Dan Carden on being Blue and feeling hopeful

Dan Carden, the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, was never a natural figure to front a political faction. That may be why, as he tells me walking from Westminster to escape the estate, Carden has relinquished control of the Blue Labour Group to his colleague Jonathan Hinder.

Carden and his successor were first introduced by Maurice Glasman, the godfather of Blue Labour thought, shortly after the 2024 general election. Glasman saw in Hinder a promising ideological ally looking for direction, while Carden – an MP since 2017 – stepped forward as the inaugural chair of the Blue Labour caucus. 

In Carden’s telling, the group formed organically out of conversations among like-minded Labour MPs who did not quite think like other Labour MPs. The group now meets weekly but is otherwise defined by its lack of traditional structure. If it was the European Research Group (ERG) of eurosceptic Conservative MPs that taught Westminster to love factions, the Blue Labour collective suggests we re-evaluate our model. 

When I ask whether Shabana Mahmood, who has repeatedly name-checked the tendency, counts as a member, Carden shrugs off the question. “We’re just quite relaxed about it.”

Blue Labour’s amorphous status – as a school of thought, parliamentary group, factional identity, occasional essay theme, X account and website – means it is remarkably democratic in character. It has no designated spokespeople, no permanent staff and no director. Carden, who claims to speak only for himself, refers to criticism the group has received “for not being organised and effective enough.” One senses that Blue Labour’s weekly meetings contain rather more ideological diversity than one might expect from a collective of just over 10 MPs. For Carden, these sessions serve as a forum for “ideas, free thoughts, and then every so often it gets attention either for positions we take or things that we say”.

But for all the room for dissension, Carden and his Blue Labour colleagues are bound by a shared political analysis.

The Blue Labour faithful, Carden contends, share a conviction that the party at large must “move forward to reconnect with working-class communities, to reindustrialise the country, to restore some hope and dignity, especially in the world of work, but also in those communities.”

Carden, prefacing that he is now speaking for himself, takes this thesis further. He thinks Britain is broken. “It doesn’t work”, he says. “The biggest challenge to every prime minister has been state failure across the board, and it will remain the biggest challenge for Andy Burnham. And it won’t be too long before he’s blamed for that state failure if he’s not able to radically change things.”

He adds: “So it would be pretty pointless to be in a parliamentary Labour party clapping along, saying everything’s great, especially when you look at the depths of unpopularity that the last prime minister took us to.”

Blue Labour is an ideological instinct rather than a political institution. But its prominence has ebbed and flowed since it first emerged in a recognisable form from the lecture series led by Lord Glasman in 2010/2011. The renewed attention it has garnered during the course of this parliament is generally attributed to the rise of Reform UK. 

How does Carden explain the rise of Reform? “It is not because people are turning right-wing or fascist or anything else”, he tells me, “but we’ve had a political settlement in this country for generations now – and across Europe and other parts of the globe – that working-class communities have found has not worked for them, and they are looking elsewhere for their interests to be represented.”

He adds: “There’s no doubt in my mind, Reform does not represent those interests. It represents the interests of big tech and big money. 

“It’s a small little cabal of people that don’t care about the working class. But it doesn’t mean that working-class communities haven’t been dispossessed. They have.”

Much of my conversation with Carden revolves around his politics and its complications. First elected to parliament in 2017, Carden rose to prominence as a “Corbynite” lieutenant, serving loyally on the former Labour leader’s frontbench and as an officer in the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG).

Carden characterises his political evolution as a “journey”. But he rejects the suggestion that he has shifted from left to right: “my politics is left. My economic politics is left, especially.”

He adds: “But I think I recognise more than ever the difference between liberal progressive politics and left politics, and there’s a chasm between the two, and just because somebody like me questions a lot of the received wisdom of progressive liberal politics, doesn’t mean I’m not left-wing – quite the opposite. 

“I actually think liberal progressive politics has been part of the issue that has driven working-class communities away from the Labour Party.”

For Carden and Blue Labour more broadly, “progressive” is a term of pure opprobrium. He repeats a favourite joke of Glasman’s: “The last thing you want to hear when you go to the doctor is ‘it’s progressive’.”

Carden treads carefully when questioned on his Corbynite era. He insists he still “really like[s] Jeremy Corbyn as a man and a politician”, and praises him for having “caught the mood of many people in the country” during the 2017 general election. Skipping ahead to his twin resignations from Keir Starmer’s frontbench in 2020 and 2023, he reflects: “I guess I haven’t fitted in very comfortably anywhere, which is fine.”

Would he welcome Corbyn back into the Labour Party – something he called for upon the former leader’s suspension in October 2020? “I guess it would be firstly down to Jeremy if he ever saw himself coming back”, he responds initially. 

But Carden’s full answer is more complex. “If you look at the principle of this, it’s one of how should politics be governed… Do you use discipline to control political debates – and that’s what we’ve had for most of the time that I’ve been in Westminster?”

Carden adds: “If you use discipline to control political debates, then we’ve lost the argument, and that’s what we’ve had too much of. So, of course, people should decide if they’re in the Labour Party, if that’s where their politics is, and that’s where they’re comfortable. 

