Goose in a heron’s nest and cute goslings….

James Purnell taking crap (what’s new?!)

The ghost of bigot of Gillian Duffy lives on resurrected now by former NL minister, James Purnell.

Describing “Blue Labour” as the most interesting element of the current debate within the party, he says it is central to understanding why the party lost so many voters – symbolised by Gillian Duffy, the Rochdale pensioner branded a bigot by Gordon Brown in the seminal moment of the 2010 general election.

And

“This roots politics back in people’s lives and how they can pursue what they want. It’s not that GDP or equality don’t matter; just that they are not the right place to start.” He argues that “Mrs Duffy and millions like her had good reason to be angry. It wasn’t her gratitude problem. It was our ideological problem. “In the name of helping the poorest, we’ve thought too much about what people get out of society, and not enough about what they put in. Too much was to be solved from the centre.”

What is it about people who like to lecture the left on how they have got it wrong? Generally the charge is that we have ignored how reasonable it is for people to have reactionary ideas and blame the powerless in society? Challenge the ideas of the rightwing whether social conservatism or neo-liberalism? No that is somehow a form of intellectual feebleness.

What do people put into society? If you are working class grindingly hard work and being exploited and accepting endless kicks in the teeth from the likes of …James Purnell. If you are a working class woman unpaid domestic labour and when you do work you get paid being fobbed off with 75% of the pittance that your male counterpart gets. If you are working class and Black you do all the crap jobs that the likes of J Purnell Esq would turn their noses up. So your office/home/hospital cleaned, the nice food and wine in the posh shop, the swanky car in the drive, the latest electronic gizmo that impresses your friends at the dinner party. All these things are contributed by working class people. People who quite often fall ill, grow old or get chucked on the dole when the bankers and NL politicians ruin the economy.

The only time that working class people do not attract the sneering or moralising of those who lecture the Left is when they are being racist. At that point they are said to be expressing some sort of fundemental truth about identity politics that the Left in its ideological blinkeredness has missed. Criticise someone for being racist? You blinkered relic of the the 1970′s!

More pix from May Day