The working class believed that the Labour Party was on their side

I derived the title of this essay from a quote by Lord (Maurice) Glasman, a guru of Blue Labour. The quote came in an interview with Tom Newton Dunn for the Times: “The working class believed for over a hundred years that the Labour Party was fundamentally on their side. And now they think we’re not”. 

But this is not initially about Glasman; it’s about JD Vance. Vance was apparently aware of Blue Labour - I’m not sure how - and sent a copy of his Hillbilly Elegy memoir to Glasman asking, according to the article, “whether he thought America’s Democratic Party could be rebuilt in the same light as Blue Labour.”** Subsequently Glasman became the only Labour politician to be invited to Trump's inauguration, at the personal invite of Vance. This peaked my interest; I’ve always been interested in political thinkers and particularly in radicals, of all colours. I have to admit I’d not been aware of Blue Labour and, until the last seven months, of Vance. I often feel my blog relies too much on flippancy and perhaps that should be balanced by serious thought. So I made a plan.

Step 1: read Vance’s book. So I did. Written in 2016 (when he was 31) it's a very moving account of his childhood and early adulthood in Kentucky - part of America's "Rust Belt": the deindustrialised MidWest/South. He uses the term hillbilly throughout the book almost as a badge of pride; they are his people. His upbringing was just about the most chaotic you could imagine. Dysfunctional mother, absent father, a succession of father figures of varying reliability, a maternal grandmother who, though steadfast and loving, was in Vance’s own words a gun-toting “lunatic” meant that he had zero stability and a developing bafflement as to how adults were supposed to behave.

The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future—that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small hometown just last year. I was one of those kids with a grim future. I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me. Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I’m some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me. That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book.

It’s a torrid tale of fear - that he’d be left alone; that he'd amount to nothing; that he'd never get out of the nightmare.

He was saved, first by his sister Lindsay, five years older but more often than not the "only adult in the room", and then by the Marines: "From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw [beloved hillbilly maternal grandparents] had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness."

After the Marines came two years of college at Ohio State and then Yale Law School where he met future wife Usha ("my Yale spirit guide"). Called to the bar, marriage, fatherhood. Welcome to the world, but never forgetting:

I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

In 2018, Vance added an Afterword to the book, giving us a clue to how his political awareness developed.

I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams. But those of us on the Right are deluding ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that it did accomplish something else: it prevented a lot of suffering, and made it possible for people like Mamaw to access food and medicine when they were too poor, too old, or too sick to buy it themselves. This ain’t nothing. To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone.

I've usually argued that my own party has to abandon the dogmas of the 1990s and actually offer something of substance to working- and middle-class Americans. And despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for the “elites” and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base.

After graduating from Yale he practised corporate law, worked as a Senate aide and became a venture capitalist, a Senator in 2023, Vice-President in 2025. Not exactly a normal life path for a hillbilly but, despite some critics, I see no reason in this book to doubt his genuineness.

Step 2: check out bluelabour.org. I did that too, but it's hard to see through the flummery. 

About

Blue Labour is a force within the Labour Party committed to the politics of the common good. Our socialism is both radical and conservative. It is a politics about the work we do, the people we love, and the places to which we belong. 

Our starting point is the democratic renewal of our country. Blue Labour’s goal is a democratic self-governing society built upon the participation of its citizens in the exercise of power and its accountability. 

Our politics is a challenge to the liberal consensus of the capitalist order, but it does not belong to the revolutionary left. Its inheritance is the labour tradition.

It's hard to argue about any of this because it's just vacuous phraseology. Or maybe I'm too stupid to understand. Newton Dunn describes this as "economically left-wing and socially on the right". Maybe he should write their copy. Moving on:

Blue Labour began as a challenge to the liberal consensus of the capitalist order. Democracy was becoming an oligarchy with the liberal left in control of culture and the liberal right in control of the economy. 

Both Labour and the Conservatives shared a liberal contractual view of society. Instead of mutual loyalties binding human beings into families, groups and nations, Labour saw the individual and the state, the Conservatives saw the individual and the market. Neither spoke about the families and neighbourhoods we are born into, nor about our cultural and religious inheritances. Both overlooked the most basic bonds that hold individuals together in a society. 

In the 2019 general election the liberal consensus was broken. We are entering a new political era. However both parties are products of the liberal settlement. They remain substantially unchanged and so unprepared for the challenges ahead. 

