The difficulties of a ‘coalition of the rational’ on immigration

One of the intriguing ideas to emerge from the Labour party conference earlier this month is shadow immigration minister Chris Bryant’s proposal of a non-partisan ‘coalition of the rational’ in favour of immigration. The idea is attractive and interesting because it raises the ideological complexity of the issue. However, it is this very complexity that threatens the feasibility of the hope.

What Bryant appears to recognise is that immigration is an issue that cuts across the traditional left right divide, pitting libertarians against conservatives on the right, and liberals against egalitarians on the left. If those in favour of migration are to prevail, they are of  course going to have to reach out to those on the other side of the spectrum.

However, it is important to recognise how difficult this diversity of opinion makes forming and maintaining such a coalition. I think it’s generally true that the inherent difficulty of coalitions stems from the fact that people agree on something, but do so for different reasons. Immigration is unusual because of the extremely high number of different ways in which people can be in favour of it: because it promotes economic prosperity, because it helps businesses, because it reduces state regulation, because it brings cultural benefits, because it atones for historic injustices, to name but a few.

Both Bryant and Don Flynn of Migrants’ Rights Network, who has also discussed the idea, appear to be too optimistic about the scale of the differences between potential coalition partners. Bryant’s moniker for the group suggests that all unprejudiced ‘rational’ people will inevitably come to the same conclusion. Meanwhile, Flynn seems to suggest that there are only two necessary conditions for the project to be a success: transcending party tribalism, and establishing the facts about immigration.

Both these views seem to suggest that a common appreciation of ‘the facts' is all we need to establish common ground on immigration. But this is a gross oversimplification of the diversity of possible positions on the topic. For a start, how would we even know what the relevant facts are? Is it about the effects of immigration on growth, unemployment, Gini coefficients, or what? Different facts will seem salient or irrelevant to different people, and I would suggest that no set of facts will convince people of all perspectives.

Even more threatening to the vision of a coalition of the rational is the fact that the same set of facts may be received in diametrically opposite ways by different people. Let’s say immigration doesn’t significantly affect the bargaining power of labour, or cause wages to fall. That might encourage egalitarians to favour immigration, but equally it could alienate pro-business types from the cause. If it were to emerge that immigrants are overwhelmingly high skilled, the news might be taken as positive by those who see immigration as an engine of growth, but it is unlikely to be cheered by cosmopolitans concerned by brain drain in developing countries.

The point is that the very diversity of values and assumptions that make a wide pro-immigration coalition possible also make it inherently fragile, especially to new facts. And frankly, that is what makes the idea so interesting.

The End of Blue Labour?

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blogpost about ‘Blue Labour’, the intellectual movement that then seemed perfectly poised to capture the ideological heart of the Labour party. With an apparent endorsement from party leader Ed Miliband, Blue Labour was certainly in the ascendency. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff, however, the past couple of weeks have seen this trajectory first arrested and then reversed, with the Blue Labour brand now in freefall.

It all started with a couple of imprudent remarks by Maurice Glasman, the figurehead of Blue Labour to an interviewer from the Fabian Review. Asked to clarify his stance on immigration, Glasman implied that his position is more extreme than any mainstream politician, suggesting that he would not be averse to an outright freeze. To put this in perspective, Andrew Green, a man whose job (as head of the hardly-liberal Migration Watch) is to oppose immigration, described Glasman’s views as “over the top” and “not practicable”. Rumours quickly emerged that the interview had alienated Glasman’s allies, and ended Blue Labour. And now it seems that Glasman is going into hiding, at least for the summer.

It is not clear whether Blue Labour really is dead, or just in hibernation. However, it seems unlikely that all the ideas developed over the past few months will be so swiftly ditched. So what is worth keeping, and what ought Blue Labour to change about itself? What lessons ought to be learned from the immigration debacle?

Presentation

If nothing else, hopefully this whole episode will rid the movement of its terrible name, which only encourages misunderstanding and draws undesirable connections. Indeed, the impulse which presumably gave someone the idea that ‘Blue Labour’ was a good label is the same one that got Glasman into such trouble: what we might call an overactive sense of irony. Almost everything that came out of the Blue Labour camp seemed to be infused with a self-satisfied air of contradiction, from the name to the oft-repeated slogan of ‘radical conservatism’ to the title of the Blue Labour book. More fundamentally, it fed Glasman’s desire to wind up the left by attacking their icons – from the welfare state to, fatally, immigration.

The Blue Labour message is complicated and controversial enough to have to sell without needlessly alienating people with this off-putting attitude. Use irony too often and nobody knows when you are being serious. It is always tempting to overstate the point to make it seem more urgent and important. However, wilfully antagonising people who may have been sympathetic to elements of the Blue Labour message by exaggerating their differences from them was a mis-step.