“And if every other member of the Labour Party disagrees with them, that’s fine. You don’t use discipline to kick people out.”

Carden’s political journey from Corbynite disciple to Blue Labour chair was motivated by something more than naked electoralism. In Liverpool Walton in recent years, the question at election time is not whether he will be returned to parliament, but whether it will be with a 70% or 80% vote share.

Instead, Carden frames his politics as in dialogue with working-class communities like those he represents. He draws a straight line from his experiences as the son of a dock worker to his election in 2017. “It’s not because I went to the London School of Economics [that I went into politics]”, he says. “It’s about where I come from and the values that I was taught when I was young.”

I sense it is the interaction between the values instilled by his upbringing and the lived experiences of his constituents that produced Carden’s politics – and sometimes reproduces it.

Andy Burnham gives Carden “a little bit of hope”. He sees the prime minister as sharing his view of politics and who it is for. “Even just having a prime minister who can at least connect with people and has some emotional intelligence. That’s a f***ing major step up from the last guy.”

There is notable overlap in the sources of Burnham and Carden’s politics. “I have all the Catholic guilt”, Carden responds when I ask him about one such influence. He argues that religion and faith are too readily written off by the “progressive” worldview – an instinct he has come to challenge.

Carden suggests that this re-evaluation emerged from his recovery from alcohol addiction. Seven years sober, he describes his recovery as part of a process in which he became “a lot more open to thinking about things differently”, including his Catholic upbringing.

He reflects: “I think it’s that sense of duty to other people, and almost a public decency, where it matters the commitments you make, the duties you have, the responsibilities you have.

“I was brought up to kind of dismiss all of that. I look back and think how tragic that is now. Religion, culture, history – these are things that have kept the human race and countries like ours on an even keel. 

“I think sometimes politics can be just a little bit too quick to try and dismantle everything, and not understand the consequences of doing that.”

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Throughout the interview, Carden repeatedly – and without prompting – refers to Keir Starmer’s tenure in office with real disdain. So when I finally ask him directly for his thoughts, starting with Starmer’s decision to stand down as an MP, he is scathing.

“I think it was pretty terrible, to be honest”, Carden responds. 

“First, I think back to all those people who were attacking Rishi Sunak, saying, ‘Well, he’ll lose and then he’ll go off to California.’ Yeah, that never happened. And I just think that you should have a respect for your constituents and a respect for the privilege of being a member of parliament. 

“Yes, there’s other jobs to be done in government and everything else, but if you take on that responsibility, you should treat it with some courtesy and respect. So I’m quite amazed, but no doubt Keir Starmer thinks he’s due another big job somewhere else.”

Carden traces Starmer’s undoing as prime minister to the June/July 2025 welfare rebellion, which he calls “the beginning of the end.” He still struggles to make sense of the government’s position, which crumbled in the face of a mass rebellion of Labour MPs. 

“There was nothing behind it. We were told we need 5 billion quid, and a few weeks later we were told, right, I’m going to cut 5 billion off welfare, and there was no political narrative story, and there was no willing to go out and fight for it.

“Because I’m up for doing difficult things in politics, but you have to have a vision for where you’re taking people, and you have to win people around. I just never felt like the top of the Labour Party at that time had the ability to do that.”

Carden is at his most animated when our discussion turns to the Chagos Islands deal and the proposed handover of the archipelago to Mauritius. He is utterly uncompromising in his criticism of the “disastrous” arrangement.

He tells me: “I’m still amazed that so few Labour MPs have had anything to say about it. I just say to any of them, go meet one of your constituents, try and explain the Chagos deal to them, and see how it goes down.

“For me, that’s what politics is – to see whether people understand what you’re doing and why you’re there.”

We are talking on 9 September, shortly after Kemi Badenoch called attention to the Chagos deal to bash Burnham at prime minister’s questions. Carden is not surprised by the Conservative leader’s line of questioning – and shares her concerns. 

He relates: “I have been saying, it might be an idea to drop this terrible policy because you’re going to get beaten around with it, and then you get the Falklands [controversy].”

Carden links the row directly to Argentine president Javier Milei’s recent sabre-rattling over the Falklands. “It will be a domino effect, and we don’t take overseas territories seriously”, he says. 

“We need to look at how we actually give the territories a stake in parliament and a stake in government.”

“So I hope Andy is capable of doing that, and I have some hope that he will look at the disastrous Chagos deal and drop it, and look to do something different – because he’s got the ability and the capacity to do that.”

After all, it is the Chagos Islands – a dispute over a remote archipelago thousands of miles away – that brings Carden’s politics into its sharpest relief. For Carden, Chagos is a test case for a politics built on dialogue. If a policy cannot survive a discussion on the doorsteps of Liverpool Walton, it must be misguided. That same sense of disconnection – between Westminster and the people it answers to – is what Carden believes hollowed out Labour’s support under Starmer.

Carden’s politics, perhaps, are not so complicated after all.