@wood5y Hard to believe #BlueLabour really are just going to leave disabled people to die - where's the profit in that? A theory:
Tired: Financial support for daily living via #PIP that disabled folk can spend however they want. Clearly bad because it's a "handout."
Wired: "Public private partnerships" to deliver care in the home, and ultimately deliver you to the care home, with a nice NHS badge because everyone loves the NHS. Clearly good because... Innovation! Efficiency!
The far-right turn of Blue Labour and the political ontology of post-liberalism
This genuinely surprised me but it explains a lot about the direction of Starmerism given the ideological influence Glasman in particular, as well as Blue Labour in general, seem to have had over the now dominant faction around Starmer:
Glasman hit similar beats in a January appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, (apparently facilitated by the good offices of Nigel Farage). There, Glasman expressed his long time interest in “MAGA” as “a strategy of coalition building in which workers can again have a voice”, given “the humiliation and degradation of the working class under the rule of the progressives”.
For the Labour peer, “progressives” are “the enemy … they are the enemy because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love, and they don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife”. Agreeing with Bannon’s comment that progressives work to “sow disunion between the races”, Glasman said that they do this “all the time”, before adding, “it’s a relentless separation of people, victim status, microaggressions, power relationships, they are single-handedly destroying the labour movement”.
https://labourlist.org/2025/02/maurice-glasman-progressives-labour-peer/
Why has post-liberal communitarianism gone in this direction? I don’t think there’s anything in the philosophical sources far upstream of this movement (e.g. Etzioni, Macintyre, Taylor, Lasch) which easily lends itself to this direction of travel. An observation in the article above possibly hints at a mechanism which drives this movement:
There is a world of difference between criticising the left because you want to help it be better able to beat the right, and criticising the left to explain and justify why you are glad that the right has triumphed
Under what circumstances does the former become the latter? I wonder if the political ontology of communitarianism, particularly the tendency to think in terms of Gadamerian ‘horizons’ in relation to which meaning is secured, lends itself to a lazy populism in which anything outside of that horizon is a threat and anything that speaks for the horizon is a friend. It’s a philosophical approach to think about political contestation which obscures the sociological complexity of the cleavages it is generalising hazily about.
There is an appreciable risk that #bluelabour may succeed in eroding in advance the cultural and institutional barriers to the entrenchment of a #farright regime in the #uk after the next general election. It is that serious!
‘Urging the party to renew its “covenant with the British people.
We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities.
“We should legislate to root out #DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.”
Article by #BlueLabour entitled ‘What is to be Done’
So the Tories plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda wasn't such a bad plan at all, at least according to UK's misnamed 'Labour' party! Seems Reform UK Ltd. really have Starmer and his bots spooked! Oh for someone with a spine to emerge and challenge that odious little s**t Farage!
#bridgetphillipson can act to make education outside #london more appropriate - achieving #london results by different means. #angelarayner can enable countervailing power to be exercised against monopsony employers by strengthening #tradeunions and employment rights. #heidialexander can improve local transport outside #london systematically. The question is whether the 'boys club' in #downingstreet and the #faragist 'fellow travellers' in #bluelabour will let them do so!
It's time for Blue Labour to fuck off, they have failed.
If they want to fight ReformUK, they must not become ReformUK.
As Haigh says, it's 'naïve' to carry on with this failed tactic.
#Labour #BlueLabour #ReformUK #UKPOL #UKpolitics #LouiseHaigh
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social I've long felt the hatred Blue Labour has for the Left Wing, one wonders why they choose the Labour Party for their career when the Tories would accept them without question.
#BlueLabour
@af just because it has no point doesn't mean they will relinquish their power. It's power and grift which attracted them to Politics...
And the situation is not exactly helped by giving undue attention to 'fellow travellers' of the populist right such as #mauriceglasman of #bluelabour - interviewed at length in the yesterday's #observer !
“The first six months of this government were awful, irredeemable: no direction, horribly progressive.”
https://observer.co.uk/news/politics/article/labours-trump-card
Right-wing Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting has appointed a health privatiser, who has been behind the pushing of the use of non-doctor 'physician associates' (PAs) both in the NHS and in the private GP surgery business she ran, to run the English NHS Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
I wrote to my MP this morning about #BlueLabour and the party acting exactly like the Tories. I couldn't say whether it will get through, or whether or not she'll actually read it herself, but 🤞
I explained that I vote tactically and that I would not vote for this Labour government again; that people voted to get an actual Labour government and not a Tory continuity government. It's so short-sighted their policies and behaviour defy reason and are driving people either to the LD or Reform 😠
Excellent thread, take note #BlueLabour and #LabourParty
👇👇
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rkyy7n3zrob2x4n3jhkxsjpk/post/3ljezmnfjuc2f
I never thought I'd say it but Annaliese Dodds has the right idea! Speaking of ideas - anyone know how we, the people, can force a Labour leadership election?
"we need to understand that he has left our house – that of #democraticsocialists and #socialdemocrats – and crossed the street to build a new one amongst our enemies. So be it. We will stay to guard the old house."
The side you are on
https://renewal.org.uk/2025/02/16/the-side-you-are-on/
#BlueLabour
#MauriceGlasman
#USpol
#UKpol
#Maga
#politics
#populism
I do not think that #keirstarmer has that fantasy. I do suspect that he is only too aware that the #uk will have to choose - and which choice it should make. He has to face the fact that at least two of the opposition parties - the #conservatives , #reformUK and the #democraticunionistparty - are unlikely to support him. Nor will their allies in the media. Worse still he may be facing something of a 'fifth column' within #labour - of which #mauriceglasman and #bluelabour are part.
Labour defy UK’s international duties by sneaky citizenship change
#Labour accused of defying the UK’s international obligations after #covertly changing rules governing whether #asylum seekers can become #British #citizens
Monday UK Govt quietly altered Home Office’s “good character guidance” to state people will now “normally” be refused citizenship if they entered the UK by irregular means – no matter how long they have lived here
