Labour’s woke leadership has made the party a ‘hostile environment’ for working-class voters, a senior Labour peer claimed yesterday.
Maurice Glasman said the ‘lanyard class’ had alienated traditional supporters who are now flocking to Reform UK instead.
His intervention came as Keir Starmer faced a growing Labour backlash over the loss of votes to Nigel Farage’s party in last week’s local elections and in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, in what was one of the party’s safest seats.
The 45-strong Red Wall group of Labour MPs also called for a change of direction, including restoration of the winter fuel payment, saying the Prime Minister’s pledge to go ‘further and faster’ in the same direction had ‘fallen on deaf ears’.
And another Labour MP last night told the under-fire leadership that he would ‘swim through vomit’ to vote against their benefit cuts.
Lord Glasman, founder of the Blue Labour movement that has attracted interest from some senior government figures, said many self-styled ‘progressives’ had been too quick to condemn legitimate concerns about immigration, grooming gangs and other issues as being ‘far Right’.
The life peer said: ‘For 20 or 30 years now, Labour culture has been a hostile environment for working-class people. If you say what you think, then you get condemned. The inability to let people express their grief. We see people in pain and we call them far Right or populist or racist or sexist – they are just speaking.’
Lord Glasman said last week’s results showed Labour would get turfed out in an election unless it starts to listen to ordinary voters.
Labour ‘s woke leadership has made the party a ‘hostile environment’ for working-class voters, a senior Labour peer has claimed. Pictured: Keir Starmer speaking during PMQs
Maurice Glasman (pictured) said the ‘lanyard class’ had alienated traditional supporters who are now flocking to Reform UK instead
‘Reform is a working-class insurrection against the progressive ruling class,’ he said. ‘The only way to counter it is for the Government to lead the insurrection.’
Lord Glasman told a New Statesman event at the Policy Exchange think-tank in London a ‘battle is fully ongoing’ within No 10 about whether to change course to try to reconnect with the party’s traditional roots.
The peer, who is close to the PM’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, warned that doing so would involve ‘doing something that has never been done, which is turning things round in office’.
He savaged the Government over its refusal to hold a national public inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, describing the rape of mostly young white girls by gangs of predominantly Pakistani origin men as ‘the ultimate desecration of human life’.
Calling for televised trials of those involved in perpetrating and covering up the scandal, he said it was ‘a festering wound’.
Lord Glasman also criticised the Labour leadership for embracing wokery, saying future generations would look back on this time as a ‘period of progressive insanity’ where ‘you could lose your job for saying completely normal things’.
Lord Glasman did not spell out what he meant by the ‘lanyard class’ of professionals but he suggested it included those running big HR departments who have introduced woke culture into workplaces.
‘There has got to be a culture change,’ he said. ‘This thought policing of what is acceptable discourse, the power of HR departments, has got to be targeted to create a political space in which people who created our movement are allowed to speak.’
Labour lost last week’s Runcorn and Helsby by-election to Reform by just six votes, as the right-wing party overturned a 14696-vote majority. Pictured is Nigel Farage and Runcorn’s new MP Sarah Pochin
Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden warned Labour MPs about Reform, telling a behind- closed-doors meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party: ‘A new fight is taking shape. It’s a fight between our values and a nationalist politics of the Right. It’s a battle for the very heart and soul of our country.’
A string of Labour MPs suggested they could rebel over the Government’s plan to cut disability benefits by £5billion.
Left-winger Ian Byrne claimed he was ready to ‘swim through vomit’ to vote in the Commons against the plans.
He said the cuts would be ‘devastation for disabled people’.
In the Commons, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch challenged Sir Keir to reinstate the winter fuel payment, saying: ‘Even his own MPs are saying it’s wrong. He’s refused to listen to me on this, will he at least listen to his own party and change course?’
But the PM defended means-testing the payment, effectively ending it for ten million pensioners. Chancellor Rachel Reeves added: ‘That policy stands.’
