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The Morphology of the Labour Party’s OneNation Narrative: Story, Plot and Authorship

JOHN GAFFNEY AND AMARJIT LAHEL

‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale.’(D. H. Lawrence)

To grasp the underlying significance of theOneNation narrative, we should look at it as acorpus of interactive and evolving texts. Inthis way, we shall see more clearly the effectsof the narrative upon the party and upon theparty leadership. We shall identify the centraltexts, their provenance and their evolution,and show how they fit into an overall narra-tive structure, such as that identified andanalysed in narrative theory.1 The One Nationnarrative has, as we shall show, the classicalliterary structure of a story and a plot, withorigins, journeys, false starts, returns, trialsand upheavals, reflection, heroes, desertcrossings, hope, gatherings, migration and(the promise of) triumph. In order to demon-strate this, we shall discuss the main texts, theevents surrounding them, their deeper struc-ture when taken as a whole, and the vexedquestion in a leftist political party of narrativeauthorship. The corpus we use consists of thefollowing:

. Labour’s Future (07/2010), Soundings andOpen Left.

. New Politics. Fresh Ideas (11/2010), LabourParty.

. ‘Blue Labour’, BBC Radio 4 Analysis (03/2011).

. ‘Maurice Glasman: My Blue Labour visioncan defeat the coalition’, The Observer (04/2011).

. Refounding Labour, a Party for the New Gen-eration (04/2011), Labour Party.

. A Better Future for Britain (06/2011), LabourParty.

. The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Para-dox (07/2011), The Oxford London Semi-nars.

. The Purple Book: A Progressive Future forLabour (09/2011), Biteback Publishing.

. ‘Jon Cruddas—the maverick MP trying to

lead Labour out of the wilderness’, TheObserver (06/2012).

. ‘Building the New Jerusalem’, essay by JonCruddas, New Statesman (09/2012).

. Ed Miliband, Labour Party Conferencespeech (10/2012).

. The Relational State (11/2012), IPPR.

. Ed Miliband, Fabian Society annual con-ference speech, ‘One Nation Labour—TheParty of Change’ (01/2013).

. One Nation Labour—Debating the Future (01/2013), LabourList.org.

. ‘Labour’s NewNew Jerusalem’, BBC Radio4 Analysis Programme (05/2013).

. Ed Miliband, ‘A One Nation Plan for SocialSecurity Reform’, speech (06/2013).

. Jon Cruddas, ‘One Nation Statecraft’,speech (06/2013).2

We can express the corpus diagrammatically:see Fig. 1.

Rhetorical beginnings

In July 2009, James Purnell, after resigningfrom Gordon Brown’s government, launchedOpen Left, a three-year project with the cross-party think tank, Demos. In May 2010, OpenLeft and the journal Soundings co-organised aseminar on the future of the Labour partywhose findings were published as an e-book,Labour’s Future, in July 2010. The ideas under-pinning Labour’s Future—localism, recipro-city, the relationship between the individualand the state, reforming the state and themarket, and the idea of a new ‘covenant’with the people—became the fundamentalelements of the emerging narrative. Editedby Jonathan Rutherford and Alan Lockey,Labour’s Future and the discussions around itconstituted a prelude to the post-2010 narra-tive. This set the scene for what followed,acting as a founding moment. In an interviewwith Alan Finlayson, Rutherford later elabo-

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The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3, July–September 2013 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-923X.2013.00000.x


rated this coming together of a select groupthat would go on to develop, with others, themain ideas informing the debates.3 It is im-portant to underline that Labour’s Future pre-dates Ed Miliband’s election, coming at thetime of Labour’s defeat in the general election(and is significant too in that its origins andthe small group of people meeting predate theelection defeat itself). Its essential motif wasthat the party had lost its way. In fact, theoriginal meetings and discussions pointedCassandra-like to an approaching calamity(the 2010 defeat), and the need to ‘go back’.Labour’s Future called for a move down to alevel of activism and politics that was dramat-ically devolved (reciprocity, localism), butalso back in that it began a rehabilitation notof pre-Blair Labour, but of pre-Attlee Labour,in the search for the party’s true road. Therewas a spatial movement down and a temporalmovement back, that is to say, that to main-tain legitimacy, and if New Labour wasdepicted as ‘up’ and ‘now’, there was onlydown and back to go. This would be part ofOne Nation’s rhetorical richness, but also apotential source of strategic, if not doctrinal,

weakness. The essential point for us to retainis that Labour’s Future was both a prelude anda rhetorical/ideational rival to both NewLabour and to the 2010 Labour Party PolicyReview that would follow.

Miliband elected leader: rivalnarratives

Policy Review, Mark I

UponMiliband’s election, a new developmentof the narrative was set in train by him:namely, the Policy Review (November 2010).This led to a great deal of textual output by theLabour Party, and a great deal of activityincluding meetings, discussions, consultationpapers, speeches and interviews and relatedoutput by Miliband: forewords and introduc-tions in official Policy Review consultationpapers, policy events and speeches. Its firsttextual expression was New Politics. FreshIdeas, published in November 2010. The con-sultation paper outlined four policy ques-tions: How do we grow our economy and

2 John Gaffney and Amarjit Lahel

The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3 # The Authors 2013. The Political Quarterly # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2013

Figure 1: Corpus of main texts


ensure good jobs and a sustainable future?How do we strengthen our families, commu-nities and relationships? How do we putpower in people’s hands, from our politicsto our public services? How do we secure ourcountry and contribute to a better world? Thisfirst document of the Policy Review began byemphasising forthcoming dialogue and dis-cussion within the party. However, we canmake two points here that characterise thedocument. First, the wider discussion wasconstrained by the somewhat directive natureof the questions, even by the interrogativeform itself. Second, the document—though itmade the required symbolic gesture, as itwere, by going back to the party’s base toask those questions—moved very quickly tothe issue of policy elaboration.