Detail

A second flaw of the Blue Labour project exposed by the controversy is the difficulty it has in fleshing out the principles it endorses. A natural response to the arguments put forward by Glasman and co. is to try and work out what exactly they means in practice, what sort of policies it lends itself to. (See, for example, Sunder Katwala’s attempts to spell out a Blue Labour manifesto). How conservative is ‘radical conservatism’? How far does it want to tighten immigration, toughen law and order, retrench gender equality?

In a way, this is an unfair demand. Blue Labour was not intended to produce a detailed set of policy commitments. Its focus is more on the big picture, trying to sketch out a new ideological direction for the party. Blue Labour would have been mistaken, certainly at this early stage of its development, to be bogged down in details. Furthermore, a major plank of the Blue Labour ideology was a fundamental objection to top-down, elite-driven policy. It would have been anathema to the spirit of Blue Labour for the wonks that devised it to hand down a complete ready-made manifesto crafted in a smoke-filled room.

But these excuses exaggerate the distance between big ideas and little ones, between ideology and policy. The reason that people clamour for detail is because it is impossible to make sense of the movement without understanding its implications. It was such a call for clarification that presumably prompted Glasman’s controversial remarks. It seems to me if there were a clearer pre-agreed Blue Labour line on immigration, which need not be too final or detailed, this crisis might have been averted. It might be an idea for Glasman to include setting out clearer definitions of Blue Labour’s policy stances among his summer holiday homework.

Conservatism

The previous two comments could be seen as friendly amendments to the Blue Labour project: this criticism is deeper and more hostile. My final suggestion is for Glasman to tone down, if not eliminate, the Conservative element of Blue Labour.

It seems to me that Blue Labour is a coalition of people with two different gripes with the direction the party has taken. On the one hand, there are those who bemoan the excessive centralisation and statism of modern Labour tactics. On the other, there are critics of its excessive liberalism, who wish Labour to learn once more to love he social conservatism of the working class. And then there’s Glasman, straddling the two.

Hopefully this furore will convince Glasman or his supporters that this right-wing line is a liability. In my previous post, I reported that one of my friends had described Blue Labour as ‘Labour, just more racist’. This was angrily rejected by Marc Stears, who pointed out that it is an absurd charge against someone who has focused so much of his energies on helping illegal immigrants. I’m sure he’s right, but the connection between Blue Labour and racism is one that I’ve heard a number of times from different sources. It doesn’t matter whether the perception is accurate or not, that it exists at all is a major problem for Blue Labour. This is partly a matter of presentation, but the fact that Blue Labour’s agenda can give rise to such misunderstandings is a major source of the disquiet around it.

Glasman’s remark that “Britain is not an outpost of the UN” sits uneasily with the internationalism of many on the left. There have been similar concerns about its apparent lack of feminist credentials. This juncture offers the more liberal of the Blue Labour sympathisers an opportunity to consider whether they really ought to be yoked to Glasman’s conservative project.

Thus the big question for Blue Labour is whether the coalition it represents can be held together, or whether both sides would be better served divorcing and starting from scratch.

Don't Get Any More Big Ideas

Liberated or cut loose (it all depends on your perspective) from the apron strings of Blair and Brown, the Labour party is in a period of identity crisis. Dismayed by election defeat and the prospect of five years in opposition, it has been forced to decide what and who it is for, to search for a new vision to inspire voters to return them to power.

The leading contender in this fight for the soul of the Labour party is a movement called ‘Blue Labour’. It is the product of Labour peer Maurice Glasman, ennobled by Ed Miliband, and the Oxford Political Theorist Marc Stears, an old college friend of the party leader (who also happens to be one of my tutors).

Last week saw the clearest statement of Blue Labour’s principles and ideas. An e-book, The Labour tradition and the politics of paradox, collecting papers from the set of conferences where the doctrine was developed, was released. Most significantly, Ed Miliband provided his clearest endorsement of the group to date, by contributing its preface.

Before discussing the substance of Blue Labour, a couple of points about its presentation. Firstly, the name is awful. The people behind Blue Labour clearly enjoy the idea of paradox (judging from the title of their book, and the tendency to describe their position as ‘radical conservatism’), and so seem tickled by the possibility that the future of the Labour party is to embrace (small ‘c’) conservatism. But to an electorate that thinks politicians are already too similar, and many of whom despise the Conservatives, emphasising cross-party agreement, however superficial, seems like a bad move. Moreover, the name is an allusion to the ‘Red Tory’ movement in the Conservative party. This a) makes it seem like Labour couldn’t even be bothered to come up with its own modernisation process, so it nicked the Tories’; and b) highlights the similarity of Blue Labour to an ideology that really isn’t all that different, undermining the originality of the philosophy.

