Blue Labour is something different. Labourism, like most social-democracy and reformist socialism, has always been tinged with a reactionary, “anti-capitalism”, carried forward from the ideas of the petty-bourgeois moral socialism of people like Sismondi, which does, indeed, have the same kind of material basis within the condition of the small business class. The “anti-capitalist” rhetoric of social-democracy has always been simply that, however, and was presented in the form, not of actual attacks on that large-scale capital – upon which they recognised the economy and the state's future depended – but in the form of presenting the small business myth, and claims about how it was the small business sector that was the bulwark of the economy, and how much they sought to support it. All the while, however, the laws of capital, of concentration and centralisation, rolled on, and those small businesses continued to disappear.
Occasionally, social-democratic governments would increase Corporation Tax, or even levy the odd, one-off windfall tax on some sector of big capital, but never would they systematically undermine that big capital, which is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and besides which is the source of the wealth, power and revenues of the ruling class, which controls the state. On the contrary, in the post-war period, social-democratic governments, pretty much everywhere – whether they went under the label Labour, Conservative, Democrat, Republican and so on – nurtured that big capital, and ensured its development. In Britain, Conservative governments as much as Labour governments presided over a growing state, and public sector of the economy, including the nationalisation of bankrupt industries, important for the rest of big capital. They could do no other, because, as Marx and Engels described, even 150 years ago, that is precisely what capitalism, dominated by large-scale, socialised capital requires.
Almost everywhere, such governments established national economic planning bodies, such as NEDO, as they extended economic planning and regulation, entirely in the interests of that large-scale industrial capital, and, thereby, of its shareholders, and the ruling class. The extension of those ideas into the creation of the EEC, and then, EU, as well as the attempts to create even global bodies to undertake such planning and regulation, such as GATT/WTO, World Bank, and IMF were all elements of that social-democratic agenda. The development of welfare states, everywhere in the developed capitalist economies, including the US, was a major part of such planning and regulation, of the supply of labour-power, on behalf of that big capital.
But, during that post-war period, all of this expansion and accumulation of real industrial capital was, also, quite in keeping with the interests of that global ruling class of speculators, and owners of fictitious capital. As capital expanded, and more and more labour was employed, producing more and more surplus-value, including in ever new regions of the globe, so more and more of that surplus value enabled increased dividends, interest and rents to be paid. A turning point in that process only arose in the early 1960's, around 1962, indicated by the flash crash in stock markets in that year.
By the early 1960's, the economic expansion that followed WWII, had led to capital expanding at a faster pace than the available labour supply, even with the large-scale immigration that developed economies used during that period, alongside the bringing of large numbers of married women into the workforce. Even, the addition of a large number of young workers – baby boomers – born in the immediate aftermath of 1945, who began to enter the workforce in 1959, was not enough to satisfy the demand. As Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21, in these conditions, to grow surplus value, capital must increase the social working day, and that means not just these additions to the workforce itself, but a lengthening of the individual working day. However, by the early 1960's, the previous means of doing that, of simply offering workers the chance of overtime, was itself not sufficient.
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