Blue Labour Peer proposes Fascist style House of Lords

Mussolini believed in a corporate state where a large part of the democratic structures were elected through functional groups (workers, business sectors and so forth) - a bit like this from Maurice Glasman:

The Lords, in contrast, should represent vocational democracy. There should be people elected from each sector, whether that be electrical or academic, medical or administrative. Doctors should vote for a peer, as should nurses and cleaners. It would give an incentive to the organisation of carers, builders and gardeners, who would each select a representative from within their organisation.

Aside from being pretty impractical it acts to create blocs within parliament solely vested in sectoral interest - with the result being that, as Italians discovered, you have to have a licence to open a sweet shop or set up as a gardener. Or as Benito put it:

Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.

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Postliberalism - rediscovering the "F-word" in Blue Labour and Red Tory

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It’s always tricky to use the ‘F’ word when writing about political thinking. It has become so cursed by its association with genocide, racism and war that the thinking that lies underneath is ignored. It seems to me that, unless we act with care, we will tiptoe towards those ideas again:

There is a distinct combination of ideas here – of market-friendly social democracy and a greater respect for “flag, faith and family” social conservatism – that has a natural majority in most rich countries, one that was squandered by the left in the 1980s. (Though the first Blair government had some echoes of it.)

Groups such as Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour” and Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism” have tried to turn their parties in a post-liberal direction, with limited success. But the interest in those two movements is in itself a sign that there may be a new intellectual consensus emerging to rebalance politics after the reign of the two liberalisms.

Here we see new language – “post-liberalism”, the two liberalisms – used to replace the older language of past rejections of the enlightenment revelation that we are free individuals. Whether than tones of Hobbes’ Leviathan with its appeal to god and the monarch as the embodiment of statehood or to a 20th century critique:

It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual.

Today we see in those anti-liberal “Blue Labour” and “Red Tory” ideas another assault on the idea of individual sovereignty. And the attendant policies echo those past ideas – not just “flag, faith and family” (a slogan that the creator of the “F word” would have loved) but the rebirth of protectionism, the corporate state and an obsession with grand projects. For draining the Pontine Marshes read instead HS2, the Severn Barrage or ‘Boris Island’ – great schemes that only the powerful state under inspired leadership can deliver.

At the core of this new philosophy lies state-sponsored community organisation – taking Alinsky’s idea of the inspired activist and twisting it to turn these people into agents of authority wrapped in the cuddly language of the “third sector”. Such people become the shock troops of post-liberalism – the advocates of the new corporate state, projectors of moral judgement and champions of subsuming the individual into an allocated geographic, cultural or social group.

This post-liberalism is founded on a different conception of the state than the “F word” – more local, less anti-clerical and closer to the “F word’s” syndicalist roots. But some of the calls are familiar:

“...we've got to re-interrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour…We should be more generous and friendly in receiving those who are needed. To be more generous, we have to draw the line.”

...and:

“a commitment to regional renewal, democratising corporate governance, reform of the firm, a left patriotism, a willingness to work with faith communities and a scepticism of traditional centralising, state solutions.”

As the creator of the “F-word” demanded:

...an active man, one engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it behooves man to conquer for himself that life truly worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual) in order to construct it. Thus for the single individual, thus for the nation, thus for humanity. . . .

But above all:

Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes)...

So, when those protectionist, anti-immigration, anti-choice, anti-business words drop from the lips of politicians red or blue – couched in a language of populist appeal – listen instead to an earlier post-liberal voice, that of Mussolini, and ask whether we really want those ideas again?

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Why Labour's leaders should stop 'Blue Labour' and the agenda of 'flag, faith and family'

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There has always been an uncomfortably close connection between Fabian social democracy and fascism. Throughout the 1920s American progressives, leading socialist thinkers such as the Webbs, G B Shaw and H G Wells fell over themselves to praise Mussolini and even Hitler – at the heart of this praise was the view that such leaders “did something”, were men of actions in tune with the syndicalist tradition at the root of social democracy.

The birth of a new idea – “Blue Labour” – seems to come from this tradition of social democracy. Founded on an almost mystical characterisation of the working class, Blue Labour seeks to refound that party as a traditionalist, nationalist organisation operating through syndicalist – almost corporatist organisational structures. Its progenitor, Maurice Glasman puts it this way:

The starting point for Blue Labour is that the banking crisis of 2008 marked the end of New Labour economics and opens up the possibility for renewal. The tradition is strong and the party should honour it. In its explanation of the crash it must point to the volatility and vice of finance capital and the necessity of a balance of power within the firm and stronger institutions to constrain capital and domesticate its destructive energy.

The lessons of New Labour are not to have a contemptuous attitude to the lived experiences of people but work within them to craft a common story of what went wrong and how things can be better. To bring together previously separated political matter in the pursuit of the common good.

To this we can add the rejection of New Labour’s commitment to globalisation and free trade and a deeply worrying equivocation on the subject of immigration and race:

But it is immigration and multiculturalism which has become ‘the big monster that we don't like to talk about', claims Glasman. Mass immigration under Labour, he believes, served to ‘act as an unofficial wages policy'. The party's position, Glasman contends, occupied a ‘weird space where we thought that a real assault on the wage levels of English workers was a positive good'.

More seriously, he charges the last government with having acted in a ‘very supercilious, high-handed way: there was no public discussion of immigration and its benefits. There was no election that was fought on that basis. In fact there was a very, very hard rhetoric combined with a very loose policy going on.

That people in the Labour Party are prepared to engage with the issue of immigration is welcome but, when that discussion is combined with syndicalist trade unionism, elements of jingoist patriotism and nostalgia for times past we step too close to the elements that forged Mussolini’s Fascist Party. And we see these same elements cropping up in political movements across Europe – movements often mistakenly termed ‘right-wing’ by lazy pundits.

The populist True Finns Party has unveiled its manifesto for the upcoming parliamentary election. It advocates tax increases for the higher paid, opposes the mention of Finland’s EU membership in the country’s constitution and demands cuts in social benefits for immigrants.

According to the Danish political scientist, Ole Borre, the DPP is right-wing “only” in connection with questions regarding value-policy while they can be consider to belong to the left on the right-wing on issues such as distribution of wealth (Borre, 2001: 181).

Similar positions will be found in Italy’s Northern League, in the overtly Fascist platform of the Vlaams Blok and in the programme of Ireland’s Sinn Fein. All these parties look to a tradition that could be called a marriage between the conservative idea of nation and social democratic ideas of social justice – using the appeal of “flag, faith and family” to appeal to the working class voter and linking this appeal to promises of worker power, higher wages and protectionism. While some look to an English radical tradition as a source for this nostalgia – akin to Tony Benn romanticising the levellers – I find it strange and rather worrying that the solution to Labour’s disengagement with the working class lies in adopting a policy platform difficult (overt racism aside) to distinguish from that of the British National Party.

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