became unfashionable in Labour, many members of which are still scarred by the infamous “controls on immigration” mugs of that era.

A new group of Labour MPs has now formed around the Blue Labour tradition, independently organised from within the parliamentary party. Chaired – to some surprise – by former Socialist Campaign Group member Dan Carden, members describe it as “small but growing”.

Notably, its core group of MPs other than Carden are from the 2024 intake: Jonathan Hinder, Jonathan Brash, and David Smith. (No women are openly involved so far, which some regard as a challenge but for which there is no apology on account of their opposition to DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – culture.)

The Blue Labour group of MPs has been meeting for several months, holding private conversations about the country’s future. Comparing it to the new Red Wall caucus of MPs, which has a narrower electoral focus, Smith says Blue Labour members enjoy exploring answers to the big questions together. “There’s a lot of deeper thought going on within the Blue Labour space. Like genuinely, philosophically, what does the good life look like? What kind of country do we want to create?”

Future events will extend invitations to external speakers and be open to intrigued colleagues, who are too shy about associating themselves with Blue Labour to be named at this stage. There are mixed feelings within the group about how closely to adopt the ‘Blue Labour’ brand; its relationship with the corresponding X account – which was strongly critical of the government on grooming gangs – has not yet been worked out.

“There are people out there using the name Blue Labour in a way that I totally disagree with, on social media partially, which is not representative at all; in fact, antithetical... There is a bit of baggage with that,” explains Smith.

“Trump recognises people want our own industry protected and we want secure borders. That is what people in the UK want too”

Carden, the chair, is happy to use the name, telling PoliticsHome: “I'm not scared of the term Blue Labour.” He does not mind the term “socially conservative” either, he adds, because “progressive politics” has threatened communities. “It's challenged the value of long-standing institutions, from trade unions to churches. I think it's been incredibly damaging to have those things undermined and diminished.”

How does he explain his journey from the Labour left Socialist Campaign Group to Blue Labour? “If I’ve moved anywhere, it's from left to left,” he replies.

“I spoke out on the grooming gangs issue, and one or two people in here joked with me, ‘Oh, people say you’re far-right now’. I mean, that’s madness,” Carden says. “It suggests to me there is something really broken in this place, and there is such a wide disconnect that I'm almost pulling my hair out.”

Hinder, who is understood to be responsible for booking rooms for the group’s meetings, says: “The Labour Party under Keir Starmer has moved in a distinctly Blue Labour direction since 2019, and the Prime Minister has my full support.

“But we now need to go much further to reconnect with our working-class base in seats like mine of Pendle and Clitheroe, and hundreds like it across the country. That means bold, left-wing economic policies, much lower immigration, a complete rejection of divisive identity politics, and proudly reclaiming our patriotism.”

Brash, the MP for Hartlepool, says: “Economically, I believe in big government. I believe in the state intervening and doing far, far more on what it is currently doing. But then on crime and punishment, probably on immigration, I think people would characterise me as being on the right-of-centre.”

He offers an economic analysis that presents a challenge to Treasury orthodoxy, and gives full-throated support to a policy often implicitly banned in Labour circles – protectionism.

“We need to recognise that the mandarin metric – ‘it's all about GDP, it's all about maximising growth’ – is not all that matters. It's where we do it and who benefits. I'm done with the sort of rhetoric that forces all the growth in this country into the same small number of already incredibly wealthy areas. I don't think that's what the Labour Party is about.”

Of Trump, Brash says the President “has obviously tapped into things that many in the US find extremely appealing”.

“Let’s just look at those things. Secure borders, perfectly reasonable. Will I agree on every policy he has around how he goes about that? No, I won’t. But on the principle of he thinks the borders should be secure, I do.

“On the idea of reindustrialisation, protectionism – people in this country want to protect British industry. I don’t think we want to work in a free-market globalised economy when nobody else is.

“The whole world is moving to a protectionist model when it comes to their industries, putting their country first. We have to do the same thing. Forget the politics of it – that is the right thing to do.”

The MP adds: “Trump recognises people want our own industry protected and we want secure borders. That is what people in the UK want too.”

Yet resistance to Blue Labour persists. “Blue Labour and the hard left are two cheeks of the same arse,” complains one centrist Labour MP.

