One of the mysteries of the current British Labour government has been its obsession with the party group known as Blue Labour, which espouses a form of social democracy that marries social conservatism with progressive economic policies. This isn’t just a parochial issue: it seems to be a feature of many struggling social democratic parties at the moment.
In the UK, it might not be such a mystery. The former Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, Morgan McSweeney, pursued this strategy as a way to hold on to potential switchers from Labour to the hard right Reform party, without spending much time considering the consequences for more progressive Labour voters.
This strategy came crashing down around the party’s ears last week in the Gorton and Denton by-election (the equivalent of a US ‘special election). It was won comfortably by the Green Party, with Reform in second and Labour—who had held the seat for more than 90 years—in third.
Blue Labourism
In discussing the wider issues here, this post is a bit of a remix of some of the themes I have touched on when writing about politics at my Just Two Things newsletter.
There’s a familiar—if simple—diagram about political attitudes that places them on a 2×2 which marries social attitudes on the vertical axis and economic attitudes on the horizontal.
(Source: Political Compass)
Blue Labourism, in other words, sits in the top left, and more progressive parties, such as the Greens, in the bottom left.
Politics and place
I understand Blue Labourism as having something of an old-fashioned idea about the nature of the working class (which has been changed considerably by post-industrial society) and that it also privileges a notion of a rooted white working class as somehow more important to Labour than other voters.
But Maurice Glasman, who developed it, was concerned about the effects of globalism on communities. If I read him right, he is an advocate of more localism, the importance of mutual organisations such as faith groups, trades unions, and sports clubs, and stronger support for communities as a way to counter this.
So this brings into the discussion a different political map, originally developed by Ian Christie in 2002 and tweaked a bit by me for an article on populism in 2017, which looks prescient by now.
(Source: Curry (2017), based on Christie (2002).
On this 2×2, place becomes more important: the vertical access is about a sense of location: a global (‘mondiale’) politics at the top, and a local (‘terroir’) politics at the bottom. Horizontally, the axis runs from rights-led politics on the left to authority-led politics on the right.
Political energy
If you think about this version, all of the political energy right now is in the bottom half of the space, and it has drained away from the top half. This is largely a consequence of the long political crisis that has stretched on from the Global Financial Crisis. This is, I think, what the journalist John Harris means when he writes of politics reaching “the belated end of the political 20th century.”
But both the British Labour Party and the mainstream US Democrats remain chained to the top. This is partly because, as Nancy Fraser has argued, they got captured by the interests of finance capital, the arch-enemy of terroir politics. After all, it melts all that is solid into air.
I don’t have Fraser’s short book in front of me as I write, but as I recall in the US this was mostly about money, specifically campaign funding, but also because of the geographies of Democrat politics, and to some extent a deliberate strategy of political capture by Wall Street.
‘Unfriendly to business’
In the UK it is a bit more complicated, but likely a fear of being tagged as “unfriendly to business”[1], some uninformed mumbo-jumbo about the bond markets, and a misunderstanding of where economic development and growth comes from.
(As an extended aside, the British Conservative Party got captured by different—as in speculative—fractions of finance capital, such as hedge funds, while Trumpism is now a creature of venture capitalists and offshore finance, who need new profitable sources of investment now that the 50 year digital tech wave is winding to a close[2].
This is the reason that the Epstein Files are so toxic: MAGA is a terroir party, in the same way that Reform presents itself in the UK, but isn’t—whereas Trump is a creature of speculative untethered mondiale capital. (Ann Pettifor made a connection between Epstein. Peter Mandelson, and Wall Street in a recent post.)
But I digress. Back to the main story.
Taking voters for granted
The version of Blue Labourism promoted by Morgan McSweeney was long on centralised authoritarianism, and short on any kind of real local power, and long on migration as a threat to community.
In the meantime, party policies that were economically progressive were delivered apologetically, always looking over its shoulder at finance. This has pushed its progressive voters to the Greens (in England in the Gorton and Denton by-election) and to Plaid Cymru (in a Welsh Senedd by-election in Caerphilly last year.)
