With this new wheeze Labour can unite a 'working middle class', without addressing any of the party's failures
Ed Miliband's recent appointee to the House of Lords, Lord Glasman, is considered the "intellectual godfather" of the Labour party. This week he has been publicising his idea to win back Labour's "working-class vote".
Blue Labour. A solution that truly understands the findings of the recent research by Searchlight into British attitudes on race and identity politics. One that allows Labour to unite "working-class" voters and those who identify as the "squeezed" middle class, and doesn't involve addressing the widening inequality their economic policies caused ? or opposing the cuts they are trying not to be too visible in supporting. Labour should embrace the "values" that make the Sun and the Daily Mail Britain's biggest selling newspapers.
Labour have been in a bind for a while. The birth of New Labour ensured that the pursuit of real economic equality had to cease. The shift of wealth upwards during the last government's tenure was immense. Labour's way of staying true to Labour values, whether we admit it or not, was public sector and welfare spending.
We have to be clear here. It was not benefits for our most vulnerable groups that got more generous. Labour was as willing as the coalition to win votes by turning the screw on the unemployed, and those too sick to work. Benefit rates were suppressed and conditions for claiming unemployment benefits have become extraordinarily difficult. The effect can clearly be seen in some of our poorest towns.
Some expansion in our welfare spending came from our ageing population; improved diagnosis for disabilities in children expanded our DLA bill. The number of incapacity benefit claims inevitably expanded to absorb the effects of deprivation. But Labour's true failure lies in its spending on "in-work benefits".
Tax credits and housing benefit bills expanded to subsidise artificially suppressed wages, and inflated housing and childcare costs. Swaths of our working population are now welfare dependent. Bringing tax credits and housing benefits under the coalition's universal credit umbrella means a distinction between the deserving and undeserving recipients of state support is no longer necessary. With the lowest paid among these now lifted out of taxation, their identity as benefit claimants rather than the "taxpayers" political parties want to represent, is complete.
If you can't afford to maintain an economic policy that creates gulfs of inequality, while using your social policy to protect people from its effects; if you are committed to a cuts agenda you are winning votes by opposing ? what do you do? Addressing problems you created in government costs votes. Labour needs to recreate the "coalition" of middle-class and working-class voters that gave them their landslide victory in 1997.
In northern post-industrial towns, little apart from low paid, deskilled, insecure work, public sector jobs and welfare benefits replace the traditional industry that was suffocated. Towns where poverty's effect on the public purse is in provision of services that cost more than it would to allow people a decent standard of living in the first place.
The "progressive" values Labour championed, while increasing the inequality that breeds alienation, are not shared by everyone. Poverty doesn't generally create an air of solidarity, it fractures communities.
I have had discussions recently about the left's reluctance to discuss working-class racism and misogyny. I can't see that this is a problem confined to the "working class", but economic hardship doesn't really have track record of pulling communities together. It tends to exacerbate social problems, bring out our need to find someone to blame. We live in a society where I still have to explain to my four-year-old why "Paki" is not a word we use.
Labour never shied away from using the politics of fear and blame. Welfare scroungers, asbo kids, asylum seekers, Islamic extremists, immigrants. Discussion of the moral deficiency of benefit claimants has long been a substitute for political and economic debate, asylum-seeker is a dirty word, and "chav" is a word that no one wants applied to them. Organisations such as the EDL play on genuine alienation within marginalised communities, but their warped answers are legitimised by the rhetoric of successive governments.
The research from Searchlight didn't just highlight the danger that the EDL narrative poses in times of hardship. It showed how many votes there are in exploiting prejudice and fear. Enough that you wouldn't have to tackle the reasons for the economic insecurity that feeds them. Tackling the threat of far-right extremism might be worthwhile, but there are votes to be won in playing on fear of difference.
I was sent a joke about Conservatism and equality. A working-class white guy, a working-class black guy, and a rich white CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies. The CEO reaches across the table, takes 11 cookies, and then turns to the poor white guy and says: "Look out for that black guy he wants a piece of your cookie." Blue Labour tells people they are right. Benefit scroungers and immigrants are the reason you don't have enough cookies. Rather than trying to bring together the communities fragmented by neoliberalism, it encourages them to blame each other, and the weakest members within them.
It allows Labour to safely oppose cuts that are important to "middle-class" voters, while hands are washed of any responsibility to examine the effect on those who will suffer most. It uses a nostalgic working-class idea that doesn't fit with the economic system Labour chose. One full-time wage being enough to feed and house your family, with the household's main earner distributing that money round their community and family. It may rely on myths, inequality and prejudice but when people are looking for someone to blame when their hard work is getting them nowhere, it will win votes.
Some are concerned that the concept of Blue Labour will alienate those for whom Labour party membership is about "progressive values". As the "squeezed middle" Miliband appears to want to represent, they are likely to stick around. He may even appear a saviour if he opposes cuts to services that affect them.
But it disenfranchises the mothers for whom welfare benefits are the only remaining bridge for the inequality they face, regardless of how hard they work. Those who becomes too sick to work, those who could work more hours than they are awake and still need housing benefit, and those whose unpaid caring work allows the rest of our society to function. In the towns where industry was sacrificed to pay for our credit based growth, Labour is another party willing to ensure that the struggling "decent taxpayers" have someone to blame when they get nowhere.
Blue Labour is the only way "New" Labour can continue after a global financial crisis. With it Labour can unite a "working middle class", without addressing any of the party's failures. It casts those left behind adrift, convenient scapegoats for all societies ills. But if your only goal is to get Labour elected, it is too good an opportunity to miss.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/25/blue-labour-working-middle-class
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