Maurice Glasman: Blue Labour

Maurice Glasman—community organiser,contributor to the Open Left discussions andpublications, academic and Labour peer—was the main proponent of Blue Labour,conceived, we should note, as early as March2009.4 It was given political expression andwide coverage in a Radio 4 Analysis Pro-gramme in March 2011, and in an articlewritten by Glasman in The Observer (24 April2011).Blue Labour was a social theory. This was a

radical rhetorical departure. Glasman arguedfor an almost mythical ‘return’ to Labour’sroots, to its origins and essential purpose;essentially, to a reciprocal, mutualist, local,community-based socialism or social demo-cracy. The prescription was also ‘modern’; itscommunitarianism was of a contemporarymulticultural type, it talked about problemsfacing communities now; but in the imagin-ation, what was rhetorically constructed wasan early twentieth-century Britain (Englandalmost exclusively): communities, faith,family, reciprocity, mutualism/cooperation,the ‘outside’ somewhat precluded; a strongnational patriotic feeling informed it, includ-ing a hesitancy about ‘outsiders’ and inter-ference. In contemporary terms, this meantcircumventing the corrosive social and eco-nomic power of banking, and a strong dis-approval of uncontrolled immigration.In many ways, Blue Labour pointed

towards an Arcadian England, and we should

point out here something rarely noticed in thestudy of political discourse: not only that theideational enhances the policy-practical(although it does) but, conversely, that thepractical (these big banks don’t work, thereare too many Polish immigrants for the wel-fare services to cope, mutual societies didwork, reciprocity does overcome anomie andalienation) legitimates the mythical or lyrical.Blue Labour pointed both forward and back,and was both prescriptive and nostalgic.By the summer of 2013, this evolved narra-

tive would be put to more practical purposeas policies began to develop. We shall comeback to this below. Beyond the critique of BlueLabour’s appealing to reactionary thought, amore acid criticism concerned its nostalgiaand possible political irrelevance—can thisEngland exist; did it ever?Whatever the truth,such accusations (we shall return to the ideaof ‘narrative attack’ in the conclusion) madeBlue Labour both contentious and divisive(and some of the comments made by itsauthor caused controversy). Nevertheless, itshighly evocative, emotional and ethical regis-ters made it rhetorically very attractive, par-ticularly if New Labour were to be shown ashaving been in thrall to false idols. This wasnot long in coming. Rhetorically, therefore,Glasman’s discursive invention of BlueLabour was an alternative pole to Byrne’sNew Politics. Fresh Ideas initiative, as well asbeing a critique of New Labour. Moreover, inits conception, like the other texts we men-tioned, it predates the Policy Review, as ifcoming from another source.

Refounding Labour

In November 2010, Peter Hain, Chair of theNational Policy Forum, was tasked by Mili-band to write a consultation paper. In April2011, Refounding Labour, A Party for the NewGeneration was published. This was the sec-ond Policy Review consultation paper, theconsultation ending on 24 June 2011. Theconsultation sought responses to four ‘bigquestions’ (and sixty-three associated sub-questions) concerning the following: an out-ward-looking party; a voice for members;renewing our party; winning back power.The outcomes of the consultation were pub-lished in Refounding Labour to Win, a Party forthe New Generation. The consultation claimed

The Morphology of the Labour Party’s One Nation Narrative 3

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3,255 individual submissions, 20,354 hits onRefounding Labour websites, 66 events acrossthe country, 184 party submissions and 36submissions from groups or affiliates.Refounding Labour to Win, a Party for the NewGeneration outlined the way in which theparty perceived the four ‘big questions’ andassociated questions, and then proposedrecommendations; for example, ‘the agewhich you can join the party will be reducedto 14 years of age’. An accompanying paper,Refounding Labour to Win, a Summary Report,was published in July 2011. The report sum-marised Hain’s initiative and set out six issuesto be addressed: building a more open andwelcoming party; connecting with commu-nities; increasing member participation andinvolvement; party leader, leadership elec-tion, elected representatives and candidates;equality; a strengthened policy-making pro-cess. The first two outputs of the PolicyReview, New Politics. Fresh Ideas and Refound-ing Labour, a Party for a New Generation, drewlegitimacy first from being tasked by theleader, and second from the creation of asense of wide-ranging party involvement.Both also focused upon two areas: policyand organisation. What neither focused onin any detail was ideology.5

A Better Future for Britain

In June 2011, A Better Future for Britain waspublished. This interim paper summarisedByrne’s November 2010 initiative, New Poli-tics. Fresh Ideas. Byrne’s initiative had resultedin almost 4 million contacts with the public, 70public events with Shadow Cabinet spokes-people, a People’s Policy Forum led by EdMiliband, 6,000 attendees at consultation eve-nings, 2,000 written responses and 16,000online responses, and hundreds of thousandsof mailings. A Better Future for Britain waspresented as a listening exercise and con-tained 60 unmediated responses, each givingthe impression that the party had listened andwas renewing its appeal. The responses wereoften personalised and given as quotes, andsigned as ‘Melanie, Surrey’ or ‘John, Burn-ley’—visually and textually suggesting wide-ranging dialogue within the party. A BetterFuture for Britain concluded by outlining fourpolicy themes—first, getting the deficit down,or Rebuilding our Economy to help the

Squeezed Middle; second, Renewing thePromise of Britain for the Next Generation;third, Renewing Responsibility, Strengthen-ing Our Communities; fourth, Our Place inthe World—and nineteen expert workinggroups were set up as a result of the consulta-tion, each chaired by a member of the ShadowCabinet. The third major output of the PolicyReview, A Better Future for Britain, stressedpolicy and introduced the idea of party dia-logue (and had leadership support particu-larly through the involvement of the ShadowCabinet); it was, nevertheless, the third majorparty document in a row that had paid scantattention to doctrinal or ideological renewal.This meant that it was rhetorically and idea-tionally inadequate to ‘story’.

