Blue Labour, soft left, hard left, Labour Together, Labour to Win … Labour it appears is riven with conflict. JOHN CUNNISON reviews an in-depth analysis of party factions that makes a bold attempt to bridge political rifts but ultimately misses the point.
Few could disagree with Frances Foley’s assessment of the current Labour government that opens her recent Compass pamphlet on the state of the party’s left.
“After 18 months in power, the current Labour administration seems strategically lost,” she writes. It lacks confidence, a coherent vision, and an intellectual foundation, leaving it paralysed in the face of seismic global and domestic shifts in the political landscape – the rise of Trump, Farage, far right populism, et al.
Without a clear sense of direction, she says, the party has succumbed to a new outbreak of factionalism “with the reformed Blue Labour group pitted against the so-called ‘soft left’ and ‘hard left’”.
Soft Skills, Hard Labour: The Case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour Politics is Foley’s highly analytical attempt to excavate the roots of this state of affairs and suggest areas of common ground, drawing on a year of interviews with figures from each tradition.
Those associated with Blue Labour, she argues, roughly support the government’s positions on issues such as immigration, and feel “vindicated that questions they’ve been asking for years are now more salient”. They claim that a shift leftward risks “killing the good faith of the curious and ditching those who might share their political priorities”.
Writing from a soft left perspective, Foley accepts the need for change but believes there’s enough overlap between some aspects of the Blue and soft positions to move beyond mutual antagonisms and build a new type of politics. She contends that both traditions contain ethical socialist and communitarian strands capable of reconnecting Labour with the country.
Within each of these broad factions, Foley identifies four related but distinct ‘tribes’ – the ‘democratic communitarians’ and ‘rights-based liberals’ of the soft left, and the ‘postliberal democrats’ and ‘rules-based majoritarians’ who make up Blue Labourite thinking. By mapping these groups graphically, she attempts to show how democratic communitarians and postliberal democrats are most closely related in political outlook, while the other two sub-groups hold the most divergent views.
The problem, she says, is that the views of those at either extreme – rights-based liberals and rules-based majoritarians – have come to be seen as synonymous with their respective factions. “If the democratic communitarians and the postliberal democrats see one another more clearly a different kind of dialogue, and indeed politics, might become possible,” she writes.
The rest of the pamphlet is devoted to uncovering what that dialogue might rest on. She does this by outlining each faction’s critique and identifying their “chief concerns and priorities”.
Hollow politics
At its core, Blue Labour targets the so-called ‘ultra-liberalism’ that it believes has hollowed out politics, eroded civil society and prioritised metropolitan values over the socially conservative traditions of post-industrial communities. This, they argue, has fuelled identity politics, culture wars, technocratic governance, and a loss of meaningful democratic debate.
Immigration is the key flashpoint: Blue Labour accuses the soft left of avoiding serious discussion, dismissing community concerns as xenophobic and alienating “ordinary people”, so leaving space for far right exploitation. They also argue that the so-called meritocratic society and its education system disproportionately benefit the middle classes, intensifying resentment during the cost-of-living crisis.
Foley’s argument is that this position is based on a critique of rights-based liberal thought rather than the democratic communitarian strands within the soft left.
It is democratic communitarians, she says, who “draw from the best of soft left thought and practice”, creating “a new articulation of equality” that takes on board how “feminism has deepened, broadened and strengthened left politics”, how ”civil rights and anti-racism movements have long been aligned to socialism”, and how climate change affects the lives of ordinary people.
This question of equality is central to left thought and cannot be subordinated to class conflict alone, she writes. Blue Labour wrongly conflates emancipatory movements, such as feminism and anti-racism, with shallow identity politics and relies on a nostalgic, 1950s archetype of a working class male that ignores decades of social and demographic change.
Blue Labourites also underestimate structural constraints and fail to grasp the need for constitutional reforms such as PR, abolition of the House of Lords and devolution, which would boost democratic engagement more effectively than culture-war politics. Brexit is as an example of how symbolic politics can worsen material outcomes.
The importance of climate change is also undervalued by Blue Labour, both as a threat and as a political opportunity, particularly for re-engaging local communities, although care must be taken to avoid technocratic, top-down approaches.
The paper concludes by identifying possible areas of shared concern among democratic communitarians and postliberal democrats, including welfare reform, opposition to extended detention and ID cards, and cooperation with environmental organisations rooted in land and place.
Acknowledging Blue Labour’s current insurgent momentum and the soft left’s declining influence in recent years, the author calls for a more propositional politics that focuses on building alternatives rather than factional opposition, encapsulated in the injunction to “propose more than oppose”.
Existential crisis
This is an intense, highly technical, in-depth analysis that benefits from more than one reading. While acknowledging the intellectual effort, I do question the relevance of its central thesis at a time when Labour could be facing an existential crisis. In more stable times, debates about factional alignment, ideological centres of gravity and electoral positioning might be useful. But these are not normal times.
The political centrism that sustained Labour during the Blair years collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis. Neoliberalism and Labour’s ‘third way’ approach are now widely discredited. This attempt to reconcile internal factions seems rather too close to futile navel-gazing at a moment when the party itself risks becoming irrelevant.
In this context, the key question is not whether the soft left and Blue Labour can find common ground, but whether Labour can break free from the dominance of the Labour To Win faction and reopen genuine and wide-ranging internal debate, backed by a plural, democratic system that allows the outcomes of those discussions to have purchase and impact.
Polling suggests the wider political landscape has shifted decisively, with the Greens offering a clear alternative on the left and Reform doing the same on the right. Against this backdrop, Labour’s precise position along the axis of the political centre is of diminishing importance to voters.
I would also challenge the paper’s definition of the soft left as “a substantial part of the Labour Party encompassing social democrats and ethical socialists”. For me, there is an essential difference here in that socialists seek to replace capitalism rather than merely reform or tame it. The major debates within socialist thought lie in strategy and timescale.
While I accept the paper’s account of how Blue Labour views the soft left, I reject their explanation for the erosion of Labour’s working class support. The biggest reason why the traditional working class abandoned Labour is very straightforward: we stopped delivering for them.
The 1945 government had a huge visible impact on people’s lives, but that transformative impact faded over time. By the 1970s, Labour had become distant from its base and unable to back organised labour effectively. Rather than confronting this failure, Blue Labour has constructed misleading narratives based on the notion of “political correctness, gone mad”.
Whether its divide from the soft left is reconcilable or not seems to me to be the wrong debate at the wrong time.
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Soft Skills, Hard Labour: The Case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour Politics, by Frances Foley, was published by Compass in December 2025.