“Blue Labour got a terrible reputation,” academic and original Blue Labour founder Jonathan Rutherford recalls of the Miliband era. “People did not like it. Even now, you’re not going to get Labour politicians – senior ones – coming out and saying, ‘Oh, I’ve been influenced by Blue Labour’ or ‘I’m Blue Labour’.

“But behind the scenes, it’s a different story. We’ve had a lot of conversations and discussions, and I’ve worked with quite a few of the Cabinet over the over the past 10, 12, 14 years.”

Cabinet members Shabana Mahmood, John Healey, Steve Reed and Jonathan Reynolds are all seen as sympathetic to Blue Labour thinking. Rachel Reeves engaged with it when she worked on “the everyday economy” – focused on decent work, secure families and local prosperity – before becoming Starmer’s shadow chancellor.

Lisa Nandy worked with the group in her levelling up brief but has often been seen to support identity politics, which Blue Labour rejects. Angela Rayner falls into a similar camp, espousing Paul Collier-style socialism (the Deputy Prime Minister is known to hold his book The Future of Capitalism, which makes the case for rediscovering reciprocity and patriotism, in high esteem) but also strongly supporting LGBT+ rights. Net-zero-backing Miliband, ironically given his ties to Blue Labour founder Lord Glasman, is deemed to stand in opposition to Blue Labour ideas.

Progressives see Blue Labour as “reactionary” and believe “we want to go back to the 50s – absurdities like that”, says Rutherford. But it is more about “recognising that change brings loss”: “We’ve always been accused of being nostalgic, but actually the past and people’s inheritance – it matters to them.”

Rutherford reckons the British are “Radical and Tory”, in the historic sense rather than the party political one, and that Blue Labour captures this paradox, which is the key to winning UK elections.

“Keir Starmer has tried to capture that paradox, but the instinct of Labour is progressive and socially liberal, and so he has struggled to,” he says.

“If you watch Reform, if they’re smart, they will do this as well. They will start appealing to Muslims. They will start appealing to a more overtly working-class politics. They’ve already called for the nationalisation of water. If they’re smart, they will, but I’m not sure they can. They’re Thatcherites, really, at the top.”

“There is a brittleness around the government about what it is”

Farage will ultimately fail to occupy that ground because he is, Rutherford says, ultimately of “petty bourgeois politics, rather than a working-class politics”. According to this analysis, here lies a prime opportunity for Labour.

And while questions remain about the brand, there is little doubt that Blue Labour has become more relevant amid the rise of Reform and return of Trump to the White House.

“I don’t think you would necessarily find a lot of sympathy within Blue Labour circles for Donald Trump the man. Personally speaking, I think he’s a loathsome human being,” says Paul Embery, the writer and firefighter active in the original Blue Labour group.

“Where there is an overlap between Blue Labour and both Reform and Trump is that they both recognise that the radical progressive elite and the agenda they’ve been pushing for so long – open borders and so on – is something that just does not resonate in working-class communities.”

When Trump broke with tradition by inviting world leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to his inauguration, European centrists including Keir Starmer were left out. Curiously, one UK Labour Party politician did get an invitation: Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer and Blue Labour founder.

Why? Glasman explains that JD Vance, now US Vice-President, had sent the peer his book Hillbilly Elegy eight years ago and said he admired Blue Labour.

“I had no idea who he was. So we had two or three email exchanges that were very polite and measured, discussing globalisation and the status of workers who would be best-placed to represent that,” Lord Glasman says.

While in Washington DC for the inauguration, Trump’s team were “extraordinarily friendly” to him, he reports cheerfully.

“They even presented me with a handmade pair of cowboy boots. I said, ‘I had enough antisemitism in the Labour Party, how is a Jewish person supposed to pull off cowboy boots?’” Glasman recalls. He accepted the boots but turned down the cowboy hat.

With the help of Farage, who was “extremely generous” in making introductions, Glasman met with Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. In doing so, he not only forged a new channel of communication between the UK and US but also gave them advice.

“I’m basically saying, ‘All of this is worthless unless you’re actually pro-worker and pro-trade union.’ I explained what happened with the Conservative government, where they blew it entirely because they couldn’t change the economic model,” says Glasman.

He describes his brokering of a UK-US relationship as being “faithful” to the “Bevin doctrine”, referring to Ernest Bevin’s comparable efforts as foreign secretary in the post-war Labour government. (Everyone associated with Blue Labour is scathing about No 10’s pick of Lord Mandelson as ambassador; “an appointment from hell”, says one critic.)

