During his conference speech today – summarised by one wag as ‘spend 17 years getting ready for work and learning to follow the rules, then the rest of your life working and following the rules’ – Kei Starmer quoted ‘the beauty of work’ as a driving force for what passes for his ‘vision’s the UK.
Starmer attributed his idea to Auden – but in fact the ‘beauty of work’, ‘Schönheit der Arbeit’, was the slogan of a propaganda department of the nazi regime from 1934 to 1945:
Along with its sister organisation Strength through Joy, which promoted large families to secure ‘Aryan’ domination, SdA aimed to keep the population in what its rulers considered their place.
Not ideas you’d hope to find in the head of a Labour leader. But then Keir Starmer is neither Labour nor a leader, not in any meaningful sense of those words at least.
And with his speech today carefully stage-managed to hide the sparse attendance and the audience literally policed by the Met’s armed response unit to suppress dissent, the source of those ideas might well have approved.
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