The Labour tradition and the politicsof paradox

A wider intellectual/philosophical enquirywas taking place in the period after Milibandwas elected as party leader. Between October2010–April 2011, academics and Labour MPsand advisors took part in The Oxford LondonSeminars series on the Labour tradition. Theseminars debated Labour tradition and mod-ernity, nation and class, labour and capital,community and the individual, society andthe market, the state and mutualism, andcontrasted belief and empiricism, romanti-cism and rationality, obligation and entitle-ment. The debates led to the publication of TheLabour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox inJuly 2011, edited by Maurice Glasman,Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and StuartWhite. The preface was written by Miliband.We can make two points on the significance

of The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Para-dox for the development of a Labour partynarrative. Our first point is that in the preface,Miliband endorsed the publication, referringto the ‘political energy and intellectual confid-ence’ of the contributors, and welcomed‘openness to new ideas and new approaches’.Blue Labour was mentioned in passing as thestarting point for discussions on partyrenewal (one of the very rare occasions onwhich Miliband has named Blue Labour: ‘Thecentral contribution of this ebook, and of theBlue Labour idea more generally, is squarelyin the middle of this discussion—one which




has already re-energised the party and poli-tics more generally since we left office’).Miliband’s endorsement of this publicationand its contributors indicated first, the impli-cit legitimation of an unofficial Policy Review;and second, an implicit criticism of theByrne/Hain Policy Review initiatives.Our second point on the significance of The

Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox isthat the four editors stated in the introduction:

We were NOT trying to define policy or deter-mine what should be done. We wanted to asksome fundamental questions about the condi-tion of the country and the predicament ofLabour following its defeat in the May 2010general election . . . The task of the OxfordLondon Seminars was to signal the beginningof a new revisionism following on fromAnthony Crosland in the 1950s and the ThirdWay of the 1990s.

This is particularly interesting in that it sayswhat the contributions are not (policy) andwhat theymight be (an analysis of the countryand the party), and then adds what theyactually are, namely the beginnings of a full-blown revisionism. And political revisionismis always not only about what, in this case,Britain needed, but about what Britain was. Afurther feature to note in this text, as insubsequent texts, was the flooding into theemerging narrative of the ideas and philo-sophical perspectives of earlier figures suchas—to name but a few—Robert Owen, JohnRuskin, Kier Hardie, G. D. H. Cole and R. H.Tawney. The authors were taking as theirinspiration some of the major leftist philoso-phers of nineteenth and twentieth-centuryBritain.

The Purple Book

The New Labour pressure group, Progress,published The Purple Book in September 2011;editor Robert Philpot stated that the theme ofthe book was the redistribution of power ‘notonly in relation to the state and public ser-vices, but also in relation to the market,economy and workplace.’ 6 The authors—many of them, of course, Blairites—contribu-ted a number of essays. The Purple Book sawthe congregation of a very broad churchwithin the party, with papers by figuressuch as Jacqui Smith, Frank Field, TessaJowell, Alan Milburn, and Peter Mandelson,

as well as by the authors of what wemight callthe emerging narrative. There were several‘straight’ policy essays, less focused on phil-osophy, as well as many contributions fromthe authors of the emerging dominant narra-tive and New Labour converts to it. The cen-tral thrust of all the contributions was therethinking of the state. There was even oneessay by Ivan Lewis on ‘One Nation’ itself.What we see in The Purple Book is a narrativethat draws upon the ideas in Labour’s Futureand The Labour Tradition and the Politics ofParadox. It is an intelligent set of essays anda clear attempt by the Blairites to, if notrhetorically capture then become central to apost-Blair agenda. The Purple Book, however,was the last time that they appeared instrength as part of the elaboration of a post-2010 narrative. Coming to the fore was thequestion of whether these two approacheswere compatible, and indeed whether oneneeded to disparage the other concertedly inorder to justify and impose itself rhetorically.Mandelson’s contribution was illustrative ofthe dichotomy. He was sceptical about‘romantic ideas about working class peopleturning back the clock’, but ‘romance’ in bothits dreamy and storytelling senses was actu-ally fundamental to Labour’s imminent revi-sionism.

Policy Review, Mark II

In May 2012, at Miliband’s request, Byrnestood down from the Policy Review and wasreplaced by Jon Cruddas. The initial PolicyReview had focused immediately and almostexclusively upon policy and organisation(and gestured towards dialogue within theparty) as opposed to ideology and narrative.It was precisely this shortcoming that led tothe ‘second start’ of the Policy Review. Crud-das was a surprise appointment: a Blairite,although a disillusioned one, who was per-ceived as a leftist. Cruddas, like Glasman, alsohad ‘street cred’ in that he was from an‘ordinary’ background, as well as being ex-tremely articulate and considered one of theparty’s intellectual thinkers. Among his con-tributions over the following period was thesense of excitement and emotion he broughtto the development of the party narrative. Weshall come back to this extremely importantfactor of the role of emotion.




