LABOUR freefalling down to 25 per cent in the polls, behind Reform, is raising questions about Keir Starmer’s direction. Some formerly pro-Starmer publications are toying with “Blue Labour,” a group claiming to be “socially conservative” but “economically leftist,” as an alternative. 

In the words of the Guardian, Blue Labour can “seriously challenge” the “indifferent, profit-seeking interests of financial capital” and “free market capitalism,” wrenching Labour back to the interests of the workers, while supposedly reassuring those workers with their socially conservative, anti-migration stands. For Blue Labour supporters, working people always get the blame for “conservative” and “anti-migrant” views, not middle-class people.

However, even a cursory inspection shows Blue Labour’s “left economics” are often absent, while the “socially conservative” stances fit easily into Starmer’s “flag-shagging” approach. 

Which is hardly surprising if you see how Blue Labour keeps popping up in Patrick Maguire’s recent exposé of Starmer’s rise in his book Get In. Maguire’s book shows Starmer was eased into leadership by the millionaire-funded group Labour Together. This whole operation was a “great deception” that “hoodwinked the Labour membership into abandoning Corbynism with Starmer’s soft-left leadership campaign,” which was just a “lie” to make Labour right wing again.

Blue Labour appears as a minor subplot in this book, but not as an opposition to Starmer’s manoeuvres. Instead, they appear as members of the same clique. While Starmer dressed up as a “progressive,” they dress up in flat caps, but they share the same economic positions. 

Blue Labour says it wants Labour to be “a party of, by and for working people,” but it was actually founded around 2009 by academics, including Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford. It had a flurry of support when Ed Miliband was leader but was sidelined when the Corbyn era brought  a more full-blooded “left economics.” In Get In, Blue Labour appears repeatedly, but not as critics of Labour’s right wing. 

In the 2015 Labour leadership campaign Liz Kendall “was briefly Blue Labour’s great hope and quietly outsourced her campaign preparations to [Maurice] Glasman’s Dalston office.” Having flirted with Labour’s most right-wing candidate in 2015, Blue Labour became involved in “Labour Together,” the group that pushed Starmer into power on false claims. Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford “had been among the founders of Labour Together.” He is described repeatedly as “ Labour Together’s tame intellectual, Jonathan Rutherford.” 

Get In also reveals “much of Starmer’s first speech as Labour leader was written by a man he had never met. Jonathan Rutherford.” That speech was one in which Starmer promised to “unify” Labour and welcomed the “friendship and support” of his vanquished opponents, Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy, and his other, older “friend,” Jeremy Corbyn, who “energised our movement.” 

In light of subsequent events, Blue Labour’s Rutherford wrote a dishonest speech for Starmer, helping him cosplay as a “soft-left” unity candidate. Far from being critics of Starmer’s deception, Blue Labour was one wing of it. 

I asked Blue Labour who spoke for them — who wrote their statements and so on — and how they responded to this story. Their spokesperson, who is anonymous, said he could not say who was actually in charge as they “are going through a reorganisation” and “in flux.”

As to how they reconciled their supposed “left economics” with their involvement in Labour Together, as shown in Get In, they told me that I was “relying on secondary sources that are mostly wrong” to show how close Blue Labour is to Starmerism.

Blue Labour recommended I read two papers to show how their economic thinking was genuinely left wing, and not a “lie” like Labour Together. 

The first was a paper written by Glasman, published by Labour Together, in 2022. The second was Rachel Reeves’s 2022 paper, The Everyday Economy, which Rutherford helped to write. These papers come from the time Labour Together and Rachel Reeves were pretending to be part of the “soft left.” A time they claimed to want to, according to Reeves’s pamphlet, “bring capital under better democratic control” and have more wealth taxes and social spending. 

But these papers, which Blue Labour helped write, are precisely part of the “deception” of Starmer, Reeves and Labour Together, a pretence at left economics which was immediately discarded when they gained power.

If Blue Labour spokespeople had responded to the abandonment of those 2022 positions by speaking out, by criticising Reeves and Labour Together for junking their left-wing policies, they might seem serious about their “economically leftist” claims. 

But they haven’t. Instead, they have almost exclusively promoted their “socially conservative” and anti-migrant messages — messages which Starmer seems more than happy to use as a distraction from his rightward moving economics.

So Glasman has rushed to embrace the right, not promote “leftist economics.” He was the only “Labour” speaker at the very right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in February. Other speakers included Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and Douglas Murray. 

This conference was funded by hedge fund multimillionaire Paul Marshall. Glasman is also going to present a show on right-wing TV channel GB News, also part-owned by Marshall. 

Glasman was invited to the Donald Trump inauguration by Vice-President JD Vance, whom he ludicrously claimed is “pro-worker.” In January Glasman appeared on US rightwinger Steve Bannon’s show where he made wacky claims, arguing “progressives” are “the enemy … they are the enemy because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love, and they don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife,” agreeing they “sow disunion between the races.”

Blue Labour is being promoted by the Guardian and the New Statesman, and a few opportunist backbenchers — sadly including Dan Carden — because they can see Starmer is in trouble. But far from being an alternative to Starmerism, Blue Labour is a minor wing of the same rightward-moving gang, a wing that wants to throw around a lot of distractions about “social conservatism” and insubstantial promises about “economic leftism” to keep the same crowd in charge. 

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.