Blue Labour on MAGA Square: Maurice Glasman’s Journey to Trumpism

The anti-immigration, pro-faith-flag-and-family Labour peer Maurice Glasman is back in the limelight. The originator of Blue Labour – economically interventionist, socially conservative – was the only British parliamentarian to receive an official invitation to President Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington. 

By way of recompense for this honour, Glasman sang the praises of Trump, the MAGA project in general and several of its key ideologues in particular, notably former Trump staffer Steve Bannon and Vice-President JD Vance.  Yet this Ed Miliband appointee claims he is still on the left, and Blue Labour appears to be wielding increased influence on the Labour government. How and why?

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Boosted by Bannon

Glasman’s invitation – signed by Vance himself – was no accident. Key MAGA operatives saw the potential to use the Presidential inauguration not only to consolidate their domestic cross-class coalition by staging a monarchical-style investiture in Washington but also to invite key figures from across the world, eager to salute and hail, in Glasman’s words, the new “emperor of the republic”.  

Trump strategists want to create a new nationalist International, above all in Europe, where they seek the break-up of the European Union. Hence the stream of inauguration invitations for anti-European political figures able to promote the national populist cause: a clutch of AfD politicians from Germany; the leader of Spain’s Vox; the French MEP Sarah Knafu, representing Eric Zemmour’s extreme right party Reconquest; and Glasman.  

He didn’t disappoint. In a series of news stories and profile pieces, Glasman extolled the virtues of the MAGA project and berated “progressives” as “a sickness” and “the enemy”. In an hour-long soft interview with Freddy Sayers for the national populist Unherd podcast (6 March 2025) Glasman said that the Trump victory heralded “the end of globalisation” and  “Labour should be dancing in the streets”. 

According to Glasman, there are two sides to “the MAGA square” and while all owe fealty to Caesar, he sides with Bannon and Vance on the left side against the tech bros and oligarchs on the right. The leftness of the Bannon/Vance faction consists of support for re-industrialisation, tariffs and the working-class and its trade unions as well as fully endorsing MAGA’s overall anti-immigration, anti-progressive and anti-woke agenda. In other words, Glasman supported the full-fat national populist position promoted – if not always stuck to – by Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Donald Trump.

So here was a senior Labour figure clearly revelling in the new Washington, receiving gifts  (a set of cowboy boots) and being feted as a “hero” by Steve Bannon. Like an awe-struck teenager suddenly cast in the spotlight, Glasman describes the experience to Sayers as “far-out, man.”

Emerging after the 2008 crash, Glasman’s Labour communitarianism could be seen benign if not appealing:  a necessary corrective to New Labour’s infatuation with global neo-liberalism, and its disdain for its traditional industrial base. 

Following his ill-judged call for a stop to immigration and dialogue with the English Defence League, Glasman apologised and went silent. But now, in the wake of hard-core national populism’s victories across the continents, what are we to make of a British socialist declaring that “The only place to build a house now is on the left side of MAGA square”? 

There have always been academics and writers originating on the left who have switched horses and turned to the right. Glasman claims he is still on the left, reinterpreted as a movement of the conservative working-class. But now Glasman has ridden with enthusiasm into the darker reaches of MAGA square, should he not be judged alongside other left-right defectors as just that? And should we not be alarmed by his and Blue Labour’s increasing influence? 

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Blue Labour Rinse

There is certainly much to be alarmed about. Blue Labour veterans, including Glasman, former MP Jon Cruddas and erstwhile Starmer speech-writer Jonathan Rutherford, have set up the “Future of the Left” project, under the auspices of the right-wing think tank, Policy Exchange, with the purpose of building a “coalition around a conservative left politics”. 

During his decade as New Statesman editor, Jason Cowley has given consistent sustenance to this thinking, and unsurprisingly praises this initiative, describing it as “a notable new project.”

Glasman is also on the advisory board of the rabidly right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, whose recent conference speakers included Jordan Peterson, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Trump funder and tech billionaire Peter Thiel.  Rutherford and co. have held several meetings with Starmer’s aides and advisers in No.10.

In his Comment is Freed Substack (19 February) Sam Freedman traces the origins of No 10 Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney’s association with Cruddas and Rutherford in the anti-BNP battles of the late 2000s, and ascribes Starmer’s shift in language (for example, berating “progressive liberals” at a February cabinet away day) to McSweeney’s influence. 

No wonder that Glasman gleefully tells Politics Home, “Morgan is one of us.” Consequently or not, the Starmer government is borrowing liberally from the Trump playbook: slashing overseas aid and the civil service, imposing stringent welfare cuts, and broadcasting videos of arrested and deported migrants.

Without funds to pursue an assertive social-democratic agenda, and panicked by Reform’s success in the polls, the Trumpian cocktail of closing borders to migrants and trade seems attractive in the 89 Labour seats where Reform came second. (Though in all but three of those seats Labour has a percentage majority in double figures, and in a third it’s over 25%.) Jonathan Brash is one of a number of new intake, red wall Labour MP who believes that Trump’s anti-migrant protectionism “obviously tapped into things that many in the US find extremely appealing”, and which “people in the UK want too”.