In his first interview (16 June 2012),Cruddas stated that the party had lacked an‘over-arching story’ since the last election. ForCruddas, the story should be about ‘rebuild-ing Britain’ and ‘national renewal.’ Cruddascompared the present (financial crisis, Euro-zone crisis) with the challenge that the Labourparty faced in 1945 and stated: ‘the way I lookat it would be that in 1945 Labour locked inthe organised working classes into an over-arching story of national renewal, and that isthe equivalent task at hand today.’ The sym-bolic role of 1945 would, however, shift deci-sively over the next year. Cruddas’ first actionon the Policy Review was to replace theByrne/Hain initiatives, including the policygroups, with three areas for reflection: theeconomy, politics and society.Cruddas took over the review and trans-

formed it into a review of thought rather thanof policy (in 2012–2013). He took the BlueLabour discourse and folded it into hisReview while expanding the doctrinal remitto include much more decisively contempor-ary culture in preparation for the elaborationof the ‘One Nation’ theme; for example, in hisNew Statesman essay (28 September 2012),Cruddas referred to establishing the identityof cities and building ‘city cultures and econo-mies that power regional economic develop-ment.’ The Glasman-style referencesincreased, however, under his chairmanship,and all the ‘thought’ that had gone before wasextended emotionally to include a kind ofDickensian or Elizabeth Gaskell register ofemotional indignation at injustice; althoughgreat emphasis was constantly put on thelocal, the emotional sweep was often on abroad national scale:In this gloom [a political system dominated

by the rich and powerful, unchallenged banksand media, etc.] Danny Boyle’s Olympicsopening ceremony shone a light of hope. Heshowed us our common life and all that isgood about our country and its history, andhe roused in us a self-confident and generouspatriotism. For Labour to win in 2015 it willneed to speak for that country, harness itstalent and offer a future forged out of thebest of British traditions.The Policy Review Mark II, along with key

speeches and interviews given7 at variousstages, began to lift the discourse of OneNation to rally proportions, as if the narrative

were catching a tide. Blue Labour had beencontroversial, as was Glasman, but all itsideas were mobilised even more intensely byCruddas.

One Nation (two authors)

In October 2012, at the Labour Party Confer-ence in Manchester, Ed Miliband used ‘OneNation Labour’ as the formative theme of hiskeynote speech. We have analysed elsewherein detail Miliband’s performance at Manches-ter 2012.8 Here, let us concentrate on the rhet-oric of One Nation as regards Miliband. Heintroduced One Nation in this way:

Friends, I didn’t become leader of the LabourParty to reinvent the world of Disraeli or Attlee.But I do believe in that spirit. That spirit of OneNation. One Nation: a country where everyonehas a stake. One Nation: a country where pros-perity is fairly shared. One Nation: where wehave a shared destiny, a sense of shared en-deavour and a common life that we leadtogether. That is my vision of One Nation. Thatis my vision of Britain. That is the Britain wemust become.

We should make two points here as regardshis ‘authorship’ of One Nation. First, Mili-band developed the idea and its implicationsthroughout the speech, always referring towhat One Nation was for him, and accordingto him, and these in a highly rhetorical man-ner. Second, his telling of the One Nation talewas not a simple reporting to the audience ofwhat it was either ideologically or in terms ofpolicy (though both of these perspectiveswere present), but in terms of his own verypersonal and emotional story: his childhood,moral and emotional commitment, his per-sonalised envisioning of a better world, hisacute sense of injustice, references to hisfamily, country, and so on. Miliband left theConference with the press and the partyacclaiming his performance and leadership;he also took with him as ‘his’ the now highlyrhetorical narrative of One Nation—throughappropriation, ‘it’ became ‘his’, thus mediat-ing if not resolving the question of authorship.And it became his not simply because headopted it but, as we have seen, because hedid so in such a highly personalised, inter-pretive and emotional way.




The Relational State

In November 2012, The Relational State waspublished by the IPPR think tank. The pub-lication was an outcome of an IPPR seminar inearly 2012 and was edited by Graeme Cooke(Open Left/IPPR) and Rick Muir (IPPR). Inthe extended introduction which set out thecontext for discussion, the editors stated that‘the purpose of this collection is to begin to fillthis political space by introducing the idea ofthe ‘relational state’—a new intellectual andpolitical perspective on statecraft and thepublic services.’ The publication featuredtwo major essays by Geoff Mulgan (chiefexecutive of the National Endowment forScience Technology and the Arts) and MarcStears (Miliband’s advisor and an academic),and a series of responses. Let us make twopoints on this publication and its significancefor our analysis. First, in the critique of 1979–2010 (New Public Management: markets andtargets) found in many of the contributions,there are echoes of Blue Labour’s community-centred approach. This was reinforced inMulgan’s essay in which he advocated arange of personal/local measures, such aslong-term patients deciding on their careplan. Second, the contributors stressed thevalue of human relationships, thus promotinga narrative based upon personalism and loc-alism and strongly against both a collectivistapproach and the hard individualism of themarket. The Relational Statewas also a signific-ant and contemporary theoretical contribu-tion to the developing narrative.After Miliband’s 2012 Conference speech,

One Nation became the Labour Party narra-tive. In his Fabian annual conference speech,he vividly described his vision of a post-2015British society:

The idea of a country which we rebuild together,where everyone plays their part . . . we know thisidea [One Nation] is a deep part of our nationalstory because we have somany different ways ofdescribing it: ‘all hands to the pump’, ‘muckingin’, ‘pulling your weight’, ‘doing your bit’ . . .Turning this spirit of collective endeavour oflooking out for each other, from something wedo in our daily lives, to the way our nation isrun. That is what One Nation is about.

