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Blue Labour creator Maurice Glasman. Photograph: David Levene
Blue Labour creator Maurice Glasman. Photograph: David Levene

Labour's lost liberalism

This article is more than 12 years old
Now that Blue Labour has come unstuck, the party should reconnect with its orange heritage

What do the health bill, David Cameron's veto at the European summit, disagreements over the forthcoming budget, reform of the House of Lords, and the battle over a Scottish referendum all have in common? The answer is that these issues of major significance are defined by arguments occurring within the coalition government. Labour may have interesting insights to contribute to each, but very few of us, it appears, are listening.

Senior party figures acknowledge this. Some shrug their shoulders, suggesting it is inevitable after the painful electoral defeat of May 2010 and 13 years in power. Consequently, Ed Miliband has struggled to establish himself in the public mind. Others have grown increasingly fractious, insisting that Labour's failure to cut through domestically cannot be blamed on the errors of the Blair and Brown years: doing so smacks of woeful complacency.

Labour's negligible profile on major issues encapsulates a far starker problem afflicting many of its sister social democratic parties in Europe. Parties of the centre left are battling through the great recession that began in 2007 with a clear sense of what it is that they are against – the austerity measures advocated by governments of the right. But they remain fundamentally uncertain about what it is that they are now for. Social democracy as a viable political doctrine has reached a historic cross-roads.

In the case of Labour, this uncertainty translates into an inability to develop clear positions on the big policy questions – and worse still, a tendency to point in different directions simultaneously. Take the eurozone crisis. Where does Labour stand, and beyond considerations of tactical advantage, why does it take the positions it does?

There is, in short, no obvious strategic direction emerging. The Blue Labour current achieved considerable profile, arguing that New Labour's embrace of "hyper-globalisation" eroded the party's traditional support base and was complicit in destroying the ties and bonds of community life. Yet when it sought to translate these sentiments into policy, most notably on migration, Blue Labour came unstuck.

While its diagnosis of Labour's ills was powerful, Blue Labour's remedy may have offered the wrong kind of medicine. Many question the implications of romanticising the social relations of the past, against which women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians have rightly rebelled.

We should not forget that the Labour party's liberal heritage has been just as important as its collectivist and statist tradition. For many on the left, the Lib Dems' role in government has discredited anything that smacks of "liberalism". The leadership's lurch to the right on cuts, the NHS and tuition fees has, indeed, been calamitous. But Labour needs to appeal to a much wider support base, including liberally inclined voters, if it is to become a serious contender for power. Strategic co-operation, both in the Lords and the Commons, is necessary to block the Tory-led government's most damaging proposals.

The real "values" question which Labour needs to tackle is not communitarianism versus liberalism – that most overplayed and false of philosophical choices. It is what kind of liberal social democracy the party wants to espouse.

It ought to rediscover the insights of early 20th century progressivism: welfare and equality as the basis of a society where all have the freedom to flourish; redistributing power from corporate and bureaucratic elites. On the questions of our age, – how to reform British capitalism and redefine the role and purpose of the state – progressive forces must work together to forge a new "coalition of ideas". Circumstances can always conspire against the best ideas – but without ideas, there is no hope.

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