However, the popularity of protectionism among Blue Labourers and Red Wallers does not make it any more feasible for a small country in the 21^st century. The essence of Blue Labour is that it is a nationalist movement with an exclusive focus on the nation state. As Glasman told Sayers in Unherd, “Blue Labour is sovereigntist, very strong for Brexit”.  

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Nationalism and Globalisation

Blue Labour’s critique of Blairite neo-liberalism was always within a nation-state context. It echoes the classic binary claim of the hard right, that there is only one model of globalisation and that nationalism is the only alternative to it. 

 In fact, in the modern world, self-sufficiency is a plausible, if not wholly adequate, strategy for continents such as the USA, Russia and China – in America’s case, especially if they seek to commandeer the resources of Canada and Greenland. But it’s an impossible road for the countries of Europe, or indeed most other parts of the globe.

 Since the Second World War, modern production has leapt beyond the boundaries of the small and medium-sized nation states. There is no way that the main elements of the economy, both in manufacturing and services, can be forced back into their national boxes. All the main production processes now rely on integrated supply chains operating across borders. The optimal economic area is now European in scale, which is why a hard Brexit was so difficult to negotiate and has had such harmful effects on the UK’s economy. 

Bannon and Vance know this. They recognise that, by creating its Single Market, the European Union represents a potential rival to an imperial America. Hence their desire to promote national populist parties, who want to disrupt and break up the EU; and their admiration for Glasman, a devoted Brexiteer. 

 So while Glasman can applaud Trump’s ‘capitalism in one country’ economics for the US Continent, a similar strategy for any medium-sized country in Europe is delusional, which explains why Marine Le Pen has retreated from her previous Frexit positions. 

Marine Le Pen is not in power, but Boris Johnson was, Viktor Orban is, and Donald Trump both was and is again. With the failures of neo-liberalism after 2008 becoming ever more apparent, conservative parties on both sides of the Atlantic presented a classic national-populist programme of economic intervention –  constrain market forces, renew infrastructure, “protect the Rust Belt”, “level up the North” – combined with drastic limits on migration and a re-assertion of traditional family values, in order to detach parts of the working class from its traditional allies and bring them into new cross-class coalitions on the Right. 

This strategy met with considerable electoral success, notably with Brexit, Boris Johnson’s big win in 2019 and Donald Trump’s 2016 and larger 2024 Presidential victories. But, as we pointed out in January, it’s striking how rapidly the progressive, state interventionist elements of the strategy fade or disappear when its proponents are in office. 

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Unpopular Populism

Trump’s first term saw huge tax cuts for the wealthy, but his infrastructure programme was confined to building (some of) his border wall; Johnson’s forty new hospitals remained a mirage; ‘Levelling up’ was a White Paper that sunk nearly without trace: in its first year, only 3%  of the promised funds were delivered. 

And in the prototype national populist country, Hungary, Viktor Orban started his (now) 15 year prime ministership by raising the minimum wage and promising to abolish student fees; later, he was to impose a flat-rate income tax, retain student fees, weaken employee and trade union rights, and reduce job-seeker benefit from nine months to three.

What’s left of national populism when you take out the interventionist economics is of course the conventional conservative combination of reactionary cultural policies with letting the market rip, reducing both taxes and the services they pay for. 

As recently as 2023, British national populist proponent Matthew Goodwin proposed a five-point policy platform for a new party, which included challenging “big global corporates”, “systematic tax avoidance” and “obscene executive pay”. In his 2023 book Value, Voice and Virtue, Goodwin twinned the economic liberalism of Margaret Thatcher with the social liberalism of Tony Blair, as two sides of the same elitist coin. 

By February this year, on the BBC’s Question Time, Goodwin was demanding an end to “an economy that is big tax, big debt, big spending, big net zero, big immigration”. Gone were calls to limit executive pay rises, in favour of the conventional Tory economic policy of lowering taxes and reducing public expenditure.  There are still occasional mutters about reigning in global corporations, but they are drowned out by Thatcherite dreams of a Trump/Musk style unit whose “overriding focus will be to reduce the size of the state.” 

And for those indulgent souls who think that presenting social conservatism sweetened by economic interventionism will peel votes away from the far-right, events in Germany this February should give them pause. 

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How the Left Enables the Far Right

Sahra Wagenknecht was a far-left German parliament member who broke away from her party ‘Die Linke’ over its alleged pro-migration bias and its lifestyle leftism and set up the Alliance for Sahra Wagenknecht (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW), as a new party following the national populist playbook, economically interventionist but socially conservative,  and thereby offering a moderate alternative to those attracted to the extreme right AfD.  

There was a wave of sympathetic coverage in Germany and in Blue-Labour-leaning progressive circles in the UK (for example, The left’s conservative turn – New Statesman 14 Nov 2023.  and Sahra Wagenknecht’s new left-populist party should be taken seriously – New Statesman 25 October 2023). With a charismatic leader and significant gains in three East German provincial elections in autumn 2024, there was heady talk of the BSW being a key player in potential German coalition negotiations following the 2025 federal election.