The down-to-earth liveliness of Miliband’srhetoric here is reminiscent of a kind ofrallying war-time spirit.

From lyricism to policy

In January 2013, One Nation Labour—Debatingthe Future was published by LabourList.org.Edited by Cruddas, it was the first substantialtextual expression of the Policy Review MarkII. The contributors were drawn from acade-mia, think tanks and parliament. This groupof Labour thinkers represented what wemight call an orientation towards policy basedupon the ideas, research and scholarship ofOne Nation. The contributors did not outlinepolicies but practical justifications of policyand how policies would work in practice—forexample, employee representation on com-pany boards; political parties and courts togenerate accountability; rethinking corporategovernance. What we see in One NationLabour—Debating the Future is not yet policyelaboration but, as with The Relational State,the ‘re-imagining’ of aspects of society and thepolity. Under Cruddas’ leadership, as wehave seen, the Policy Review ceased to be aPolicy Review and resembled a rhetorical andideological exercise until 2013, but the ‘actualimagining’ of society, as it were, now sawpolicy implications emerging, all of whichwere based upon/would follow from theOne Nation narrative. In the January 2013publication, One Nation discourse was givena further lift, essentially through the highrhetoric of Cruddas and the other contrib-utors, all of whom celebrated One Nation;they also, however, changed One Nation’ssignificance profoundly by drawing attentionto Miliband himself as their inspiration. Hereis one such endorsement, by Tristram Hunt:

It is now just over three months since Ed Mili-band made his One Nation conference speech.When a speech can be instantly recalled by asingle phrase, it is usually a good indication ofits effectiveness. And there can now be littledoubt that it galvanised the party and stimu-lated thinking.

References of this kind abound in OneNation Labour—Debating the Future, linkingthe text’s authors to the leader through theirfinding inspiration in One Nation and him; itwas as if Miliband had become the author ofthe narrative.In February 2013, Cruddas delivered a

speech at the IPPR launch event for its latestproject, ‘The Condition of Britain’. He beganthe speech by outlining the collaborative




relationship between IPPR’s research and thePolicy Review itself. Thereafter, one of theessential features of the speech was the lyri-cism of One Nation:

Generations before, The Labour Party itself grewout of the mass popular movements of mutual-ism, self improvement and collective self-reliance. It was working people organisingtogether to change their lives for the better.Building their own power and strength. Creat-ing building societies, cooperatives, sports socie-ties, libraries, education groups and tradeunions. A great force for civilisation in Britain.It is a tradition that believes in contribution,taking responsibility and the power of relation-ships. One Nation Labour will build on thistradition and once again be the movement fora good society.

What we see in Cruddas’ speech is the build-up towards policy that will draw upon thelyricism of the One Nation narrative. Theemotion of the narrative had become one ofits central rhetorical elements.In May 2013, in a Radio 4 Analysis pro-

gramme entitled ‘The New New Jerusalem’,Maurice Glasman and others explored therole of the state and Labour’s approach towelfare. The programme began with anextract of Attlee’s (1951) Party Conferencespeech in which he described ‘building Jer-usalem’. Jon Cruddas and Marc Stears thencritiqued that Jerusalem. What was strikingabout the advocates of One Nation was theassertiveness with which they criticised thepost-1945 (and actual) welfare state in thename of localism, and unapologetically‘assumed’ the policy consequences of theirposition. A second striking feature of theprogrammewas the use of localism in practice.Sir Robin Wales, Mayor of Newham, advo-cated localism strongly against centralisation,and demonstrated a series of One Nationpolicies that were being applied. Wales’ contri-bution to the programme was to demonstratethe practical significance of One Nation. Glas-man made no reference to Blue Labour in theprogramme. From a symbolic and practicalperspective, this was significant as, afterMiliband’s 2012 Conference speech, BlueLabour had been folded into the One Nationnarrative.In June 2013, Miliband delivered a speech at

Newham Docks entitled ‘A One Nation Planfor Social Security Reform’ (the location was

an indirect endorsement of Wales’ ideas in theRadio 4 programme). The speech was the firstexpression of One Nation policy for a post-2015 Britain, and focused exclusively uponwelfare expenditure. In the speech, Milibandfocused on four objectives: ‘Overcomingworklessness, rewarding work and tacklinglow pay, investing in the future [housing] andrecognising contribution: these are the Labourways to reform our social security system . . .The next Labour government will use a three-year cap on structural welfare spending tohelp control costs’. One Nation was very closeto moving from ideology to policy, but notwithout rhetorical flourish. A striking featureof One Nation on the threshold of policyelaboration was how lyrical it had become.We see this in a speech delivered by Cruddason ‘One Nation Statecraft’ four days afterMiliband’s speech at Newham Docks:

But let’s remember our traditions.Wegrewout ofthe popular movements of self-help and self-improvement. Our history lies in mutualism,cooperatism and organising. We gave politicalrepresentation to working people by buildingpolitical power in our English Cities. We gavemillions pride and meaning when we spokeabout the virtue of work and about conservingthe local places people called home. Our fore-bears built this country andmade it a decent landto live in. They understood that politics is astruggle for power and they organised to winit, not from the topdownbut from the bottomup.

