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“In April 2011, the newly ennobled Maurice Glasman suggested that immigration ‘undermined solidarity, it undermines relationships, and in the scale that it’s been going on in England, it can undermine the possibility of politics entirely’. A week later, he suggested talking to the English Defence League, and on 18 July, he told the Daily Telegraph that ‘Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first’. Asked if that meant a stop to immigration, Glasman answered ‘yes’”.
Extract from Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar: The Little Black Book of the Populist Right
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?
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.
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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?
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.