In the run-up to the election, BSW poll ratings began to drop, and in the February election, the party fell just short of the 5 percent threshold and failed to enter parliament. The core case made by the BSW and its supporters was that it would weaken the AfD. However, the reverse happened. Voter migration patterns show only 60,000 voters who voted for the AfD in 2021 switched to BSW, compared to 410,000 from the SPD, a further 410,000 from non-voters and 340,000 former voters of Die Linke. 

The idea of fighting the AfD from the left by adopting its positions on migration and culture wars failed. In fact, the BSW’s strategy strengthened the far right by focusing on the two main issues that the AfD wanted to talk about, but without weakening the AfD electorally.

Or take a more distant example, in France in 2002, when the former senior minister in two Socialist governments, Jean Pierre Chevenement – Che to his left-wing friends – stood as a Presidential candidate on a nationalist, anti-EU programme. He got 5% of the vote, which contributed to the failure of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s electoral campaign and enabled the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to squeeze through as the second candidate against Jacques Chirac.

 In a distinct echo of today’s national populists, Chevenement claimed that he wanted to “disrupt the system”, end the “Chirac-Jospin duo” or “Chirospin” and bring together republicans “from the two shores”, i.e. left and right. His movement petered out, but his ‘sovereigntist’ legacy lives on. 

What is revealing is how many of the activists and intellectuals backing Chevenement in 2002 have become key figures two decades later on the national populist right. Eric Zemmour, the current leader of extreme far-right Reconquest party and then a journalist on Le Figaro, was a strong advocate; as was Natacha Polony who became editor of the national populist weekly Marianne after 2018; Florian Philippot, for some time vice president of Le Pen’s party; and Elisabeth Levy, another Le Figaro journalist who became editor of the influential culture wars website and magazine ‘Causeur.’

These examples show that the gravitational pull of nationalist politics is to the right and away from the values of liberty, equality and solidarity. For those who wish to defend and apply these core principles in today’s dangerous world, there is some good news to be found. 

Sahra Wagenknecht failed to get her current party into the Bundestag because she concentrated on immigration and culture wars rather than bread-and-butter issues, but her former party Die Linke, nearly doubled their vote, coming first among 18-24-year-olds, partly because they fought against high rents and wage stagnation as well as the racist danger. Denmark’s social-democratic government is noted for its stringent anti-immigration policies, but one consequence of that is that the Greens beat them in the European elections. 

Meanwhile, Maurice Glasman’s hope that, on economic policy,  the Bannonites will defeat the Muskovites is by no means certain; and Bannon’s proclamation that he’s to the right of Trump on the need for “radical cuts of spending” suggests that state spending to level up the rustbelt is unlikely to be forthcoming from either wing.

Back at home, the McSweeney-driven shift in Labour policy leads the government to remain silent on the Single Market, the one measure that would undoubtedly restore growth to the UK economy. 

However, with its focus on workers’ rights, an active state, and a new industrial strategy, Labour could offer the kind of growth agenda being put forward by its Socialist counterparts in Spain, keeping Labour’s coalition together. Interestingly, the Spanish government pursues that policy in alliance with Sumar, a party of the feminist Left. 

But the Labour leadership remains allergic to reaching out to progressive forces, either within or outside its ranks. It remains fearful of offending business interests or upsetting the Tory press. But if it doesn’t offer this type of alternative and fails to boost public services, then the inevitable question is, what is Labour for?

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What is Labour For?

Let’s be clear. Since the 1960s the UK electorate, like the rest of Europe, has moved in a socially liberal direction: on divorce, equal pay, abortion, racism, LGBT rights, equality legislation and general social attitudes. Support for this progressive agenda has been a central plank of Labour’s electoral coalition. 

Progress hasn’t been uniform, and the populist right and their press are making strenuous efforts to reverse the trend, building on MAGA’s successes in the US. In the States, these hard-won rights clearly need defending as abortion rights are withdrawn, libraries emptied, and feminist and antiracist public servants purged. 

In this country, the much less prominent religious right is flexing its muscles: the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is the latest project of the militantly religious near-billionaire Paul Marshall, who founded Unherd and now owns the Spectator. The presence of evangelicals like Miriam Cates on the ARC advisory board (alongside Glasman) is a further example of how hostility to the social gains of the last 60 years requires defending.  

 The promotion of those social gains, as well as the defence of the welfare state and public services, lies at the heart of any Labour project, whether led from the Right or the Left. Any wholesale retreat from them would spell electoral disaster for Labour’s coalition. MAGA aims to bust that project and the values that underpin it.

That’s why the Trumpists adore Glasman. They see him and Blue Labour as their wedge in the culture war against social liberalism. Glasman is an open enemy of the progressive agenda, which is why wherever he places himself on the MAGA square, he’s an enemy of Labour and wider Enlightenment values.

Glasman initially appeared to offer a relatively soft brand of nationalism. However, when reviewing Glasman’s most recent book, Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good, Bloomfield concluded it was “the work of a naïve romantic who seemed blithely unconcerned about the company he keeps or the direction in which it leads.” We can now see both the company and the direction.

The time has come to take the Blue out of Labour.