If you were asked to write 1,572 words for a national newspaper on the role of voluntary associations in the Labour Movement, and thank the Lord neither you or I is likely to meet this fate any time soon, would you manage to mention trade unions at least once? Not if you’re Maurice Glasman. I don’t intend to waste much time on “Blue Labour”, but I do think this point needs to be made. Also, if you or I was to write such a slab, I think we’d make a better job of it. Here are a couple of pearls.
It required new work agreements so that all was not relentlessly up for grabs in an exclusively contractual churn.
In order to do this, Labour must establish those conversations that broker a common good within which party organisations such as Progress, the Fabians, Compass and the Christian Socialist Movement and Blue Labour talk and build a common programme.
The Obscurer seems to have anointed him as the new leader of Continuity Blairism, going by the eight handsome volumes it’s dedicated to the sage of Holloway Road’s thoughts on agriculture…sorry, the 1,572 words across a double centre page spread with a photo of him smoking cerebrally into the middle distance against a backdrop carefully blurred in line withOKTrends‘s empirically derived guidelines for successful online dating. This, next to a really Pravdaesque bit of sycophancy, from which I quote:
A source close to Miliband said the Labour leader was moved by what he heard as he munched on a bacon sandwich in Chrissy’s. “Ed met a porter who said the proudest day of his life was when he got his badge. His dad had been a porter and then he got his badge. We have nothing against people in call centres but I am not sure there would be the same emotion on being given a first telephone headset.”
“We have nothing against people in call centres”. But, it would seem, a lot of them are women and some are even black, and anyway they aren’t Proper Picturesque Proles for the TV, like. There are a whole lot of them, though, and perhaps they might have some of that emotion if more of them were in…a union. Perhaps I should start Glue Labour, for people who would rather sniff glue than read Maurice Glasman’s risible tosh. Suggestions for a motto are invited.
“Also, if you or I was to write such a slab, I think we’d make a better job of it.”
We’d make a much better job of it if we wrote “if you or I were to write…”
The subjunctive has its uses.
Although, to be fair, most of them are in German.
“Were you or I to write it… ” <--- actual non-inelegant subjunctive