Blue Labour Alternative

Glasman
18 Catholic Social Thought offers the possibility that there is a common good which is more than an
aggregate of prevailing interests or a median point between conflicting views. It favours a negotiated
ethical position that is built upon institutions, interests and practices in which the balance between
tension and cooperation is always alive. This is not utopian – does not see a world where conflicts of
interest dissolved. Society, through the development of institutions built around the preservation
and nurturing mediates the logic of both state and market which was to subordinate all self-
organised societal institutions to the hegemony of state and market (number in NHS system or tool
to be used by boss).

19 Catholic Social Thought argued that those things held to be impossible under modernity – a sense
of place and of human scale institutions, a continued emphasis on vocation and vocational education
and a pursuit of a balance of interest on boards of companies and welfare instituitons, preserved a
sense of status that interfered with the prerogatives of both the market and the state.

19-20 Proletariat was coined by Lamennais to describe a class without status assets or power. He
stressed the importance of mediating institutions that could preserve a sense of honour, skill and
belonging in a dehumanised, disenchanted world.

23 There needs to be a move away from dualism of state and private towards trinitarian structure
of, funders, users and workers, the three components of any public institution. These people should
be allowed to sit on any company boards.

25 A College of teaching run by teachers should be established. Half of universitites should be turned
into vocational colleges. Split pathways at 14.

26 An alternative banking system should be established through credit unions.

Milbank
27-8 The Labour affirmation of civil society in terms of solidarity and mutuality requires a linkage
with certain Burkean thematics if it is not simply to fade back into the current liberal hegemony.

31 Right and left liberals converge because they both celebrate random individual desire. Want to
bypass society with the market or the state. This can be contrasted with Orwell’s ‘common decency’.
People have always lived through reciprocity, through giving gratitude and giving again in turn. By
way of this process people achieve mutual recognition and relationality. Most people pursue
association and the honour of being recognised, in multiple different ways, however lowly, as their
main goal. But we have a temptation to pursue pride in all of us. Liberalism removes the social
practices of mutual assistance while augmenting our tendencies to pursue wealth and prestige
instead of human and divine love.

35 Governments cannot remain neutral with regard to ethos but must encourage the good and
discourage the bad in various ways, through education, institutional formation and legal
frameworks. Greater democratic co-determination of our society thus goes in hand with Tory
Paternalism.

39 Civil Economy needs to include – The sharing or risk in all financial transactions, including
mortgages. The rewriting of corporate law to demand statement of corporate service and profit
sharing for conditions of trading. A new public institutional trust for the pooling of technological
knowledge, the replace current patent system. Ethical as well as economic negotiation of wages,
prices and share values among owners, workers, shareholders and consumers who would all be
given real political and economic stakes in every enterprise. Making passing vocational training and
professional vocation organisations, which encourage a virtuous ethos, a condition of entry to
business practice. A contributory welfare system whose mutualism would preclude the need for
means-testing.

Field
55 Disillusionment with new Labour has led to lots of Labour voters becoming politically homeless.
They are then motivated to vote for UKIP.

56-57 Values Trump Money in new political allegiances.

58 Labour need to do four things. 1: Ban free movement. 2: The importance of the family needs to
be reinserted through policy, one full-time one part-time. 3: Move away from means-testing the
welfare state towards a national insurance basis. 4: Commit to a full employment strategy with
higher paying jobs being central to this commitment.