abstract: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 Europe, 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 peer, who is a university lecturer and describes BlueLabour as a mix of patriotism and populism, is said to be a regular visitor to Mr Miliband's office.
In our view, the problem is more exactly the internalisation of shareholder value pressures, and to illustrate the point we present below a kind of thought experiment about a different Apple (without shareholder value) which was willing to accept lower margins and employ more US blue collar labour.