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THE MANIFESTO PODCAST
Ep 47: Covenantal Politics and Blue Labour (Guest: Lord Maurice Glasman)
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The notion of Conservative Socialism or Blue Labour would to many people seem bizarrely paradoxical. It ought to. The British Labour party has in the 83 years since George Orwell made his case for a distinctly patriotic and English version of socialism and socialist in The Lion and the Unicorn has been the party of large scale nationalization and militant leftism. Until it capitulated to the Thatcherite view of the world during the End of History and has since oscillated between its old tendencies and a sort of liberal centrism well in tune with the times and of course, the City.
Too intune, too fashionable and too destructive - too European, as some would have it. The man who symbolizes that some more than anyone else is a, of all people, Labour peer in the House of Lords. Lord Maurice Glasman is a radical and a reactionary (he would surely prefer another word) all at once, advocating for a populist, conservative but most strikingly pre-French Revolution notion of politics. Arguing the country and its politics has lost itself we embark on a conversation that echoes Eric Arthur Blair's wartime cri de coeur and is sure to get everyone on the spectrum angry, frustrated - but above all, thinking.
As the twenties thunder head on into the next series of crises, it’s precisely the kind of conversation we want to have.
Because we too, “Fucking hate the French revolution” and the clichés of right-left politics we still wrestle with every day.
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