Don’t open the door, and definitely don’t answer the phone: it’s probably someone trying to sell you some ‘new patriotism’. Its salespeople are Labour politicians. Its purpose is to enable Labour to ‘re-connect’ with lost voters. This disconnect is summarised by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford thus:

“Labour is in a dangerous situation. Who listens to it today? When the crash came in 2008, the left thought its time had come. We were wrong. There is no liberal progressive majority in England or in any other nation of the UK. Across Europe, orthodox social democracy has been beaten.

“Labour is out of touch with the majority of people in this country. The left wants the New Labourites to admit they were wrong about Iraq, welfare reform, flexible labour markets. They did not understand the destructive capacity of neoliberal capitalism. But what did we on the left get wrong? Did we listen to people on crime, did we hear the widespread anger about a culture of entitlement and about immigration? Labour’s way back into power will mean navigating our way through these issues.”

This requires some unpacking. First of all, the argument conflates ‘the left’ with Labour. Labour was in office when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and made no effort to identify a ‘liberal progressive’ response to the crisis. The 2010 election saw three parties compete on the basis of a sotto voce agreement that public spending would face deeper cuts than any accomplished by Thatcher. Labour, as the incumbent reaping all of the ill will generated over its previous three terms, offered nothing distinctive on this issue. Its subsequent electoral losses therefore have little to do with the left.

Secondly, a ‘liberal progressive’ majority might express itself in any number of ways, electorally. The era when progressives voted exclusively for Labour is long over. In 2010, millions of them did not vote, as Ed Miliband has acknowledged. Millions more voted Liberal, to their later chagrin. In Wales and Scotland, reformist-nationalist parties accumulated left-of-centre votes by the millions. The SNP’s landslide in Scotland is, contrary to the diagnosis of Cruddas and Rutherford, a manifestation of its ‘liberal progressive’ majority.

Thirdly, Cruddas and Rutherford speak as if no one has addressed the issue of immigration and nationality in the last ten years or so. In fact, this ideological precinct was a habitual resort of New Labour throughout its years in office. The result is described by the Blairite Dan Hodges:

“The slide into the abyss can be clearly dated. Soon after the election of William Hague as Conservative leader, Philip Gould did a presentation to the cabinet identifying immigration as one of the few issues where the Tories, and Hague, could still outscore Labour. Suitably terrified by the prospect of young William tossing aside his baseball cap, donning a Union Jack t-shirt, and marching his crumbling blue rinse base down Dagenham Heathway, our attempted triangulation of race and immigration began.

“How successful did this strategy for managing immigration as a political issue, as opposed to the management of migration itself, prove to be? At the time of the 1997 election, MORI’s Issue Tracker recorded the number of people citing race or immigration as the most important issue facing the nation at 3%. By last May’s election it was 38%. In 1997 the BNP stood 54 candidates and secured 36,000 votes, at an average of 664 votes per candidate. In 2010 they stood 339 candidates and obtained 566,000 votes, an average of 1,663 votes per candidate. A YouGov poll taken in March found that 69% of those questioned believed Labour’s management of immigration had been bad for the country, compared to 21% who thought it had been beneficial.

“Set aside principles or morality. Even on its own terms, our political management of immigration has been a disaster. Trying to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP.”

Incidentally, New Labour’s aping of the language of the far right was coterminous with the loss of five million core working class voters. Aside from everything else that is wrong with it, it doesn’t appear to be an effective way of encouraging people to vote Labour. On the contrary, arguing for right-wing ideas within the working class is a certain way for Labour to spread right-wing ideas. Indeed, on a variety of issues, the evidence is that New Labour had more success in moving the electorate to the right than Thatcher did. The authors’ credulous use of the reactionary coinage “culture of entitlement” – as if such a chimerical creature exists – is indicative of just how far to the right New Labour has moved Labourism itself, never mind the wider public.

That is an opening argument. The problem that a ‘new patriotism’ is supposed to solve is not as Cruddas and Rutherford describe it, nor is it one that can be solved in the manner that they suggest.

So that said, what would a ‘new patriotism’ consist of? There is in fact nothing in Cruddas and Rutherford’s article that would allow one to know. They refer to “a modern post-imperial national identity”, apparently oblivious to the fact that the elusive search for just such an acceptable liberal nationalism underpinned New Labour’s approach to migration, race and ethnicity since at least the northern riots in 2001. They also ask pertinent questions as to what “British values” might be, though they don’t go as far as attempting an answer. But as for detail as to what this ‘national identity’ might look like, there is none. One might think that they have a cheek writing a whole article about something they decline to define even minimally. However, the justification for doing so is the purported public need for such a nationalism. Thus, in demagogic fashion, Cruddas and Rutherford attempt to articulate what “people fear” and “people imagine”. They don’t bother to cite evidence or examples. Even Enoch Powell had the decency, when channelling the great unwashed, to cite an anecdote or two. That Cruddas and Rutherford’s standard of evidence is actually lower is indicative of the kind of political game they’re playing: they talk about these things as if they don’t require proof: you just know. And how do you? Because everyone says so; because it is common sense. But this ‘common sense’ is itself a product of the press and of politicians, and it becomes authoritative through being repeated – by the press and politicians. For example, take this passage of moronic waffle from the pair:

“Globalisation has devastated people’s ways of life. People fear the loss of their culture and their identity, which provide their lives with meaning. Who are we? Where do we belong? A disorientated culture like our own throws up these questions but it cannot answer them. People are left to cope with uncertainty.”

