If you mention communitarianism within Labour Party circles, the chances are that someone will roll their eyes and mention something about Blue Labour. The mention of family, community, locality, and all things associated with communitarianism tends to prompt suspicion more than agreement.
It’s something that has shimmered in Keir Starmer’s leadership of the party. The occasional mention of love for England, emphasis on work and even criticisms of immigration systems as deflections for local investments all point to a pitch for a politics rooted in places where people live.
Starmer is not the first Labour leader to be attracted to this political messaging. Ed Miliband tried something very similar, discussing the centrality of community and work to life. Even though his adviser was the Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman there was an air of inauthenticity to Miliband’s messaging, encapsulated by those awful immigration controls mugs.
Even Jeremy Corbyn, whilst not necessarily communitarian, has magnified certain ethos of that tradition from a socialist perspective such as increasing workers’ democracy and utilising Brexit.
Some in Labour, those instinctively anti-Brexit but from a leftwing place, pushed back against this, regarding it as hostile to being seen as a tolerant and open party. And yet, embracing the country’s communitarian instincts is the only road for a party rooted in social democracy, even if confronted with challenges. Otherwise it is abandoned to right-wing post-liberals whose only advocacy for strengthening community bonds is as an intellectually shallow bulwark against the perceived dominance of elitist liberal identity politics, or to oppose any meaningful public investment.
The national response to the Covid-19 pandemic told a story in Britain of how a concept of community based on selfless care and solidarity was rooted in the ethics of most people around the country. Most immediately accepted lockdown as a price for keeping safe, maintained social distancing at the expense of not seeing loved ones and persevered even as mental health collectively shrivelled.
Beyond that, communities reconnected with each other through the renewal of being neighbours. Mutual aid groups were formed as communities looked out for each other – and the most vulnerable in them. It was a time of rare social solidarity in a country exhausted by Brexit’s divisions. It was, also, a moment that spoke to what the country has been searching for a long time. The longing for greater social connections, relationships, family, and community are a staple of life and is something everyone craves at some point in their life (and gets exhausted by others). Community wasn’t a jargon used for political purposes but a very real means of survival.
Communitarianism has currently been left to conservative post-liberals. What this means in parliamentary terms is that the Tory party has no real concept of what it is as a vision of society, rather than what it stands against. But a Labour brand of communitarianism is one that recognises the role of the economy is to embed people within their communities and allow them to be willing contributors to these shared places.
Jobs are no longer tied to their communities. The blue-collar industrial jobs that fermented a sense of identity and belonging have been replaced by an atomised private sector. London has become the black hole which sucks in jobs and people, leaving communities up and down the country disfigured by people moving away from homes, and in a state of rust from years of underinvestment.
A positive vision for the UK doesn’t just focus on cultural divisions but recognises the economic malaise that contributes to frayed social fabrics. A possible answer to this is expanding the co-operative movement, which was far more resilient during the pandemic than other types of businesses. The Co-op Economy 2021 report, compiled by Co-operatives UK, found that co-operative businesses were four times more likely to survive than businesses generally in 2020 during the global pandemic. Creating jobs that give locals a sense of control and dignity is as important as creating jobs itself. These communities need more co-operatives and fewer Amazon warehouses.
Communitarianism, of course, isn’t just about supporting co-operatives and democractising workplaces, but also revitalising the shared spaces that have declined. Towns haven’t just been impacted by the loss of jobs but the decay of pubs, libraries, football clubs, working men’s clubs and even gyms. These are all places that constituted spaces for people within the community to interact with each other, to build a sense of neighbourhood. And yet in recent times, all of these vital social spaces have been left unprotected against a remorseless capitalist market and have dwindled in their numbers.
For all that the Conservatives in the past have spoken about a Big Society, they were never interested in protecting civic assets that uphold a sense of the collective. A communitarianism built on the sort of local fraternal spirit gathered during the pandemic is something that people instinctively yearn for on some level no matter where they are – but they need support to protect them from market forces. Protecting these local cultural social spaces is a key part to revitalising a sense of belonging and togetherness across towns and cities.
This is something that Labour can and should tap into. A politics of solidarity and community with actual policies that return power to places rather than leaving them scrambling to fill the void of government investment is a very radical approach that would find far more attraction than some believe. It would allow people to be a part of a vibrant and living community reborn by investments.
A left-wing communitarian politics is the truest expression of the assertion that people are social beings, requiring connections that are carefully built over time. Social democracy can only work if it convinces people that they are part of something together. The pandemic showed us that beyond economics, such a thing as society still exists. People are webbed together in mixed communities finding ways to overcome differences, help each and live together. That is what allowed a lot of people to endure the grim months of Covid lockdowns.
Labour’s social democrats should be angling for the party to take a version of this politics. The pandemic has worn down the desire for conflict. We have seen people’s sense of sacrifice and duty where it concerns helping others. Communitarian politics can help a sense of society rediscovered by embedding people once more into the places they live and helping them find common causes and values. The pandemic showed that this was a possibility where the differences no longer mattered. Everyone shared a common goal to survive; everyone was united in the hardship, the struggle, but also the desire to connect with others. Keir Starmer should not hesitate but make it abundantly clear that this is what the Labour Party under his leadership will stand for.