The Blue in Blue Labour expresses our disenchantment with the progressive politics of the last few decades. Things do not always get better. Human life is dependent upon forces greater than our own selves. There will never be an end to human pain and suffering, but it can be made less. Politics is about hope and great achievements, but it is also about failure and tragedy.

This sounds awfully like Reform's (and MAGA's) nostalgic rhetoric. Anti-globalism, anti-statism, anti-growth, lots of antis. Glasman claims "I didn't realise the importance of 'again' in Make America Great Again until I went to Trump's inauguration".

I tried hard to find a policy outline for Blue Labour on their truly awful website. The nearest I could come to is this (forgive the lack of brevity):

Labour must rebuild our national economy. 

1.     Britain must reverse decades of deindustrialisation, to rebuild working-class communities and secure our national security in a new era of global uncertainty. There can be no rearmament without reindustrialisation, and no reindustrialisation without cheap energy. We need cheap, clean energy to bring down industrial energy prices, industrial policy to support industries of critical national importance, and regional policy to ensure all of Britain benefits.  

2.     Austerity was a disaster that hollowed out our state capacity and left communities abandoned. Years of historically low interest rates were wasted by Tory governments who refused to invest in the future and we are now paying the price. We should scrap the fiscal rules, in which economic sense and democratic politics are subordinate to faulty OBR forecasts, and invest in infrastructure and the public realm.

3.     Successive governments have sold off our public services and national assets and utilities, leaving us vulnerable and dependent on others. Privatisation has all too often led to extraction, mismanagement and waste. We should reconsider public ownership for public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel.

4.     Buying an ordinary family house has become a struggle for even those on good salaries, excluding many young people from adulthood and parenthood. We have not built nearly enough houses, while immigration has radically increased demand. Government must enable more housebuilding, with the explicit objective of reducing house prices and rent as a proportion of incomes.

5.     Our tax system needs reform to reflect new realities, including that most value is tied up in land and assets rather than income. We should consider taxes on assets, and updating council tax bands to ensure it no longer disproportionately hits those in poorer parts of the country. 

Labour must restore the integrity of the sovereign nation. 

1.     Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy. We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers. 

2.     Crime and antisocial behaviour are contributing to a sense that public order is breaking down, with working-class communities usually the victims. We must restore the trust and authority of our police force, clarifying its increasingly blurred mission, so that it can focus on the small number of repeat offenders who are responsible for the vast majority of crime. 

3.     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.

Labour must restore the integrity of the state.

1.     The government does not run this country. We have handed over too much control to unaccountable QUANGOs and increasingly powerful courts with the power to block government policy. We should return decision-making to parliament, limiting the endlessly expanding power of judicial review and reforming or closing QUANGOs which make decisions which properly belong to the realm of democratic politics.

2.     The British state is bigger but less effective than ever. The prime minister is right that the civil service is sclerotic and needs reform, but we also need to end the scam of consultants ripping off the government and wasting huge sums of public money. We should restore state capacity by reforming our civil service and ending the corporate commissioning and consultancy racket. 

Labour’s covenant begins with these three political tasks. Their achievement will define the government’s ‘decade of renewal’ and shape the future of the country.

In amongst the generalisations there are probably some ideas that are worth considering but the biggest problem that isn't answered is "what then?" We get rid of half the civil service, net zero, immigration, the ECHR, fiscal rules; and what's left? Of course I recognise that we live in an era of disaffection, of low or no faith in governments and the signs are that those lead voters (or perhaps insurrectionists) to put their trust in those promising simplistic solutions. Unless I am misunderstanding Blue Labour I can't take this seriously.

I'm going to give the final word to JD Vance:

To return to the issue that motivated me to write this book, doing better requires that we acknowledge the role of culture. As the liberal senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” I agree, and my view that there will never be a purely government-based solution to the problems I write about has remained largely unchanged since Hillbilly Elegy came out. That said, I’m hardly a policy skeptic, and I think there is much more our governments could do to address these problems. Better policy requires better politics, however, and like many people, I find new reasons each day to wonder whether our politics are remotely up to the challenge. [and to repeat] To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone.

Thankyou for taking the time to read my ramblings. I don't pretend to have solutions to the world's problems but am always willing to hear and read the views of others, of all persuasions.

