Red Tory Vs. Blue Labour

[Vice President Christian Man]

What's the difference between someone who's a "Red Tory" and a "Blue Labour". They both seem to have overlaps, but is there an actual difference other than party identification?

[darklordoftech]

“Red Tory” is most commonly used in Canada. “Blue Labour” is a group that exists in the UK.

[Blair]

Neither actually exists in any large number outside of the Westminster bubble.

[CumbrianLefty]

Blue Labour was a genuinely interesting thing when it started out.

Now "represented" by total red-brown cranks like Embery.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Blue Labour is a mixture of red-brown cranks and Cambridge theology students (but I repeat myself).

Nobody in the UK has referred to Red Tories since about 2014.

[Silent Hunter]

Nobody in the UK has referred to Red Tories since about 2014.

Unless as an insult.

[Agonized-Statism]

Both tiny communitarian factions (Red Tories are a more Canadian phenomenon as mentioned above), which I'm guessing is something you already know and find appealing given your username, but want to know more about. Nothing to look up to IMO, but we were all kids looking for obscure populist-right factions abroad to rave about once.

Blue Labour was an intra-party reaction to Tony Blair and New Labour, an advocacy group founded in 2009 by former professor and trumpeter Maurice Glasman. Kind of a warped version of the Tea Party's origin story but with zero popular support. Apparently that was inspired by a concurrent promotion of Red Toryism in the Conservative Party by a one Phillip Blond and his ResPublica think tank. David Cameron claimed ResPublica was a major influence on him, and The Daily Telegraph called Blond "a driving force behind David Cameron's 'Big Society' agenda" in 2010. So you might say that the early 2010s Conservatives were peak Red Tory, looking to integrate the free market with a theory of social solidarity based on hierarchy and voluntarism, but the Big Society had given way to an emphasis on economic stability and border controls by the 2015 election.

The color labels, I'm assuming, have to do with blue's association with conservatism and red's association with socialism. Hence, Labour but socially conservative and Tories but shifted economically to the left.