So, you see: it is not Cruddas and Rutherford who pose and cannot answer the question of what a new nationalism would like: it is the “culture”. Leaving aside the insidious way in which ‘globalisation’ is used here to conflate different processes (financial liberalisation, migration, etc.), if this question has been posed repeatedly for over a decade (and longer), only to yield answers so sheepishly underwhelming, perhaps it’s time to stop banging one’s head against a brick wall, and ask a different question. If no bases for a ‘new nationalism’ have yet disclosed themselves, why are politicians so desperate to assert one? Could it be because nationalism empowers politicians to police culture? Or, more accurately, to culturalise social questions, which are then policed? They go on:

“Labour recoils from the visceral politics of loss and belonging. It has been deaf to the pain. It fears people’s bigotry and xenophobia and has been contemptuous of those nostalgic for a past that they imagine was better. But Labour has to make the journey through the loss, the rage against newcomers, the fear of strangers, and the nostalgia for an old way of life. We have supported a multiculturalism that hides the pain of this reality. It has been a practice of avoiding our differences. It has been permission to pass each other on opposite sides of the road.”

In the bold new Britain, politicians will have the guts to “feel your pain”. Mark the horrendous clutter of cliché, the psychobabble, the imprecision. You are directed to “the pain,” “the loss,” “the rage,” “the fear,” “the nostalgia,” and “the pain” again. There is absolutely no logical structure to this peasoup of stupidity. Whose “pain”? How creditable is that “pain”? How much weight ought this “pain” carry in comparison with, say, the human rights of minorities? Since when did “Labour” think, speak and act with one voice, as if it was a giant corporate personality? Equally, in what sense has “multiculturalism”, even generously defined (as such an indeterminate, sprawling concept must be), ever been about “avoiding” differences? Difference is the very staple of multiculturalist discourse. It is just that while multiculturalism has generally extolled difference (in the spirit of “it takes all sorts”), the poetasters of progressive patriotism can think only of difference in terms of privation and resentment.

Cruddas and Rutherford, though lacking the ability to make an argument as simple as 1+1=2, are not lacking in evocative talents. They evoke and portray a landscape – contemporary Britain, ruined by globalisation and multiculturalism – which is relentlessly bleak. Their image of multicultural Britain is that of strangers passing each other on opposite sides of the street even if in the real world they are as likely to go to school together, work together, eat and drink together, strike together, live together, have children together, marry, fornicate, and in general do as much together as they do apart. One could imagine an attempt at a civic nationalism that not only acknowledged but celebrated these things, but for Cruddas and Rutherford there is nothing but a ruin of pain, rage, loss and nostalgia. Their ‘new nationalism’, whatever it may turn out to be, would evidently be a response to this terra infirma. One can only pity and fear for those “strangers” and “newcomers” who would be identified as the cause of such fear and loathing in this ‘new nationalism’.

When this new doctrine is finally birthed into existence, or at least given some foetal definition, it will form a part of the emerging whole that is ‘Blue Labour’. No one quite knows what ‘Blue Labour’ is, confesses a sympathetic critic, Sunder Katwala – but, he says, we’ll know it when we see it. In fact, I think we can say with some precision what ‘Blue Labour’ is. It is a condensation of the most backward-moving, reactionary elements in New Labour thinking, with the emphasis heavily on its communitarian strand (as is natural in an age of austerity and collective belt-tightening, where the figure of the acquisitive individual is no longer adequate). It is a hegemonic movement within Labourism to outflank the left in a circumstance in which the Blairite Right in its old form is likely to be out of power for a time. It exists for the purposes of anchoring Labour’s response to austerity firmly to the right. As Ed Rooksby has pointed out, there is even a toxic undercurrent to the ostensibly progressive element of ‘Blue Labour’ pioneer Lord Glasman’s thinking:

“It doesn’t take a genius to see that its hostility towards statism, in the context of economic crisis and austerity, could provide useful ideological cover for an assault on welfare. Blue Labour thinking, here, converges seamlessly with Cameron’s “big society”. Its professed hostility towards market forces should be taken with a pinch of salt. We should also note that Glasman’s critique of market forces nearly always singles out “finance capital” – rather than capitalism itself – as the chief enemy. This specific focus on “finance capital” as the root of all evil has an unsettling history – it’s long been a mark of rightwing populism.”

The openness to right-wing populism was evident in Glasman’s suggestion that the Labour Party should be a place where EDL supporters could feel welcome. And as Katwala also notes, Cruddas’ co-author and devotee of Blue Labourism, Jonathan Rutherford, is also a committed patriarch. Celebrating Britishness, ending the culture of entitlement, raging against the newcomers, welcoming racist bruisers, and now celebrating ‘manliness’. Such is the terminus of newer, Bluer Labour. And we are to take lessons on identity and culture from them?

Richard Seymour is the author of ‘The Liberal Defence of Murder’ and ‘The Meaning of David Cameron’. He blogs at Lenin’s Tomb.