I derived the title of this essay from a quote by Lord (Maurice) Glasman, a guru of Blue Labour. The quote came in an interview with Tom Newton Dunn for the Times: “The working class believed for over a hundred years that the Labour Party was fundamentally on their side. And now they think we’re not”.
But this is not initially about Glasman; it’s about JD Vance. Vance was apparently aware of Blue Labour - I’m not sure how - and sent a copy of his Hillbilly Elegy memoir to Glasman asking, according to the article, “whether he thought America’s Democratic Party could be rebuilt in the same light as Blue Labour.”** Subsequently Glasman became the only Labour politician to be invited to Trump's inauguration, at the personal invite of Vance. This peaked my interest; I’ve always been interested in political thinkers and particularly in radicals, of all colours. I have to admit I’d not been aware of Blue Labour and, until the last seven months, of Vance. I often feel my blog relies too much on flippancy and perhaps that should be balanced by serious thought. So I made a plan.
Step 1: read Vance’s book. So I did. Written in 2016 (when he was 31) it's a very moving account of his childhood and early adulthood in Kentucky - part of America's "Rust Belt": the deindustrialised MidWest/South. He uses the term hillbilly throughout the book almost as a badge of pride; they are his people. His upbringing was just about the most chaotic you could imagine. Dysfunctional mother, absent father, a succession of father figures of varying reliability, a maternal grandmother who, though steadfast and loving, was in Vance’s own words a gun-toting “lunatic” meant that he had zero stability and a developing bafflement as to how adults were supposed to behave.
The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future—that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small hometown just last year. I was one of those kids with a grim future. I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me. Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I’m some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me. That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book.
It’s a torrid tale of fear - that he’d be left alone; that he'd amount to nothing; that he'd never get out of the nightmare.
He was saved, first by his sister Lindsay, five years older but more often than not the "only adult in the room", and then by the Marines: "From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw [beloved hillbilly maternal grandparents] had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness."
After the Marines came two years of college at Ohio State and then Yale Law School where he met future wife Usha ("my Yale spirit guide"). Called to the bar, marriage, fatherhood. Welcome to the world, but never forgetting:
I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.
In 2018, Vance added an Afterword to the book, giving us a clue to how his political awareness developed.
I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams. But those of us on the Right are deluding ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that it did accomplish something else: it prevented a lot of suffering, and made it possible for people like Mamaw to access food and medicine when they were too poor, too old, or too sick to buy it themselves. This ain’t nothing. To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone.
I've usually argued that my own party has to abandon the dogmas of the 1990s and actually offer something of substance to working- and middle-class Americans. And despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for the “elites” and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base.
After graduating from Yale he practised corporate law, worked as a Senate aide and became a venture capitalist, a Senator in 2023, Vice-President in 2025. Not exactly a normal life path for a hillbilly but, despite some critics, I see no reason in this book to doubt his genuineness.
Step 2: check out bluelabour.org. I did that too, but it's hard to see through the flummery.
About
Blue Labour is a force within the Labour Party committed to the politics of the common good. Our socialism is both radical and conservative. It is a politics about the work we do, the people we love, and the places to which we belong.
Our starting point is the democratic renewal of our country. Blue Labour’s goal is a democratic self-governing society built upon the participation of its citizens in the exercise of power and its accountability.
Our politics is a challenge to the liberal consensus of the capitalist order, but it does not belong to the revolutionary left. Its inheritance is the labour tradition.
It's hard to argue about any of this because it's just vacuous phraseology. Or maybe I'm too stupid to understand. Newton Dunn describes this as "economically left-wing and socially on the right". Maybe he should write their copy. Moving on:
Blue Labour began as a challenge to the liberal consensus of the capitalist order. Democracy was becoming an oligarchy with the liberal left in control of culture and the liberal right in control of the economy.
Both Labour and the Conservatives shared a liberal contractual view of society. Instead of mutual loyalties binding human beings into families, groups and nations, Labour saw the individual and the state, the Conservatives saw the individual and the market. Neither spoke about the families and neighbourhoods we are born into, nor about our cultural and religious inheritances. Both overlooked the most basic bonds that hold individuals together in a society.