There have been plenty of political commentators explaining the acute electoral error here: broadly of taking progressive voters for granted in a naïve view that they had nowhere else to go. In brief: Labour is never going to outdo Reform on how hardline it can be on migration, but it is a rapid—perhaps the quickest—way to alienate its socially liberal core voters.
A vast policy error
The electoral error here has been laid bare by election results, and plenty of commentators have pointed this out. But far worse than being an electoral error, it is a vast policy error as well. Being hardline on immigration puts the Home Office (Britain’s interior ministry) in charge of economic policy and health and social care policy. The British economy needs migration, because that is where, in a low productivity economy that is where most of its growth comes from[3]. And the health and social care sector needs migration, because the backbone of its workforce is migrants—as a report pointed out last week.
(Source: Workers Rights Centre. The darker orange lines show the rapid decline in health and social care workers coming to Britain.)
And you don’t have to be much of a political strategist to work out that voters are going to punish a social democratic party for not looking after the health sector, or for a weak economy—one a core trusted issue, the other a basic test of government competence—more than they will for migration numbers that are misunderstood and repeatedly misrepresented.
And when you do look at the migration numbers, as Simon Wren-Lewis did on his blog in late 2024 (in a post memorably titled ‘The Politics of Stupid’), you see that most of those coming in to the UK are coming in for work or to study.
(Source: Migration Observatory via Mainly Macro.)
You can cut these numbers, of course, but why would you want to? For example, cutting student numbers merely damages the finances of the UK’s university sector and reduces the UK’s soft power.
And as if to demonstrate the Labour Party’s tin ear, the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood—a member of the Blue Labour group of MPs—responded to the by election defeat by announcing that she was pressing on with her hard line measures on immigration. She is perhaps too young to recall the aphorism of the 1970s Labour grandee Denis Healey:
When you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging.
Making the migration case
The thing is, you can make a good case for migration, and not just on economic grounds, although it is true that
Migrants are also overrepresented in more innovative economic sectors; they are responsible for a disproportionate number of patents and business start-ups, and they establish new trade and investment links.[4]
I wrote about this in a 2025 report for the International Organization for Migration.
As we put it in that report,
indicators of cultural integration and exchange are hiding in plain sight; it is their everydayness that makes them invisible.
The best example is food culture, which in Britain has been transformed by migration over the past 50 years. The quality of sport has similarly gained from better foreign born players, for anyone who remembers the clogging football of the 1970s. In Liverpool the presence of high profile Muslim Mo Salah has reduced (provably) the number of Islamophobic attacks in the city. Most of the more exciting musical innovation in the past five decades has come from migrants, or often, the second-generation children of migrants[5].
Underpinned by rights
Any competent politician should be able to make a compelling story about a modern Britain from these building blocks.[6] But they do have to make it, rather than trading increasingly right wing rhetoric in a race to the bottom. (There’s a compelling Guardian analysis of this in the UK in the past few days.)
And if you are centrist or a centre-left party you ought to be doing this, because the politics that underpin much of what you are supposed to believe in is underpinned by rights. You are on the left end of that 2×2: rights, not authoritarianism.
And we also know that if you don’t defend the rights of immigrants, there are plenty of people who are happy to use this as a vehicle to remove rights from everyone else as well. One look across the Atlantic at the moment is enough to see how that story goes.
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Footnotes
[1] Some irony here, since finance capital is so unfriendly to business.
[2] No, AI is not the next big investment thing.
[3] The dirty secret of the Cameron-Osborne government was that almost all of the economic growth came from migration, but neither man was willing to make the case for migration. Cameron may not have realised the connection, but Osborne would have known.
[4] One of the issues here is that migration gets presented in simplistic economic terms as a matter of supply and demand, with the implication that more supply reduces demand and therefore wages. This is true only at the extreme lower end of the labour market, (and can therefore be dealt with through minimum wage legislation). In practice, economies don’t work like this: more supply of labour tends to increase economic activity.
[5] I was going to exclude Britpop from this list, but even Noel and Liam Gallagher are second-generation Irish immigrants.
[6] If you’re stuck, I guess you could ask Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, since they managed to do this in their 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.
