Compact Magazine78%
What Democrats Could Learn from Blue Labour 93%
By Michael C. Behrent100%
7/22/2026, 10:44:57 AM
Keywords: Blue Labour, Democrats, Labour Party, Maurice Glasman, Progressivism, Capitalism, Socialism
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Fundamental Attribution Error, Framing Effect, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 54.8% saturation with 177 hits. Analysis detected 765 faulty-reasoning hits from 323 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 87.9% and a BS Rank of 93% (1,530 of 19,896 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 92.30% of the article peer group.
As the left in most Western countries digs ever deeper into its decade-long debacle, postmortems have become an increasingly prominent genre of left discourse.
One of the few genuinely lucid practitioners of this genre is Maurice Glasman, the British peer and founder of Blue Labour , the socially conservative and economically socialist current within the British Labour party.
In recent weeks, Glasman has frequently been asked to give his opinion on the implosion of Keir Starmer’s prime ministership.
Amid all the efforts to assess the reasons for Starmer’s spectacular failure—foolish mistakes, inept policy decisions, and plain old poor leadership—Glasman has focused on the big picture: the fact that labor parties have become progressive parties.
As Glasman explained in a recent interview with The Spectator , “Labour was never a progressive party.”
Labour was rooted in a working-class critique of the destructive effects of capitalism and a moral outlook that was “more Methodist than Marxist.”
The most important modern British progressive, in Glasman’s view, was Margaret Thatcher, in the sense that she sought to “insulate capitalism from political interference.”
Tony Blair made the same creed palatable to Labour.
As a result, says Glasman, “Labour is dominated by progressives who as a matter of principle love global capital.”
The unofficial anthem of progressivism is, in his opinion, John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” with its fantasy of a world without countries, religion, or a past.
In Glasman’s view, this disdain for roots is entirely consistent (whatever Lennon himself thought about “possessions”) with the embrace of globalized capitalism, which sees nations and traditions as so many obstacles to its expansion.
He believes that while Starmer had some redeeming qualities, his core problem was that he was trained in international law, meaning that he never had the formative political experiences in which Labour was once grounded.
For Starmer “reality was always a problem”—a statement that sums up Glasman’s broader critique of progressivism.
Analysis
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