Al Carns portrays Labour politics as a form of ancestor worship

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Writing about Blue Labour in Liberator at the start of year, I suggested that:

Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

That makes him a modernist when set against Al Carns, judging by the defence minister's resignation statement in the Commons today.

Here's how Carns began:

As honourable members know, I came into politics for one reason. That was to enact change.

But to be able to work out where you’re going, we must realise where we have come from. The Labour party I joined is one that was chiselled out of the mines of the north-east. It was hammered out of the shipyards of Govan, Liverpool and Belfast. And it was forged in the factories of the industrial revolution.

Calloused hands, sore backs, people who did a hard day’s graft and asked for one thing in return – a government that has their back.

That’s the tradition I serve in this house, and it’s a tradition that shaped that decision I took last week.

Commercial shipbuilding had largely disappeared from Britain before Carns was born in 1980 – what remains is almost all in the defence sector. Brian Potter has mapped its demise:

Despite taking virtually any order that it could get, even at loss-making prices, the UK’s shipbuilding industry continued its inexorable decline. Between 1975 and 1985, the UK’s shipbuilding output declined by nearly 90 per cent, and its share of the world market fell from 3.6 per cent to less than 1 per cent. 

British Shipbuilders began re-privatization in 1983 with the passage of the British Shipbuilders Act, and over the next several years most of those newly privatised yards would close. In 2024, the UK produced just 0.01 per cent of the commercial ship tonnage built worldwide that year. In 2022 and 2023, the percentage was 0.

Potter's whole article is worth reading. It provides evidence for the view that many of Britain's economic problems stem from the fact that our managers aren't very good.

Returning to Carns's speech, coal mining in the North East of England reached its peak in 1923, with the last deep mine in the region closing in 2005. And the Industrial Revolution is generally reckoned to have begun in the middle of the 18th century.

If these are really Carns's politics, then they have nothing to do with Labour's voters and members or with the British working class today. That class, forced to exist on temporary work and zero-hours contracts, are the very people who would be hurt by his enthusiasm for yet more welfare cuts.

So when Carns went on to talk about modernising defence, you feared he was going to demand that eight Dreadnoughts be built or call for an improved flintlock for the infantry. 

In fact he had sensible things about the need to grasp how warfare is changing, which means we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't believe the first part of his statement either. 

But he's not the only Labour politician who, when asked to explain it, makes their attachment to the party sound like a form of ancestor worship.