** Glasman replied that the "ever more woke" Democrats were a lost cause.

Headlines and captions

Sub editors are the newspaper equivalents of set piece coaches. They operate largely in the background but occasionally come up with an absolute gem. Like today in the Times where a photo was captioned "Flora Phillips became a butcher because she loves animals". What? In the article Flora says "I tried liver for the first time and it was a straight shot in the veins...I couldn't believe it was possible to see and eat an organ of an animal....It blew my mind". So basically she loves dead, eviscerated animals. I'd advise her cat to keep her distance.

On the same page we get "Bunfight over street artist's burger mural next to McDonald's". Now the Times comes nowhere near the tabloid press in witty headlines but at least this is a decent try. Maybe 4/10.

On page 7 we have the news that the 13 times winner of the Times Crossword Championship has won the first ever World Cryptic Crossword Championships. You'd have thought this eminently worthy of a cryptic headline but the sub-editor had already butchered their way to the end of the day and all we get is "Cryptic fans square off for first world title". Now it's possible this is a monumental anagram but I couldn't see that; you'd have thought some kind of crypticism would have occurred to them.

I don't know how much newspapers use AI for headline writing but I asked ChatGPT for some help.

“Across the World and Down to the Wire: Global Minds Battle for Crossword Crown” is not particularly good and wouldn't fit the page so I asked for more tabloidy. "Clue-mageddon!" is more front page Daily Star; "Across! Down! Out Cold!" perhaps would suit The Sun. Still unsatisfactory. So I asked for an anagram of the Times' headline "Cryptic fans square off for first world title" and was given "Two old rivals sport cut-throat, fierce snuff cry" which is awesome, although inaccurate so I asked it to try again and finally it came up with "Crossword fight: top clan fuels first title fury"

I was not convinced this was a perfect anagram so I asked ChatGPT to check and it said:

Nope — “Crossword fight: top clan fuels first title fury” is not a perfect anagram of “Cryptic fans square off for first world title.” It’s a near miss — stylish, thematic, but technically not a valid anagram.

I was still not convinced so I actually got out pencil and paper. And it's right, it's not an anagram. So why give it to me? It blathered on about needing brute force software so, in the interests of not crashing the national grid, I gave up. But at least I tried, which I suspect is more than last night's sub-editor who obviously went home.

The Defense

A few days ago, I think in the recent Sunday Times Culture section, I discovered author John Banville nominating his favourite book by an underrated author to be The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov. He of Lolita fame (infamy?). It explores the life of a shambling, chaotic chess grandmaster and the parallels between chess and his life. I thought I would read it and, despite my O Level in Russian, to do so in the English translation.

The first interesting thing is that there is five page Foreword written by Nabokov himself (he collaborated in the translation) which amounts to a review of the book. An odd way to begin. Which means I don't have to work too hard to do this. He writes "Rereading this novel today..." as though he'd forgotten it. It was one of his earliest and remained untranslated - for reasons he berates certain American publishers disparagingly - from publication in 1930 until 1964. "I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers...." - Ouch! - "and, generally persons who move their lips when reading and cannot be expected to tackle a dialogueless novel..." I'm determined to disprove his uncharitable assertions.

Obviously my current passion for chess drew me to the book - why else would I read an early novel by an underrated author? - and the Russian title of this novel is apparently The Luzhin Defense. The history of chess is littered with eponymous openings "invented" or inspired by famous players such as the Ruy López (16th century Spanish priest), the Evans Gambit (Captain William Davies Evans) and the Alekhine's Defence (Alexander Alekhine, 4th World Champion). Luzhin is our protagonist. By the way, neither Nabokov nor Michael Scammell the translator is an American so I'm not sure why the title has an American spelling.

A brief description of the novel is that it's a love story of a boy/man rescued from youthful awkwardness by, and later mentally destroyed by, chess. And an unnamed slightly rebellious young woman who sees in this strange, socially inept and self-absorbed man strengths that no-one else (particularly her parents) can. Why does the author not name some of the key characters? I guess because he wants to de-personalise them, their qualities being more important than their names.

