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Blue Labour
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, EDI and community spirit – while remaining committed to labour rights and left-wing economic policies. It seeks to represent what it considers a working-class approach to Labour politics. In Parliament, the faction is led by MP Dan Carden, who founded the Blue Labour parliamentary caucus of Labour MPs in 2025 along with Jonathan Brash, Jonathan Hinder, and David Smith. It is understood to have a membership going "into double digits", including Connor Naismith, Margaret Mullane and Shabana Mahmood, who has served as Home Secretary since September 2025.
Launched in 2009 as a counter to New Labour, the Blue Labour movement first rose to prominence after Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election, in which for the first time the party received fewer working-class votes than it did middle-class votes. The movement has influenced a handful of Labour MPs and frontbenchers; founder Maurice Glasman served as a close ally to Ed Miliband during his early years as Leader of the Opposition, before himself becoming a life peer in the House of Lords. The movement has also seen a resurgence of interest after the loss of red wall seats in the 2019 general election.
Blue Labour argues that the party lost touch with its base by embracing anti-patriotism in the face of Brexit and by undermining solidarity in local communities through bureaucratic collectivism, social agendas, and neoliberal economics. It argues that whilst postwar Old Labour had become too uncritical of state power, New Labour far worsened this with an uncritical view of global markets as well. The group further advocates a switch to local and democratic community management and provision of services, rather than relying on a top-down welfare state which it sees as excessively bureaucratic. Economically it is described as a "movement keen on guild socialism and continental corporatism".
The Blue Labour position has been articulated in books such as Tangled Up in Blue (2011) by Rowenna Davis, Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst and Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good (2022) by Glasman himself. Additional elucidations on Blue Labour's ideas can be found in The Purple Book (2011) by Robert Philpot and Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2020) by Paul Embery. A number of commentators, including Adrian Pabst himself, have argued that, as leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has adopted significant elements of Blue Labour's analysis and policies.
The London Metropolitan University academic Maurice Glasman launched Blue Labour in April 2009 at a meeting in Conway Hall, Bloomsbury, where he defined it as "a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity". He called for an alternative to the post-1945 centralising approach of the Labour Party.[failed verification] The movement grew through a series of seminars held in University College, Oxford, and at London Metropolitan University in the aftermath of Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election.
Political analyst Bob Jessop described the movement as follows:
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. But this current does not take an idealized vision of the working class but refers to the actually existing working class – regarding it as socially conservative and nationalistic in the potential Labour heartlands – at the same time as arguing against neoliberalism and for corporatist arrangements and local democratic socialism.
It rejects the New Labour electoral strategy, which starts from the observation that the industrial working class increasingly does not vote so that it is necessary to chase swing voters by appealing to home-owning middle class and workers who aspire to homeownership. 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 also suffer from neoliberal policies and the politics of austerity.
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Blue Labour
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, EDI and community spirit – while remaining committed to labour rights and left-wing economic policies. It seeks to represent what it considers a working-class approach to Labour politics. In Parliament, the faction is led by MP Dan Carden, who founded the Blue Labour parliamentary caucus of Labour MPs in 2025 along with Jonathan Brash, Jonathan Hinder, and David Smith. It is understood to have a membership going "into double digits", including Connor Naismith, Margaret Mullane and Shabana Mahmood, who has served as Home Secretary since September 2025.
Launched in 2009 as a counter to New Labour, the Blue Labour movement first rose to prominence after Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election, in which for the first time the party received fewer working-class votes than it did middle-class votes. The movement has influenced a handful of Labour MPs and frontbenchers; founder Maurice Glasman served as a close ally to Ed Miliband during his early years as Leader of the Opposition, before himself becoming a life peer in the House of Lords. The movement has also seen a resurgence of interest after the loss of red wall seats in the 2019 general election.
Blue Labour argues that the party lost touch with its base by embracing anti-patriotism in the face of Brexit and by undermining solidarity in local communities through bureaucratic collectivism, social agendas, and neoliberal economics. It argues that whilst postwar Old Labour had become too uncritical of state power, New Labour far worsened this with an uncritical view of global markets as well. The group further advocates a switch to local and democratic community management and provision of services, rather than relying on a top-down welfare state which it sees as excessively bureaucratic. Economically it is described as a "movement keen on guild socialism and continental corporatism".
The Blue Labour position has been articulated in books such as Tangled Up in Blue (2011) by Rowenna Davis, Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst and Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good (2022) by Glasman himself. Additional elucidations on Blue Labour's ideas can be found in The Purple Book (2011) by Robert Philpot and Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2020) by Paul Embery. A number of commentators, including Adrian Pabst himself, have argued that, as leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has adopted significant elements of Blue Labour's analysis and policies.
The London Metropolitan University academic Maurice Glasman launched Blue Labour in April 2009 at a meeting in Conway Hall, Bloomsbury, where he defined it as "a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity". He called for an alternative to the post-1945 centralising approach of the Labour Party.[failed verification] The movement grew through a series of seminars held in University College, Oxford, and at London Metropolitan University in the aftermath of Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election.
Political analyst Bob Jessop described the movement as follows:
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. But this current does not take an idealized vision of the working class but refers to the actually existing working class – regarding it as socially conservative and nationalistic in the potential Labour heartlands – at the same time as arguing against neoliberalism and for corporatist arrangements and local democratic socialism.
It rejects the New Labour electoral strategy, which starts from the observation that the industrial working class increasingly does not vote so that it is necessary to chase swing voters by appealing to home-owning middle class and workers who aspire to homeownership. 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 also suffer from neoliberal policies and the politics of austerity.