Blue Labour

Blue Labour is a political tendency in the British Labour Party. Blue Labour advocates the belief that working class voters will be won back to Labour through socially conservative ideas on certain social and international issues, such as immigration, crime and the European Union, a rejection of neoliberal economics in favour of ideas from guild socialism and continental corporatism, and a switch to local and democratic community management and provision of services, rather than relying on a traditional welfare state that is seen as excessively bureaucratic. The position has been articulated in books such as Tangled Up in Blue and Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics.

Ideas

Labour peer and London Metropolitan University academic Maurice Glasman launched Blue Labour in April 2009 at a meeting in Conway Hall, Bloomsbury. He called for "a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity", an alternative to the post 1945 centralising approach of the Labour Party. 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.