In choosing the name Blue Labour, Glasman took inspiration from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue. This was at the end of Gordon Brown’s time in government. “New Labour had failed in all its ambitions to transform Britain, modernise Britain – the same industrial weakness, the same working-class disaffection. And then we had the crash. The origins of Blue Labour were feeling blue,” he says now.

Having just scored a historic victory for the Labour Party, the Starmer leadership should not be feeling the same way, and yet Glasman says the need for Blue Labour to have influence within the party has become more obvious since the UK’s July election. “Europe is swinging hard right, America has just gone totally Maga, and progressive liberalism is in retreat everywhere.”

How, then, does No 10 feel about Blue Labour? Glasman says he was “not expecting them to do cartwheels” when he was invited to Washington DC, but PoliticsHome understands that the group has influence via chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, as well as political strategy director Paul Ovenden and policy adviser Harvey Redgrave.

“Morgan is from us,” says Glasman. “He really worked with Jon Cruddas and me in Dagenham against the BNP. He witnessed with amazement the fact that Labour just didn’t listen.

“When working-class people said, ‘We’re sick of the rubbish on the streets,’ they said, ‘No, it’s Tory cuts!’ It’s a Labour council. When they said, ‘There’s too much immigration,’ people would say, ‘No, you’re misinformed.’ Well, they don’t feel misinformed now. They just feel betrayed.”

While there are commonalities between Reform and Blue Labour, the peer wants Labour to succeed by differentiating itself from Farage’s party, and plans to debate him in a new weekly GB News show.

“We have to have a position where we can have genuine disagreements with Reform. Essentially, I’m running on the line that Farage is a saloon bar Thatcherite; that he doesn’t have a sense of workers, industrial strategy, trade unions. And then wherever else we can differentiate, we will. I think ID cards is a good one,” Glasman suggests. Carden is interested in pursuing the policy, which is also backed by Tony Blair.

More broadly, however, there is a tension between the ideas of the Blue Labour-aligned and those thought of as neo-Blairites or “tech optimists”, who are represented in the Cabinet by Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle. (Although there are significant differences, a parallel has been drawn here with the Trump team divide: the Vance and Bannon camp versus Elon Musk and the tech bros.)

Blue Labour is “as far from the third way as you can imagine”, according to Glasman, who accuses Blairites of “reaching out to the old order as it is crumbling around them”. “They think it’s 1999 – they’re still listening to the Prince album!”

Jon Cruddas, the former Dagenham Labour MP who has helped guide the new Blue Labour group of MPs, similarly identifies this tension. “There is a brittleness around the government about what it is. Some see their role as being much more radical and insurgent and challenging the status quo, and indeed challenging orthodox liberal progressive approaches to what the party is for. Others find that far too challenging.”

This dynamic is expected to play out across various government departments. On the environment, for example, Cruddas says there is a choice: become more reliant on China to meet net-zero targets or rebuild industrial policy?

The Employment Rights Bill might be seen as aligning well with Blue Labour ideas, but Cruddas says of the legislation: “I would argue it does an awful lot on individual rights, but it’s not doing very much on rebuilding the strength of labour, both in terms of the duties of employers, in terms of the structure of the firm, or forms of industrial democracy, or rebuilding unions as institutions.”

Alongside the group of MPs, Rutherford and Cruddas are involved in a Policy Exchange think tank project called the “Future of the Left”, which is feeding directly into No 10. It is a continuation of the “Labour’s Covenant” initiative, which ran while Starmer’s Labour was in opposition and was anchored in the Labour Together think tank previously run by McSweeney.

While Blue Labour’s influence plays out in the context of Reform and a potential reunification of the right, Cruddas adds: “There’s also Kemi Badenoch, and some of the things she could tap into in her critique of the bureaucratic state, which I think is a very powerful thesis that hasn’t got much airtime.”

“We have to use all the intellectual and political resources available to us in trying to understand all of this and shape an agenda, because there is no safe ground here. Despite having a massive majority, the position Labour faces is pretty vulnerable,” Cruddas concludes.

“The stakes are pretty high now. Behind this big majority lies something fundamental in terms of who and what the party is nowadays.” 

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