The return of “Blue Labour”

👑 Trump dynasty | 🥰 Capybara craze | 🤷 Eusexua

In the headlines

Donald Trump has blamed diversity hiring for the air collision that killed 67 people in Washington DC. The president claimed, without evidence, that under-qualified employees with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” had been hired as air traffic controllers as part of a diversity drive at the Federal Aviation Administration. Other reports cite staffing shortages on the night of the crash. China is building what US intelligence believes will be the world’s largest military command centre. Satellite images show a construction site in west Beijing roughly 10 times the size of the Pentagon, with deep holes that military experts suspect are designed to house hardened bunkers to protect Chinese leaders during conflict. Marianne Faithfull, poster child for the Swinging Sixties, died yesterday aged 78. The singer and actress, who was famously found by police wearing nothing but a fur rug during a 1967 raid on Keith Richards’s house, was a girlfriend of Mick Jagger, who paid tribute to his “wonderful friend”.

Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger in 1967. Bettmann/Getty

Comment

Lord Glasman in 2011. Willows Photos UK/Alamy

The return of “Blue Labour”

There has always been “something of the arranged marriage” about Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. His deputy, Angela Rayner, uses the metaphor herself. He was “hand-picked” as an appropriate suitor for the party membership and then elected by voters “less by love than necessity”. This has left the party – and the country – still unsure about what exactly Starmer wants from his premiership. “Who is the prime minister? Who is he for?” The lack of answers to those questions is becoming a growing worry inside No 10, especially with the success of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage – two men who can express their aims in a “powerful sentence or two”.

Hence the recent revival by Starmer’s strategists of “Blue Labour”, the post-Blairite group which felt that the party had ditched its “moral and ethical traditions” and abandoned the white working class. Fifteen years ago, this thinking was considered “dangerously countercultural”. Members of Ed Miliband’s office still “shudder at the memory” of Lord Glasman, Blue Labour’s founder, proposing an outright ban on immigration. But today the door to No 10 is “wide open” to Blue Labour and its ideas. Glasman and friends have quietly been tasked with looking at everything from the government’s foreign policy – specifically whether David Lammy’s “progressive realism” could do with less progressivism and more realism – to the failures of multiculturalism. The ultimate aim is to convince working-class voters that their natural political home is Labour rather than, say, Reform UK. That won’t be easy. But they are at least giving it a shot.

🇺🇸😔 Glasman was invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration by JD Vance, who consulted him years ago on whether he should bother trying to convince the Democrats to focus their attention on blue-collar workers. “The vice president made his own mind up on that one, clearly.”

Photography

Travel Photographer of the Year 2024 went to Piper Mackay for her infrared images of the people and wildlife of Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Other winners from the competition include pictures of a waterfall carving through a glacier in Svalbard; someone walking across a sand dune in Namibia; Holi celebrations in north India; the Mundari people in a cattle camp in South Sudan; and a fairytale-like church in Slovenia. See the rest here.

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