Luzhin was a loner as a child, disparaged by his classmates. A chance encounter with a visitor to his father's house leads to his being taught chess by his aunt. At least for a while until she has to move away as a result of becoming rather too close to Luzhin's father. He skips school and gradually develops his skills under the tutelage of a mysterious tutor Valentinov, and becomes a Grandmaster, perambulating through Europe playing (and generally winning) chess tournaments. During one such he meets our heroine who, for reasons which we are encouraged to deduce for ourselves, is attracted to him. There are hints:

"..even in this indifference, in his clumsy words and in the cumbrous stirrings of his soul, that seemed to be drowsily turning over and falling asleep again, she fancied she saw something pathetic, a charm that was difficult to define but one that she had felt in him from the first day of their acquaintance."

"She wanted to make his acquaintance, talk Russian - so attractive did he seem to her with his uncouthness, his gloominess and his low turndown collar which for some reason made him look like a musician - and she was pleased that he did not take any notice of her and seek an excuse to talk to her..."

The peak of Luzhin's chess career looms with a match against Italian Grandmaster Turati, which seems to be a kind of playoff with the winner destined to play for the world championship. Luzhin will be playing with the black pieces and spends days, maybe weeks, preparing a surprise defence against Turati's favourite opening. Come the day Turati has his own surprise and all Luzhin's preparation is for nothing. The game progresses with Luzhin's position getting worse and his mental state worse still. Eventually the game is suspended when Luzhin collapses and is hospitalised in a sanatorium. A doctor advises that chess is a reason for his breakdown and his fiancée sets about removing all reminders from his life.

He recovers, becomes calm and happy and they marry. He has no job, no money and no purpose in life, however and it seems inevitable that his thoughts return to chess. He finds a pocket chess game in his dishevelled old jacket with a hole in the pocket and he begins to think about that suspended Turati game. Nabokov plots life events as though they are chess moves; Luzhin is now totally immersed in the game, something he has to keep from his wife and everyone else. Nothing matters except to finish the game with a win. Sadly, it's all too much and he comes to a tragic end.

Nabokov was apparently a competent chess player but wasn't interested in playing competitively, preferring to create chess problems: the kind where you get given a position in a game and have to solve the question "how does white checkmate in two moves?". So you could argue that this book creates a lifesize chess puzzle universe. I enjoyed it very much; the almost-stream-of-consciousness writing, the chess references of course, the evocation of post-war Central Europe with its Russian émigrés, Luzhin's inner struggles and his character. I don't know whether those who know little or no chess would enjoy it as much but it's definitely more than a chess novel.

Nabokov in the Foreword: "My story was difficult to compose, but I greatly enjoyed taking advantage of this or that image and scene to introduce a fatal pattern into Luzhin's life and to endow the description of a garden, a journey, a sequence of humdrum events, with the semblance of a game of skill and, especially in the final chapters, with that of a regular chess attack demolishing the innermost elements of the poor fellow's sanity." You nailed it, Vladimir!

...the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in the past. He did not know which of them to choose so as to drink, sobbing, his fill of it: everything enticed and caressed his fancy, and he flew from one game to another, instantly running over this or that heart-rending combination. There were combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corner of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom...Everything was wonderful, all the shades of love, all the convolutions and mysterious path it had chosen. And this love was fatal.

The key was found. The aim of the attack was plain. By an implacable repetition of moves it was leading once more to that same passion which would destroy the dream of life. Devastation, horror, madness.

Article 5

President Trump said yesterday that the key component of the NATO treaty - Article 5 - "depends on your definition...there's numerous definitions of Article 5, right?"

This of course is heresy to Western politicians and media, who have always assumed that the definition is clear that "an attack on one of us will be met by all the rest coming to our defence militarily". I recently listened to a podcast produced by Deborah Haynes for Sky News called The Wargame. There are five episodes and the scenario of an attack by Russia on the UK is acted out by a number of recently active politicians - Ben Wallace as Prime Minister, Jack Straw as Foreign Secretary, Amber Rudd as Home Secretary, Jim Murphy as Chancellor and others - and military experts. They meet in one room and a group representing Russia in other. Action takes place in real time.

The scenario starts with an attack on the Murmansk naval base in Northern Russia, probably by Chechen rebels but perhaps even by the Russians themselves. Russia of course accuses the Brits of doing it and threatens reprisals. And so on. Once Russian ships fire missiles at us, we naturally assume article 5 will be evoked and the Americans, French, Germans will weigh in with their planes, ships and special forces. But no. The American President calls on both sides to stop their "aggressive" actions. Eventually the Norwegians and Poles offer some kind of air support. And that's it.