Secondly, much like the Big Society, this complex intellectual trend risks being utterly lost in translation. A friend described his impression of it as being ‘Labour, just more racist’, a notion not helped by all the talk of ‘family, faith and flag’. Blue Labour, like the Red Tory movement, is critical of both the state and capitalism. However, if, as with the Red Tories, only the first part of this message is heard, they will be seen as traitors to the left. To many people politics is still just about left and right, and the inevitable inference will be that this is a straightforward move to the right. Indeed, Billy Bragg’s knee-jerk response is probably a reasonable preview of how Blue Labour will be received by the left.

My focus here, though, is not how Blue Labour will be perceived, but what it actually stands for. Stuart White helpfully draws out five core elements of the Blue Labour philosophy:

1) Decentralised ownership
2) The conservation of English identity[1]
3) Community organising
4) Hostility to moral abstraction
5) A desire to limit the welfare state

The separation of these ideas fails to reflect how interrelated they are. The argument is that Labour’s excessive abstraction and recourse to the bureaucratic state has alienated grassroots membership. An approach emphasising a common identity and decentralised ownership is offered as an alternative, to organise and galvanise the left. However, it is analytically useful to take them in turn.

Decentralised ownership seems to me the least problematic element of the Blue Labour manifesto. There is a lot to be gained from distributing the ownership of wealth, not least as a corrective to power imbalances. This is closely tied in with demands for greater workplace democracy, and a greater stake for employees in their firms. The main problem with this commitment is that it is hardly distinctive, given David Cameron’s apparent desire to spread mutualism. However, if Blue Labour can demonstrate that their dedication to this ideal is deeper than that of the Conservatives, this may well turn out to be one of their strengths.

The strident nationalism of some of the Blue Labour writers is its most eye-catching and alarming feature. Maurice Glasman has fanned these flames with his claim that the Labour party ought to do more to engage supporters of the English Defence League. Jonathan Rutherford, proclaiming that ‘The future is conservative’, has argued:

“In England Labour no longer knows who it represents; its people are everyone and no-one. It champions humanity in general but no-one in particular. It favours multiculturalism but suspects the popular symbols and iconography of Englishness. It claims to be the party of values but nothing specific.”

The trouble is that there is little indication of what, behind the rhetoric, they are really after. Immigration is usually held up as the clearest example of Labour’s lack of connection with its working class support base. Yet for the past few years Labour has been leading a risible race to the bottom over which party can out-tough the on immigration. If Blue Labour want to further restrict the opportunities of those born in less favourable circumstances to better themselves and take advantage of the things we take for granted, that alone is cause for shame.

Connected to this is an emphasis on social conservatism, which seems more closely associated with Glasman than the other theorists. Again, it’s not apparent what he wants. If it is toughness on crime, Labour are already the most authoritarian of the major parties. If it is to roll back gender equality and gay rights, well, that’s deeply worrying.

Most bizarre is Glasman’s Tudor obsession which almost seems like a parody of conservative nostalgia. A man who says things like ‘Selling Dover to the French is mad. I wonder what Henry VIII would really think about that’ is beyond satire.

Blue Labour is on much surer ground with its focus on community organising. After all, it has strong links with the successful ‘London Citizens’ organisation. Marc Stears makes a persuasive case for a vibrant grassroots Labour movement. He observes that in the past the party has tended to swing between ideological purism, with total disregard for electoral consequences, and a desperate willingness to do anything to win power. Focusing exclusively on means has prevented Labour achieving its desired ends. Yet allowing these ends to justify any means has distorted the party’s character. Stears insists that means and ends can be reconciled by authoritative leadership that is willing to delegate power to the broader party, and release the political potential of the mass membership. He looks to the example of the early Labour movement when:

“Constituency parties provided meeting places for those with different opinions and different interests who nonetheless wished to discover shared interests. The broader party then brought these geographical groupings into alliance with industrial groupings through its connection with the trades unions. The socialist societies and affiliated organizations then further brought people with other differences in aspirations and outlooks into the coalition. A series of meetings, rituals, events, and struggles cemented the relationships, ranging from annual conference to festivals, picket lines, marches, galas, and demonstrations. In the early years of the party, commentators even talked of developing a ‘religion of socialism’.”

Stears argues that unleashing this potential will not just improve the party’s prospects of power, but help it to live its ideals in opposition. Through the struggle and development of this mass movement, Labour will develop the solidarity and strong relationships at the heart of its ideology.