Story and plot

Let us now draw our reflections together tosee the plot of this story.What did OneNationsee itself as being, what was it trying to do,and what was it actually doing? A first clue isthe false start we can see, rather the severalfalse starts made by the Policy Review and byBlue Labour, like a narrative searching for itsvoice. The first decisive moment of changehere was Ed Miliband’s replacing Byrne withCruddas in May 2012. This act pushed policyaway from the emerging Review narrative toallow the widespread and sustained entry ofwhat we might call social fantasising, forcingthe activity of the party towards reflection andthe elaboration of a story (the imagining of anideal nation) before bringing the review ofpolicy back in later on. The ostensible andwidely assumed reason for this was the time




frame: it was too early to elaborate policy. Theactual effect, however, was to embark theparty on a quest that would incorporate BlueLabour into the emerging narrative, and pro-vide the party leadership with Miliband’sown narrative. There is a ‘romanesque’ elem-ent to the elaboration of the One Nation narra-tive; it re-enacts the party’s history, tells theparty’s story, and this in order to identify itscontemporary purpose and offer to party andleadership a discourse and a style for the pre-2015 electoral period. There was a contradic-tion here in that, from 2012, there would betwo authors simultaneously, enhancing andvalorising one another in an on-goingdynamic: namely, the ‘new’ party and thenew leader.Let us give a second diagrammatic repre-

sentation of the Labour narrative and focusupon One Nation as a discursive phenom-enon, and use our model drawn from narra-tive theory to identify its morphology andsignificance. If we recast ‘the adventures of ’the One Nation narrative as an evolvingdiscursive event, we can see that it fits per-fectly into the deeper structure of the ‘tale’ asanalysed by such Russian Formalists as Vla-dimir Propp (see note 1). We can identify anarrative that runs from 2009 onwards, andcontains both a story and a plot. The story wehave recounted; the plot is the following (weshall put elements of the story here in par-entheses): the recognition, by the insightfulfew, of impending calamity/catastrophe(Open Left, reflections of Glasman, Ruther-ford et al., circa 2009), which then occurs, i.e.disequilibrium (a historic defeat at the generalelection of 2010). In its aftermath, and after thefall of the king, for having been enchanted byfalse gods (resignation of Gordon Brown asleader, apparent collapse of New Labourparadigm), there must be ‘a return’—a returnto origins to find, once again, the true path(Oxford London Seminars, Byrne PolicyReview). This involved false starts, deviations(Policy Review, elements of Blue Labour),disarray (leadership election and its after-math), loss, punishment or rejection of thosewho led us astray (castigation of New Labour,eclipse of Blairites/Brownites) and the prom-ise of justice and retribution (imagining newforms of politics; identification of sources ofevil, such as the banks, the centralised state),enrichment, reflection (renewal of pre-1997

then pre-1940 Labour thought) and a harmo-nious society (One Nation), and a new king(Ed Miliband). At a particular moment, thenew leader embraced the new imaginedworld, articulating it; he enhancing it, itenhancing him (Manchester 2012 Party Con-ference and its aftermath). The projection intothe future—the end of the story, the denoue-ment, the resolution of the plot—is the pro-jected triumph of the hero (leader/party), the‘realisation’ of the imagined social harmony,mutualism, reciprocity, kindness, modesty,integrity (One Nation in practice) and thejust rule of the sovereign (party/leader; mobi-lisation of confident party behind successfulleader), the dissemination of virtue and thetrue sharing of power, prosperity and happi-ness, i.e. equilibrium (victory at the 2015general election, One Nation government,Ed Miliband prime minister). We can repre-sent this narrative as shown in Fig. 2.By 2013, One Nation had become an ‘appro-

priate’ narrative, in part because of the way itevolved and told a ‘story’: a small band ofthinkers/activists came together almost bychance and nurtured a new (old) perceptionof an original and forgotten social democracy,adapted now for contemporary purpose(hence its practical aspects), fashionedthrough effort and adversity; becoming,through the rejection of New Labour, theentry of Blue Labour and the adoption ofOne Nation, a transcendence, via Cruddas;then it was offered to the new leader (positinga synchrony between its ‘voice’ and his).Having adopted/created it, he gathered themovement around him, because it carried avision of harmony and social equilibrium inthe pursuit of the Common Good and wouldlead the party (movement, country) to deli-verance (this is in the future).

Conclusion

One Nation is vulnerable to those defending(versions of) the discourses that it dominates,and this for two essential reasons. Likemany—though not all—political philosophiesor approaches, One Nation posits a harmony.Patriotism holds the nation together, butSmall is Beautiful. The citizens of commu-nities know and care for one another. Familiesare strong. People are decent. Children arerespected and respectful. Faith groups bring




moral fibre and moral support to civilsociety. Everyone contributes. Everythingworks. This is its strength and its weakness;harmony is its central tenet and its Achilles’heel, and it is here that its critics haveconcentrated, because caricaturing claims toharmony is a powerful rhetorical device: ‘therisk for Blue Labourites lies in a neverlandinhabited by superannuated pigeon-fancierswho like Woodbines and Watneys.’9 Withinthe limits imposed by an article of this length,we cannot go into detail on the countervail-ing rhetorical forces opposing One Nation,but we can make six points.Historically (from the 1930s onwards), it

was the version of socialism that could notimpose itself once national power was won.One Nation’s ‘inclusiveness’ also meant that,like a belief system that asks you to ‘buy intoit’, it was vulnerable to narrative attackbecause it would have itself transcendent ofdisharmony; at a strategic level, it had againstit potentially all those who drew their inspira-tion from any part of Labour history andmythology that runs from 1940–2010 (andthere were many). Third, alongside its uni-tary, ‘migratory’ nature, it became highlypersonalised. It became the rhetoric of