I'm not going to bore you with anything more about the podcast except to say that it has (political?) agendas which become apparent:

• The UK's military is woefully weak
• Article 5 isn't worth the paper it's written on

To be fair, Haynes says right from the start that the situation has a 1% chance of actually happening. So we can take it with a pinch of salt, or we can consider the "truth" it exposes.

Let's have a look at the actual text of Article 5:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

So it's "each of them...will assist...by taking...such action as it deems necessary". Not a very solid commitment. I suppose it comes down to trust. In previous US presidential incarnations there was an implicit confidence in Europe's reliance on the Americans to come to our rescue. I'm not sure there's any such confidence in the future after Trump's two terms are over; even a Democrat president might well think differently about Europe than we might imagine.

Then there's "in Europe or North America". So Iran's attack on a US base in Qatar doesn't count, nor would an attack on our aircraft carrier if it's in the Pacific, off the coast of Taiwan.

It makes you wonder whether Trump is right; it's all in the interpretation.

Shut up or suck up

How to deal with the 47th President of the United States? It's a problem national leaders have grappled with for six months now. It's gone from fawning (Starmer, Alexander Stubb) through mature assertion (Macron, Carney) to bemusement (Ramaphosa, "death, death, death") and belligerence (Zelensky, "you're gambling with World War III...it's going to be great television"). It doesn't appear to make any difference. Starmer's cringeworthy production of a letter from the King out of his pocket like a magician got us a tariff reduction to 10%. Here's how the others did:

Finland: 10% (no letter, no king)

France: 10% (no letter, definitely no king)

Canada: 25% (no letter, same king, no state visit)

South Africa: 35% (poor Cyril)

Ukraine: 10% (no letter, no punishment)

Today we saw the übermensch of cringe, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte laying down the red carpet and prostrating (castrating?) himself on it in front of President God with this extraordinarily obsequious message:

Mr President, dear Donald,

Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no-one else dared to do. It makes us all safer.

You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening. It was not easy but we've got them all signed onto 5 percent!

Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done.

Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.

Safe travels and see you at His Majesty's dinner!

- Mark Rutte

Ugh. Pass me the sick bucket. He gets paid €317,000 a year tax free for this bag of wind.

Hippocrates close your ears

"Do no harm" is not actually part of the 5th century BCE oath attributed to Hippocrates, which included things like swearing by (not at) the gods, living a virtuous life and avoiding surgery (because that's for surgeons). Modern day doctors, in their graduation ceremonies, probably feel that they don't fancy at least two of these so they typically (it varies by institution) swear to uphold codes of some fairly obvious ethics, including something like the aforesaid aphorism. It's reasonable for us as citizens to expect our medics to practise their trade in an ethical way.

The British Medical Association, which represents "junior doctors" (who apparently now want to be called resident doctors, who cares), called a series of strikes in 2023/24 covering 44 days of action - or perhaps we should say inaction - after having claims for a 35% pay rise rejected by the then Conservative government, which instead offered them 6% plus a lump sum, followed by increased offers, all of which were rejected by the docs. In September last year they finally settled with the Labour government for 22.3%, some backdated, some for the following year. The BBC reported that "more than 1.2 million appointments and treatments had to be cancelled because of the strikes".

Now they're back. It's reported in today's Times that Dr. Ross Nieuwouldt, the co-chair of the resident doctors' committee of the BMA said "the vast majority are excited to to go again" as the union prepares a new wave of strikes  in support of a 29% pay rise.

Now I'm not commenting on the legitimacy of these on the face of it ludicrous pay claims (how's that for not commenting?). What irks me is the morality of key public servants withdrawing their services. As a teacher, I never joined a union. My principle was that I didn't want other people speaking for me and that I personally would never have gone on strike and - as I saw it - deprived my students of my pearls of wisdom. That would have been immoral. Basically I'm not a joining person - I don't even belong to my residents' association; I only joined Cornwall Croquet Club because it was a closed shop - no pay, no play. Fair enough.

I am instinctively supportive of the concept of trades unions and I'd have to concede that over the years I benefited from pay rises negotiated by the teachers' unions with the governments of the day. I just don't want to join your club.

But teachers striking? Not for me. Junior doctors getting "excited" over forthcoming withdrawal of labour? No, do your jobs; serve the public. Do no harm.