In the 2019 general election the liberal consensus was broken. We are entering a new political era. However both parties are products of the liberal settlement. They remain substantially unchanged and so unprepared for the challenges ahead.
The Blue in Blue Labour expresses our disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last few decades. Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.
This sounds awfully like Reform's (and MAGA's) nostalgic rhetoric. Anti-globalism, anti-statism, anti-growth, lots of antis. Glasman claims "I didn't realise the importance of 'again' in Make America Great Again until I went to Trump's inauguration".
I tried hard to find a policy outline for Blue Labour on their truly awful website. The nearest I could come to is this (forgive the lack of brevity):
Labour must rebuild our national economy.
1. Britain must reverse decades of deindustrialisation, to rebuild working-class communities and secure our national security in a new era of global uncertainty. There can be no rearmament without reindustrialisation, and no reindustrialisation without cheap energy. We need cheap, clean energy to bring down industrial energy prices, industrial policy to support industries of critical national importance, and regional policy to ensure all of Britain benefits.
2. Austerity was a disaster that hollowed out our state capacity and left communities abandoned. Years of historically low interest rates were wasted by Tory governments who refused to invest in the future and we are now paying the price. We should scrap the fiscal rules, in which economic sense and democratic politics are subordinate to faulty OBR forecasts, and invest in infrastructure and the public realm.
3. Successive governments have sold off our public services and national assets and utilities, leaving us vulnerable and dependent on others. Privatisation has all too often led to extraction, mismanagement and waste. We should reconsider public ownership for public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel.
4. Buying an ordinary family house has become a struggle for even those on good salaries, excluding many young people from adulthood and parenthood. We have not built nearly enough houses, while immigration has radically increased demand. Government must enable more housebuilding, with the explicit objective of reducing house prices and rent as a proportion of incomes.
5. Our tax system needs reform to reflect new realities, including that most value is tied up in land and assets rather than income. We should consider taxes on assets, and updating council tax bands to ensure it no longer disproportionately hits those in poorer parts of the country.
Labour must restore the integrity of the sovereign nation.
1. Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy. We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers.
2. Crime and antisocial behaviour are contributing to a sense that public order is breaking down, with working-class communities usually the victims. We must restore the trust and authority of our police force, clarifying its increasingly blurred mission, so that it can focus on the small number of repeat offenders who are responsible for the vast majority of crime.
3. We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities. We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.
Labour must restore the integrity of the state.
1. The government does not run this country. We have handed over too much control to unaccountable QUANGOs and increasingly powerful courts with the power to block government policy. We should return decision-making to parliament, limiting the endlessly expanding power of judicial review and reforming or closing QUANGOs which make decisions which properly belong to the realm of democratic politics.
2. The British state is bigger but less effective than ever. The prime minister is right that the civil service is sclerotic and needs reform, but we also need to end the scam of consultants ripping off the government and wasting huge sums of public money. We should restore state capacity by reforming our civil service and ending the corporate commissioning and consultancy racket.
Labour’s covenant begins with these three political tasks. Their achievement will define the government’s ‘decade of renewal’ and shape the future of the country.
In amongst the generalisations there are probably some ideas that are worth considering but the biggest problem that isn't answered is "what then?" We get rid of half the civil service, net zero, immigration, the ECHR, fiscal rules; and what's left? Of course I recognise that we live in an era of disaffection, of low or no faith in governments and the signs are that those lead voters (or perhaps insurrectionists) to put their trust in those promising simplistic solutions. Unless I am misunderstanding Blue Labour I can't take this seriously.
I'm going to give the final word to JD Vance:
To return to the issue that motivated me to write this book, doing better requires that we acknowledge the role of culture. As the liberal senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” I agree, and my view that there will never be a purely government-based solution to the problems I write about has remained largely unchanged since Hillbilly Elegy came out. That said, I’m hardly a policy skeptic, and I think there is much more our governments could do to address these problems. Better policy requires better politics, however, and like many people, I find new reasons each day to wonder whether our politics are remotely up to the challenge. [and to repeat] To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone.
Thankyou for taking the time to read my ramblings. I don't pretend to have solutions to the world's problems but am always willing to hear and read the views of others, of all persuasions.
** Glasman replied that the "ever more woke" Democrats were a lost cause.
