Blue Labour is a British campaign group and political faction that seeks to promote blue-collar and culturally conservative values within the British Labour Party — particularly on immigration, crime, community spirit, and the European Union — while remaining committed to labour rights and left-wing economic policies.
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Blue Labour argues that the party lost touch with its base by embracing antipatriotism in the face of Brexit and by undermining solidarity in local communities through bureaucratic collectivism, social agendas, and neoliberal economics.
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The Blue Labour position has been articulated in books such as Tangled Up in Blue, by Rowenna Davis, Blue Labour, edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst and Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class by Paul Embery.
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Blue Labour is an attempt to say, we are the Labour Party after all, and we should represent the working class rather than be the party of the aspirant middle classes.
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Blue Labour aims to regain lost Labour voters who have supported UKIP or support Conservative social policies or, increasingly, do not vote at all, but suffer from neoliberal policies and the politics of austerity.
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The philosophical basis of Blue Labour is a combination of Aristotelianism with the critique of market society developed by the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi.
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Blue Labour sees the EU as a centralising force which limits the capacity for democratic decision-making about life in the UK.
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Blue Labour argues that abstract concepts have held back the Labour Party from linking with the concerns of many voters, with its concern over material equality leading to an "obsession with the postcode lottery".
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Blue Labour contrasted the British post-war consensus negatively with the German model, saying the latter was closer to the pre-war Labour ethos of solidarity than the collectivism of Attlee which he described as a continuation of wartime planning.
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Glasman concluded that pre-war Blue Labour "improved the conditions of the working class precisely because it was not simply left-wing, it was patriotic, conservative in relation to the constitution of Parliament and the monarchy, very strong in support of family life and contribution with a strong sense of place".
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Between 2010 and 2015, some commentators suggested that Blue Labour could be a potential alternative to David Cameron's Big Society, the "big idea" that might even "define Miliband's leadership".
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Blue Labour reported an increase in followers after Johnson's 2019 general election victory.
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Labour leader Keir Starmer was described as being influenced by Blue Labour and was praised as "a true conservative" by Glasman in an article on UnHerd.
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