And Yet Wholly Pertinent

Very bad things could and should be said about each and all of Wes Streeting, David Lammy and Jonathan Reynolds. But Streeting has remained Health Secretary while opposed to assisted suicide, Lammy has kept both the Deputy Prime Ministership and the Justice Secretaryship on the side of the angels at least in this case, and Reynolds has become Chief Whip in place of a man who had voted against assisted suicide 10 years ago but in favour of it this time.

Ellie Reeves will no longer attend Cabinet, and Maria Eagle has been sacked. Not a good reshuffle for less famous sisters. Dame Angela Eagle has been put out to pasture, and Dame Diana Johnson has been sent to the Job Centre. The Home Office is no longer a pantomime. Oh, no, it isn't. The replacement of Yvette Cooper with Shabana Mahmood is a gain for the opponents of assisted suicide, though not more broadly, since the woman who proscribed Palestine Action has replaced the man who originated, in the entire world, the myth of "raped babies" on 7 October 2023. Mahmood has it within her power to deproscribe Palestine Action, by whom the Police now have to pretend to have been attacked. The people who do not want her to do so are always going to hate her, while at Birmingham Ladywood, her majority of 28,582 in 2019 was cut to 3421 last year. By Akhmed Yakoob. Think on.

That Mahmood's elevation and the general tone of this reshuffle mark the triumph of Blue Labour may, alas, be true. Apart from Maurice Glasman himself, almost no one who, for example, used to go to the Nottingham conferences any longer seems to have anything to do with it. I have no memory of Mahmood, Jonathan Brash, Dan Carden, Jonathan Hinder, Connor Naismith or David Smith at those, and I can find nothing that they wrote for Blue Labour in those days. None of them voted to lift the two-child benefit cap, and all of them except Carden voted to keep it. Brash, Hinder and Naismith voted for assisted suicide. It has indeed been 13 years since Professor John Milbank wrote: "Before Red Tory and Blue Labour there was David Lindsay. He was arguably the first to announce a postliberal politics of paradox, and to delve into the deep, unwritten British past in order to craft, theoretically, an alternative British and international future. It is high time that the singular and yet wholly pertinent writings of this County Durham Catholic Labour prophet receive a wider circulation."

Instead, the Labour Party is chaired, and Cabinet is therefore attended, by Anna Turley. Between losing Redcar in 2019 and regaining it in 2024, Turley worked for the Betting and Gaming Council, opposing limits on betting in a paid advertorial for the New Statesman. Like her new Cabinet colleague Peter Kyle, Turley was given her big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips' Office included both Kyle's close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and at the same time Dan Norris, who was also notably close to Caplin. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips' Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them have come Kyle and Turley. As well as Jess Phillips, whom Kyle's and Turley's patron supported for Leader in 2020, declining to endorse any candidate after Phillips had pulled out.

On Tuesday, Phillips told the House of Commons that, "South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter [of the grooming gangs], and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration." Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by Jody McIntyre, the Muslim candidate whom Phillips had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again. Away with her. To secure disaffiliation from the Labour Party and then to build what came next, join Unite Community here.