David Runciman checks in on a new collection on Labour politics by Maurice Glasman, Ed Miliband's "favourite maverick intellectual:"
Glasman hates the way progressive movements tend to get fixated on ideals like justice, equality and fairness, as though these words had any power on their own. He is adamant that it makes a real difference that his campaign to improve the pay of contract cleaners and other disenfranchised workers in Central London was about getting them a ‘living wage’, not a ‘fair wage’. It is life as it is lived, not as it is refracted through the tidy mantras of political theory, that provides the only plausible guide for would-be reformers. It is the ‘ism’ in liberalism that sticks in Glasman’s craw. With his sights on the astonishingly narrow educational formation of the government and opposition front benches, he says: ‘PPE has a lot to answer for.’
The Dish 