Stears’ vision is certainly an appealing one, but I am sceptical about its achievability. Essentially what he requires is for the Labour party to inspire collective action. But as Jon Stokes realises, this involves reforming a general cultural of apathy and disenchantment: “Currently, more people seek meaning and purpose from reality television and celebrity role models than they do from politics. The explosion in life coaching and coaching in the workplace is similarly driven by the desire to make sense of things for oneself, in order to have more control and influence over one’s life and experience”. I think Stears and Stokes have succeeded in identifying a major problem in British society – excessive individualism, collective distrust, a genuine lack of meaningful relationships. Stears complains that far too many of our interactions are ‘transactional’ – we do business with one another, rather than engaging at a deeper level, and he is absolutely correct. My worry is that it is beyond the means of the Labour party to redress this issue.

Primarily, this comes from pessimism about the capacity of politics to resist these powerful social forces. However, in their rejection of abstract arguments, I think Blue Labour have only weakened their ability to inspire people into action. The theorists seem fairly unambiguous on this point: the route to grassroots revival is to engage with specific, concrete, local fights, rather than appealing to big ideas like ‘justice’, ‘freedom’, or (they really seem to hate this) ‘equality’. Stokes says, “if Labour is to have a future, it will be not so much as the meaning-maker itself, but as the facilitator or enabler of meaning-making, of the human capacity to identify problems and to create solutions from within”. And Stears cites approvingly the fact that

“Walt Whitman, once said that in a democracy citizens ‘look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and Governors, as to say, “Who are you?”’. And that is the question that Jonathan [Rutherford] urges us all to ask too. Who are you to tell us what to do? Who are you to tell us what social justice involves, or fairness, or freedom, or equality? Who are you to say what people should aspire towards and what they should seek to avoid? These are decisions that must be made by real people in the contexts of their real lives. They are not to be answered for the public by anyone else, be that by well-meaning academics or politicians or other experts”

This approach strikes me as mistaken for two reasons. Firstly, I think it will be really difficult for the Labour party to attach itself seamlessly onto such grassroots movements. Stears is seems desperate to institutionalise spontaneous action. But any effort to co-opt groups campaigning for things like saving public libraries is likely to be seen as cynical opportunist party politics and resisted. Stears’ broader point, of course, is that it is an awful thing that the Labour party should come to be viewed with such suspicion, but I don’t know how that can be changed in the short term.

My second objection is that in their haste to junk abstract slogans about justice and equality, Labour would be rejecting one of the best resources at their disposal to develop enthusiasm. I’m just not convinced that the small-scale everyday injustices that people face are really more motivational than the big picture. To really inspire people, I would have thought it would be better to offer a grand vision of how to really make things better, fairer, more just.

Notice that I called them ‘everyday injustices’. One problem with the Blue Labour war on abstraction is that it seems to rely on a false dichotomy. The concrete, specific problems that people face are instantiations of the things that people invoke these big concepts against. I would have thought that the art of a great leader would be to connect the two: to show how the small struggles we can fight together form part of a broader fight for justice, equality, whatever.

The worst example of this type of thinking come in the form of the repeated objections to Labour’s apparent obsession with the Gini coefficient. (Odd, given that the Gini coefficient increased under the Labour government). Jon Wilson complains:

“On the left, our idea of equality is based around the measurement of the average statistical attributes possessed by this or that section of the population, rather than the real experience people have of hardship in particular places at particular points in time.”

This seems to rather misunderstand the point of statistics, which are there to systematically collect and compare different ‘real experiences’. Nobody cares about the Gini coefficient per se - they care about the hardship represented by rising inequality.

The final big plank of Blue Labour is an attack on the centralised welfare state. Labour’s obsession with using bureaucrats and technocrats to achieve their goals, they say, has left people passive and disempowered. This argument is another which could have been lifted straight from David Cameron, and indeed it is the rationale behind his ‘big society’ project. The political dangers of this argument are obvious: not only does it mean agreeing with the Conservatives, but agreeing with their wildly unpopular efforts to break down the state. Like Cameron’s plans, the idea is more or less reasonable as a corrective to Labour’s obsession with the state, but needs to remember that there are certain things that the state is best equipped to do.

In fact, this seems like a good summary of the Blue Labour project in general. It has identified certain flaws in post-war Labour thinking – excessive centralisation, abstraction, and statism – and reacts against these. However, taken too seriously, Blue Labour risks throwing away hard fought and valuable achievements.

[1] There is an unfortunate tendency in the Blue Labour papers to address England, as opposed to the UK, one that the Labour party would be advised to avoid, given their dependence on the support ofthe rest of the country