Miliband in every forum within which heperformed. The element of harmony andequilibriummeant, therefore, that One Nationbecame vulnerable through personal attacksupon or undermining of his persona. It is true,however, that at and after Manchester 2012,Miliband’s leadership status was, throughperformance, enhanced significantly.Fourth, One Nation was vulnerable to

satire, even lampooning, as are all narrativeswith a Utopian element to them. Fifth, it wasvulnerable to accusations of betrayal—forexample, that it, not Attlee, Crosland, or theThirdWay, leads us, enchanted, out of Hame-lin to who-knows-where. And sixth, it wasvulnerable to authority figures, particularlygiven that after 2012, One Nation becameMiliband’s personal narrative too. Criticismfrom Tony Blair, for example, meant criticismof leadership by leadership.10 The accumula-tion of criticism by major authority (or‘authentic’) figures, therefore, had dispropor-tionate potential to undermine. And this listwas formidable: Roy Hattersley, David Aar-onovitch, Billy Bragg, Vernon Bogdanor, LenMcCluskey, Polly Toynbee and Tony Blairhave all criticised the Blue Labour and, later,One Nation direction. 11



Figure 2: One Nation Narrative: Story and Plot


Let us make three closing remarks: twotheoretical and one practical. First,leadership’s relationship to the developingnarrative has not been analysed within theparty in any meaningful way, and yet it isarguably the single most important factor inthe 2010–2015 period.12 This is a serious issue,and one that affects leftist political parties andmovements universally; namely, that one ofthe least researched issues (leadership and itsrelation to doctrine and, later, policy) is, per-formatively, one of the most important. As wementioned, nearly every contributor in OneNation Labour—Debating the Future referred—in a range that ran from a symbolic nod to avirtual genuflection—to the idea of the Mili-band of Manchester 2012 as the inspiration oftheir own One Nation commitment andundertaking in the subsequent period. Theyall said that hewas their inspiration; not one ofthem said how hewas. At best, leadership is anunknown in leftist discourse, is misunder-stood and ill-thought out; at worst, it is anideological blind spot, an ‘unknownunknown’, with serious consequences for thefunctioning of a leftist political party.Second, our study points to the dualism—

and therefore, at one level, simplicity—informing the One Nation narrative. That isto say that in order to impose itself, it repre-sents the Labour ‘universe’ as a duality. Thereis One Nation (1900–1940; 2010 and beyond)and there is the land of the lost paths, namelythe complacency of the postwar settlement(1945–1979) and the siren calls of neoliberal-ism (1979–2010). Swathes of influence uponLabour are omitted: Liberal thought (J. S. Mill,Lloyd George, Keynes, Beveridge), the NewLeft (although parts of early New Left thoughtare included), Michael Foot’s radicalism, Mili-tant, Tony Benn’s influence, the evolution oftrade unionism, the SDP phenomenon,Livingstone’s mayoralty, the manifest suc-cesses of New Labour and so on. This exclu-siveness may be rhetorically necessary, but itis worth stressing its role and effects. OneNation indicates the crucial role of memoryin political discourse and ideology, but it isalso a rhetorical resource that may or may notreflect accurately that which is remembered.13

Third, a related point is the question of theplace of Utopian thought in political dis-course. Space does not allow us to go intothe point here, but it is worth stressing that it

is a rhetorical resource everywhere in politicalphilosophy and discourse; to accuse OneNation of Utopianism is to ignore the Utopianelement in all political ideology. Narrativetheory can help identify it. The practical andconcluding point we can make regarding OneNation is that—to the growing consternationof many by 2013—it may be a necessaryprocess, but it is a long one. We can seefrom our examination of the events and textsof the 2010–2013 period that the centralauthors of what became the One Nation nar-rative were adamant that the doctrinal devel-opment of an alternative narrative was anecessary ideational high road to take in orderto prepare the party for the future, and alignthe discourse with that of the new leadership.In the course of 2013–2014, this would trans-mute into the next discursive battle for policyproposals and a legislative programme for the2015 general election.The scale of the 2010 general election defeat

meant that space was opened up for a newparty narrative appropriate to, first, the scaleof the defeat; second, the renewal of theparty’s purpose; and third, the exigencies ofthe party’s new leadership. Using narrativetheory can help us demonstrate the develop-ment of the One Nation narrative as a creativediscursive moment in the Labour party’shistory, and the party political role of suchcreativity more generally.

Notes

1 L. T. Lemon and R. J. Rees, ed., Russian FormalistCriticism: Four Essays, Lincoln, University ofNebraska Press, 1965; V. Propp, Morphology ofthe Folktale (2nd ed.), Austin, University of TexasPress, 1968.

