Influence of controversial emerging Labour faction to be heard in Ed Miliband's latest address
Ed Miliband is to make his most direct engagement with the suddenly fashionable Blue Labour movement with a speech covering controversial areas such as personal responsibility, anxiety about the pace of change, and building stronger communities.
The Labour leader has long shown an interest in the ideas of a self-described "ragtail group of academics" led by Maurice Glasman and including one of Miliband's best friends from university, Marc Stears, with whom he ran a student rent campaign). They are joined by Jonathan Rutherford and the already well-known MP Jon Cruddas.
Blue Labour is more concerned with the 4 million working-class voters who have deserted Labour since 1997 than with the party's lost 1.5 million middle-class voters. Critics describe the movement as nostalgics looking for an arcadian past.
Glasman fronts the operation, offering deliberately provocative comments – one suggestion is that Labour lied about immigration – but all four have crafted its central ideas.
Glasman argues that Labour should look to an older period in its history as much as it currently worships the Labour government of 1945. The gains of Clement Attlee's government, he suggests, mask the fact that the Labour party was founded, in the early 20th century, in community politics, growing out of co-operatives and mutuals.
When the four first began, they took on shibboleths of the left. They felt the party should move beyond not only the 1945 government, but also Anthony Crosland's lengthy project to narrow inequality, which they said focused too much on ends. In doing so, the party forgot about the means – the "how" of politics. "Labour is best when it is a democratic movement," Stears says. "It's at its best when it helps people come together to forge a common good, in their communities, workplaces and across the nation. At some point in the last decade, we lost sight of this. We thought an economic boom based on financial services and globalisation meant we didn't have to worry so much about democracy, about helping people relate to each other."
In recent weeks, as their profile has increased, they have come in for growing criticism. "What people see as nostalgia is actually just an insight from the past, buried in Labour's own intellectual tradition, which is that through association and more methodical building of communities, this suspicion and fear can be overcome," Stears says. "With globalisation, the issue is to say there were winners and losers. People weren't properly protected. Outside of the city, there are often more losers than winners. So this model of unregulated economic globalisation doesn't work. That doesn't mean we think it should be stopped, but that there are things governments and companies can do to mitigate its effects and protect those who are vulnerable."
The group have met almost once a month since Christmas either in London or at University College Oxford, with a portrait of Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary, looking down on their oval seminar table. Stears insists they have been at pains to reach out across the factions, with David Miliband attending the small 20-person events alongside the man who got his brother elected, Stewart Wood.
Ed Miliband's team think Blue Labour is not the intellectual meteorite some others do – that these ideas have slalomed in and out of politics throughout the last century, Blair's early Christian socialism being an example. But they welcome it. "Blue Labour is an intellectual way of thinking about the role of the state that Labour needs to get its head around," says one of Miliband's closest advisers. "There are ways to achieve a more just society, a more equitable society, that are not just more state spending, and in fact you might do it with lower state spending and a bigger role for institutions not from the state. For example, Labour may have become too reliant on tax and transfer. If you are going to change someone's life, just shifting money around the system is not enough."
Miliband's office also agrees with the Blue Labour account of the threat to communities and people's values from the pace of change brought about by globalisation of labour. "A whole swath of middle and lower income earners saw Labour as only advocating modernity and that change should always be as quick as possible."
This has been dubbed "change-manic" by former cabinet minister James Purnell. Miliband now talks about the importance of conserving local institutions: the high street, the pub, the post office, Sure Start – even the church.
One Miliband aide praised a report by Phillip Blond's ResPublica on how communities can rebalance the retail economy away from the "big four" supermarkets.
But there are caveats. "Blue Labour poses questions more than it provides answers," says one Miliband aide. "The policy challenge is that a way has to be found to address these issues that is not insular, backward-looking, nostalgic or protectionist against change."
"Ed is very happy to say there is more to life than the bottom line. Successive governments became too focused on the bottom line, and the process of change is as important as the outcome. Maurice will talk about morality and we talk about values."
Neal Lawson, the director of Compass, and a longterm advocate of a less consumerist society, says: "Two-thirds of Blue Labour I get. One-third I don't get. I am with him in the emphasis he places on communities, and the way in which a form of globalisation wrecks that by not putting a price on values that matter, so I agree with him about land and labour. I don't agree with what he says about support for faith and flag. There is a danger that it is a nostalgia for a lost world, when we need a forward-looking agenda.
"At the moment Labour seems to be dominated by three forms of nostalgia. There is Old Labour, the Kinnockites and the Blairites. We have not formed anything new yet."