As one poll this month placed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK ahead of Labour and the Conservatives for the first time, I sought distraction on holiday in Jonathan Coe’s latest novel. Set during the brief seven-week premiership of Liz Truss, The Proof of My Innocence is a Graham Greene-style “entertainment”, rather than another Coe state-of-the-nation book like Middle England or Bournville. But it does deal with a serious political theme: the morphing of British conservatism, from the 1980s onwards, into the radical, insurgent force that culminated in Brexit, Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget.
Coe writes wonderfully well, and with empathy about very different social worlds. But his overall perspective generally stays within an embattled liberal-left comfort zone. Towards the end of the book, a twentysomething character offers her take on the disruptions that led to our present discontent: “Britain changed. What we had before: consensus more or less. What came after: libertarianism/individualism. Every man and woman for his/herself.” Earlier, the revelation of a secret plot to sell the NHS out to big pharma – involving a high-profile Brexiter – underlines a gradual eclipse of public virtue by private monied interests.
Malign and greedy motives cloaked in false patriotism, driving an elite that is bent on misinforming and hoodwinking the less well off and the less well educated. This is one standard progressive explanation for how Britain went off the rails. And as I turned the final pages of The Proof of My Innocence, politics was imitating art in the House of Commons.
At a recent prime minister’s questions, Keir Starmer used a planted backbench question to sound the alarm over Reform’s plans to sell out the NHS. Farage’s sympathy for insurance-based healthcare, Labour research suggests, is viewed with deep suspicion in the kinds of seats that Reform hopes to win en masse in 2029. There will be much more of the same before May’s council elections, as Starmer seeks to detach blue-collar voters from a movement that is visibly reassembling the Get Brexit Done coalition of 2019.
Fair enough. “When in doubt, campaign on the NHS” is an unwritten law on the British centre-left. Obeying it is an understandable manoeuvre from a government increasingly traumatised by Farage’s rise. But as the wind from the radical right blows ever harder through western democracies, the politics of the moment require more than defensive pieties, buttressed with technocratic talk about policy “delivery”.
All over again, Labour is losing its working-class audience. Among non-graduates and young men, among the inhabitants of unlevelled-up towns, and among those nostalgic for a lost sense of community cohesion, Farage is making hay. As talk of an electoral pact between Reform and the Conservatives begins on the right, the remain/leave divide in British politics is back.
It never really went away – although Covid and its scandals scuppered Johnson’s attempt to seize the moment for the right. A post-industrial cleavage both cultural and economic was never just about the case for and against leaving the European Union. At its most basic, the blue-collar leave vote expressed a desire for rupture with a globalised capitalism that had undermined the power and agency of the western working class. It also reflected a latent perception that compassionate “one world” social liberalism coexisted happily with a callous economic version; one that had stripped people and places of dignity, status and self-esteem.
So what now? Following the post-pandemic Tory implosion, the last election represented a historic opportunity for a radical social-democratic response to an ongoing crisis of trust. But whether through naivety, timidity or a hapless lack of curiosity regarding the social class it was founded to represent, Labour took its handsome victory as evidence of a national desire that normal “grownup” service should resume. Predictably, after six arid months amid plunging poll ratings, it is now planning tougher Reform-style rhetoric on immigration, in the hope of shoring up its position among the Farage-facing.
The heart sinks at the lack of ambition and insight. But there is still time to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past in the lead up to 2029. It is, for example, heartening to learn that the much maligned, much misunderstood Blue Labour movement is now getting a hearing in Downing Street. A fledgling caucus of sympathetic MPs has also formed in parliament, interestingly including a number from the former Corbynite left.
Founded in 2009 by the iconoclastic peer Maurice Glasman, Blue Labour made brief waves as a proto “left-conservative” grouping, focused on protecting blue-collar communities from the depredations of free-market capitalism. It then sank beneath those waves – in a tide of opprobrium – when it emerged that such protections would include restrictions on the import of cheaper migrant labour.
Support for Brexit, and a communitarian emphasis on “family, faith and flag”, further scandalised secular liberal progressives. Glasman and other leading figures were anathematised. Jonathan Rutherford, a former speechwriter for the ex-Labour MP Jon Cruddas, made a list of the insults that came their way. “Weirdos, misogynists, authoritarians, Brexit, thick leave voters, ageing left-behind men, not welcome, fuck off and join the Tories” were at the politer end of the spectrum.
Yet in its analysis of the dynamics of western democracies in the early 21st century, Blue Labour got a remarkable amount right. On immigration, the issue that supposedly rendered it beyond the pale, its views will never mesh with those of Labour’s liberal left, but are no longer outlying. The crucial point is that they were always contained within a wider critique of contemporary capitalism, and the contemporary left, that will be key to challenging a Faragian right.
Over the past quarter-century, progressive parties became more middle class, more city based and focused more on individual rights than social class. As Blue Labour has argued, they failed to seriously challenge the economic and social consequences of a world constructed to suit the restless, indifferent, profit-seeking interests of financial capital. The result has been a growing division of people and, just as significantly, places into winners and losers – a deepening divide that individualist rhetoric about equality of opportunity will not bridge.
Phyl, Coe’s youthful protagonist in The Proof of My Innocence, was right. Thatcherism did deliver, and morally justify, a selfish “me first” world. But Faragism, as it prosecutes an exclusionary politics of identity and belonging, is as much a response to that legacy as a continuation of it. Faced with a form of rightwing communitarianism that is shaping a dark future, Blue Labour thinking can be part of a successful response. Time for it to come in from the cold.