2 The references for our corpus, in chronologicalorder, are: Labour’s Future, Lawrence WishartBooks, 2010; New Politics. Fresh Ideas, LabourParty, 2010; BBC Radio 4 Analysis, ‘Blue Labour’,transcript, 21 March 2011, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/21_03_11.txt; M. Glasman, ‘My Blue Labourvision can defeat the coalition’, The Observer,24 April 2011, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/apr/24/blue-labour-maurice-glasman; Refounding Labour, aParty for the New Generation, Labour Party,2011; A Better Future for Britain, Labour Party,2011; M. Glasman, J. Rutherford, M. Stears andS.White, eds., The Labour Tradition and the Politics




of Paradox, The Oxford London Seminars, 2011;R. Philpot, ed.,The Purple Book, London, BitebackPublishing, 2011; J. Cruddas, ‘Jon Cruddas—themaverick MP trying to lead Labour out of thewilderness’, The Guardian, 16 June 2012, avail-able at http://www.guardian. co.uk/politics/2012/jun/16/jon-cruddas-mp-labour;J. Cruddas, ‘Building the New Jerusalem’, NewStatesman, 28 September–4 October 2012, pp. 38–43; E.Miliband, ‘EdMiliband’s speech to LabourParty Annual Conference 2012’, 2012, availableat: http://www.labour. org.uk/ed-miliband-speech-conf-2012; R. Muir and G. Cooke (eds.),The Relational State, IPPR, 2012; One NationLabour—debating the future, LabourList.org,2013; E. Miliband, ‘Ed Miliband speech to theFabian Society—OneNation Labour: the party ofchange’, Labour.org.uk. 2013, available at http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-miliband-speech-fabian-one-nation-labour-change; One NationLabour—debating the future, LabourList.org, 2013;J. Cruddas, Speech to IPPR on ‘The condition ofBritain’, 2013, available at http://www.ip-pr.org/press-releases/111/10331/jon-cruddas-mp-speech-on-the-condition-of-britain; BBCRadio4Analysis, ‘Labour’sNewNewJerusalem’,27 May 2013, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sm2g0;E. Miliband, Speech, ‘A One Nation Plan forSocial Security Reform’, 2013, available at:http://www.labour.org.uk/one-nation-social-security-reform-miliband-speech; J. Cruddas,‘One Nation Statecraft’, speech, Local Govern-ment Association, 2013, available at: http://www.joncruddas.org.uk/sites/joncruddas.org.uk/files/speech%20on%20statecraft.pdf. Anaccount of the origins, ideas, and personal rela-tionships underpinning Blue Labour can befound in R. Davis, Tangled Up in Blue, London,Ruskin Publishing, 2011.

3 J. Rutherford, ‘What is Blue Labour? An inter-view with Jonathan Rutherford’, Open Demo-cracy, 2011, available at http://tmp.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/alan-finlayson-john-rutherford/what-is-blue-labour-interview-with-jonathan-rutherford

4 J. Rutherford, ‘The Labour Party and the NewLeft’, Renewal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. 9–14.

5 Refounding Labour also suffered in terms of itsrhetorical and ideational legitimacy because ofaccusations that the exercise had been run by aconsulting agency. See D. Hodges, ‘Just who isrefounding Labour?’, New Statesman, 2 June2011, available at http://www.newstatesman.-com/blogs/dan-hodges/2011/06/labour-party-zentrum

6 R. Philpot, ‘What is the Purple Book?’, availableat http://labourlist.org/2011/05/what-is-the-purple-book/

7 See J. Cruddas, Speech to Resolution Founda-tion on ‘Earning and Belonging’, 2013, availableat http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/jon-cruddass-speech-resolution-foundation-full-text; Speech to IPPR on ‘Thecondition of Britain’, 2013, available at http://www.ippr.org/press-releases/111/10331/jon-cruddas-mp-speech-on-the-condition-of-britain

8 J. Gaffney and A. Lahel, ‘Political performanceand leadership persona: The UK Labour partyconference of 2012’, Government and Opposition,published early online, 9 July 2013, forthcoming.

9 M. Riddell, ‘Labour must not be airbrushedfrom history’, The Telegraph, 2 May 2011,available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/maryriddell/8488658/Labour-must-not-be-airbrushed-from-history.html

10 T. Blair, ‘Labour must search for answers andnot merely aspire to be a repository for people’sanger’, New Statesman, 12–25 April 2013, p. 27.

11 D. Aaronovitch, ‘Dreaming of Merrie Englandewon’t help Ed’, The Times, 23 March 2011,available at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/davidaaronovitch/article2956965.ece; V. Bogdanor, ‘Half-echoes of thepast’, New Statesman, 28 September–4 October2012, pp. 44–47; B. Bragg, ‘Labour is already tooblue’, The Guardian, 7 April 2011, available athttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/07/blue-labour-globalised-capitalism; R. Hattersley, ‘Blue Labour’, BBCRadio 4 Analysis, transcript, 27 March 2011,available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/21_03_11.txt. L. McCluskey, ‘If EdMiliband is seduced by the Blairites, he’ll bedefeated’, New Statesman, 24 April 2013,available at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/len-mccluskey-if-ed-miliband-seduced-blairites-hell-be-defeated;P. Toynbee, BBC Radio 4 Analysis, ‘Labour’sNew New Jerusalem’, 27 May 2013, availableat http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sm2g0

12 Marc Stears’ essay in The Labour Tradition and thePolitics of Paradox (2011) on ‘Democracy, leader-ship and organising’ was the only iteration ofthis issue. The essay and the responses were, infact, one of the weaker discussions within theoverall debates.

13 M. Wickham-Jones, ‘History, memory and thesocial democratic project’, paper presented atthe Political Studies Association Annual Con-ference, Cardiff, 25–27 March 2013; ‘The histor-ical origins of One Nation Labour’, paperpresented at one-day conference on the Politicsof One Nation Labour, Queen Mary, Universityof London, 18 April 2013.



Documents

The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3, July–September ...speech (10/2012).. The Relational State (11/2012), IPPR.. Ed Miliband, Fabian Society annual con-ference speech, ‘One