Globalisation, liberalism, neoliberalism, managerialism, internationalism, multiculturalism, human resources, wokeness, identity politics, progressivism, EDI, DEI, corporatism, proceduralism, elitism, environmentalism, transnationalism: there are a lot of things that voters are said to be protesting against. But now there’s a new buzzword going round. What voters are really annoyed about is the
‘lanyard class’.
Lord (Maurice) Glasman came up with the phrase. I visit him in the House of Lords (wearing my parliamentary lanyard, of course) to ask him what he means. ‘The lanyard came into my head about 18 months ago as the symbol of the progressives,’ he says. ‘It was more of a poetic idea: “The Lanyard”. I wrote a couple of poems that will never be published on the lanyard as a symbol for something horrible that I was trying to decipher.’
Glasman is the founder of Blue Labour, a culturally conservative faction of the Labour movement that is appreciated by several in No. 10 – and across the Atlantic (he was the only Labour figure to be invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration). Glasman first mentioned lanyards in an interview with the Observer last month and then expanded on it in an address at the Policy Exchange thinktank. I was in the audience, and several people repeated the phrase ‘lanyard class’ back to him during the questions. Earlier this month, Janice Turner wrote in the Times that the strength of Reform could be attributed to a rebellion against the lanyard class: The officious, rules-obsessed professional cadre who set the tone in corporate HR and run the public sector.’
If you look at archive footage from the 1980s, the lanyard barely seems to exist.
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