Blue Labour seems less in fashion than previously. It was never the answer to every challenge facing Labour. But it does have contributions to make to Labour’s renewal. Whatever it is, blue Labour seems defiantly rooted in our country and the traditions which have shaped and continue to comfort and inspire its people. Global and jet-set it isn’t.

It feels odd, therefore, to see the core motivations of a creed as unabashedly Anglo-Saxon as Britpop reflected back in the protests convulsing India and Israel. These protests, like blue Labour, are, fundamentally, about rejecting contemporary materialism for the perceived morality and communality of exalted past eras: the dignity of Gandhi’s India; the solidarity of the Israeli kibbutz; and the warm embrace of the Labour party before the middle class dilettantes stole it from the working class. It’s easy to be cynical. There were, of course, no golden ages. But it’s what blue Labour and the protests say about the present that is most interesting.

Tobias Buck recently observed in the Financial Times that 250,000 Israelis have taken to the streets calling for social reform. He described them as ranging “from students to pensioners, and Holocaust survivors to taxi drivers” and as “perhaps the most serious challenge yet to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu”. He went on: “Many Israelis, regardless of their wealth and social status, say they still long for a return to the years when the country was less materialistic and more egalitarian. Even in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the ideals of the kibbutz live on”.

Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protests have evoked the spirit of the independence struggle. Jason Burke explained in the Observer that his “asceticism – he eats yoghurt for breakfast, chapatis and a single portion of vegetables for lunch and has just a glass of lemon juice for dinner – has a deep resonance in a time when unbridled materialism is the dominant social ethic”. The bigger question, according to Burke, that Hazare has posed is: “What is this new India that is being created with its 8% year-on-year economic growth rates”?

The financial crisis brutally forced Iceland to confront its national purpose. Sam Knight wrote of this in August’s Prospect. He was told by an Icelandic campaigner: “Everyone said, ‘Let’s go back to fishing’”. Another Icelander said: “It (fishing) is a strong part of our identity”. The ideals of the kibbutz and the asceticism of Gandhi also persist as powerful parts of Israeli and Indian identity. This is in spite, or perhaps because, of the pervasive materialism of these societies.

Globalisation is man-made but, as its pace ever quickens and all that is solid melts into the air, it feels beyond human control. This leaves ever more people in circumstances that seem perilous, arbitrary and unfair. This leads them to questions of belonging and identity. I’ve written previously that the rise of the English Defence League is not the only instance of the search for identity turning ugly. In different ways everything from the birther movement to the success of the True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins can be seen through the same prism.

There are two lessons for the left.

First, without retreating to an unhelpful protectionism, actions need to be taken that re-claim globalisation for what it is: less arbitrary and more man-made. Globalisation isn’t some indestructible genie unleashed from the bottle, leaving us only with its wreckage. If we don’t like this globalisation – tax havens for the few; squeeze for the many – we can have another, so long as we have the political will and imagination.

Second, while talk of another globalisation isn’t fanciful, it is technocratic. Tumultuous times demand more visceral consolations. This can produce the ugly fear of the other, as in the birther movement, True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins, or it can celebrate the past glories of the kibbutz, Gandhi and fishing villages. The left can be more comfortable with the latter than the former, but shouldn’t be uncritically so. Eagerness to return to the Icelandic fishing villages of yore is leading to misguided reform to the Icelandic fishing quota system, while the authoritarianism of Hazare is troubling.

The point remains that people now require reassurances in ways that were denied them by New Labour’s narrow and shrill emphasis on the chill winds of global change. If romanticising aspects of national folk stories provides this, then we should be romantics. At the community level, romance means preserving the things that people want to see preserved, while fighting for change where it’s needed. The romance of preserving that with collective meaning should be as much of Labour’s lexicon as the hard-headed rationalism of confronting change.

While his views on immigration are as batty as the Icelandic fishing quota reforms, Maurice Glasman is quite the romantic. Globalisation can be re-made by human agency, but humans must be at ease and up-lifted in their hearts if their heads are to achieve all that they can. Let us be romantic, so that we may be rational.

“His conclusion is sane and simple: reducing individuals to culpable groups, and seeing the solutions to the problems of mankind in their extermination, is the ultimate crime, whether perpetrated by Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin or Hitler. End of discussion, I should have thought, though for diehard romantics, notably on the left, it never is.”

Michael Campbell and his family are the individuals depicted in Bailey and Thompson’s film, which powerfully makes clear that these individuals have been reduced to a culpable group, by virtue of being white farmers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But this is not the end of the discussion as far as Blessing-Miles Tendi is concerned.   

He argues, amongst other things that, “the documentary shows us that Mugabe implemented a racist land reform programme in 2000, but we are not told why, and how he gradually became racist.” This is an argument that seeks to defend the indefensible, because the mob beatings experienced by Campbell and his family are entirely without defence, irrespective of historical and political context. As such, Tendi provides a striking contemporary example of the “diehard romantic” trait bemoaned by Walden. We should never stop trying to learn the lessons that Burleigh aims to teach us.