Blue Labour told us many valuable things - but Maurice Glasman is now straying onto dangerous territory, writes Left Foot Forward's Daniel Elton.
Maurice Glasman has added much to the intellectual debate of the Left. The now Lord Glassman asserted that the Labour party’s mission is about people, not the gini coefficient or policy wonkery. First and foremost, he reminded Labour that it must always answer the question “which side are you on?”; to which the correct answer is “working people and their families”.
Unfortunately, his particular answer to that question is becoming sinister.
This morning’s Daily Telegraph reported that:
Lord Glasman, the leading policy adviser to the Labour leader, said the country should “draw the line” on immigration and even renegotiate EU rules that allow free movement for migrant workers…
He told The Daily Telegraph that Britain is “not an outpost of the UN” and the needs of the British people must be put first…
In an interview with this newspaper, he said: “We’ve got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital.”
This is dog-whistle stuff, pure and simple, and is one step away from “Powell was right’.
It follows a recent Progress interview from Glasman where he said that Labour needs:
“To build a party that brokers a common good, that involves those people who support the EDL within our party.”
This seems to ignore the fact that the EDL, whatever worrying potential it has, still represents a small minority. Furthermore, the previous generations of Labour leaders that Glasman wants to emulate, always had to contend with an electorate where up to two-fifths of the working class voted for the Conservatives, often built on the back of right-wing populism that traces its lineage through Enoch Powell to Joe Chamberlain.
The Labour Party didn’t win the great national arguments by appeasing those elements but confronting them.
43 Responses to “It may soon be time ‘to draw the line’ on Glasman”
Roger
final two sentences are also historically rather dubious.
Joseph Chamberlain was a populist – but that was when he was leader of the Liberal party’s radical left.
Having switched to the Tories over Home Rule (although initially maintaining a Clegg-like fiction of a separate Liberal Unionist party) his former populism was kept suppressed for nearly twenty years until he pushed the Tories into their disastrous last fling with protectionism.
But in a Tory context protectionism was not then a vote winner amongst the working class (who went Liberal and Labour by a landslide in 1906) as there was still folk memory of the corn laws when working people starved to keep the price of grain high.
The real Tory embrace of populism – indeed Edward Pearce argued in his Lines of Most Resistance even briefly a form of proto-fascism – came in the final Home Rule controversy which happened after Chamberlain’s stroke ended his political career and this was when for the Tories began to use xenophobia (and in religiously divided cities like Glasgow and Liverpool sectarianism) as an effective national weapon.
More locally the Tories also did very well from the 1867 reform act onwards in some cities as the Brewers Party – they knew that what was then called the nonconformist and we’d now call the protestant fundamentalist vote in the cities was locked up by the Liberals who gave them prohibitionist local licensing laws in exchange so they appealed to every drunk with a vote – and arguably this is a truer historical basis for working class Toryism than all the tosh that’s been talked about nationalism, aspirationalism and deference.
As for Powell despite his having written an admiring (and actually rather good) popular biography of Joseph Chamberlain and occupying his old seat in Birmingham he was for the first two decades of his political life the Highest and Driest of Tories.
Even his early adoption of Chicago and Austrian school free market economics had a strongly elitist and anti-populist taste to it.
And whatever motivated his racist outbursts from 1968 onwards it certainly wasn’t a considered strategy of maximising Tory votes – quite the opposite as he knew full well that he would be disowned by Heath.
And in fact his first real national electoral impact was in 1974 when he ended up expressing a preference for voting Labour purely on the basis of EU policy and arguably may have actually won us the October 1974 election.
And after that in his second political life as an Ulster Unionist he set his face very firmly against the sort of populist Orangeism exemplified by Ian Paisley and was in favour of a strict integrationism of the six counties into the UK that gave no special privileges whatsoever to anyone.
So yes there is a working class right wing populism which the Sun et al did not invent out of thin air but just exploits commercially and politically – but Chamberlain and Powell are not its main begetters.
And as for Labour its pure bollocks to say that we confronted ‘those elements’.
Which government was it again which brought in the first UK Immigration Act and which when last in power dedicated itself for a decade to the systematic demonisation of ‘asylum seekers’.
Labour has as far from clean hands on this as it is possible to imagine.
Stephen Tunstall
Appease EDL?? Talking sense on Glasman & #immigration RT @leftfootfwd It may soon be time 'to draw the line' on Glasman http://t.co/Oh9fBOE
John
labour list and next lefts comments diagree here,
the EDL may represent a small minority of the Whole of the U.K but that 3-4 % that they attract is a huge amount of workingclass people in tradiitional labour areas, that labour have lsot the vote in (like the East end of london,)
Leon Wolfson
Fine. Cut them loose. The EDL need cracking down on, trying to appeal to voters so lost to civilisation that they’d support that kind of extremism is an exercise in futility. Worse, it can only lose Labour far greater numbers of voters.
It’s not coincidence that the EDL came out of football hooliganism groups.
Ed's Talking Balls
Let’s all shut our ears to opinions we don’t like. What a healthy approach to debate.
Funny how Glasman was in vogue a while back. I recall a few articles about Blue Labour on LFF and I asked what the hell it was all about. Sounded like a lot of wonkish rubbish to me, but others seemed interested.
Now, as soon as Glasman says something vaguely comprehensible, something that people who don’t read The Guardian might agree with, Labour bloggers don’t want to know. The race card has been played with grim predictability and, in one fell swoop, the hands are once again over the eyes and the fingers are in the ears.