‘Blue Labour’ and the Thiel Effect: How MAGA Is Making In-Roads Into British Politics

‘Making Friends with MAGA’

Lord Maurice Glasman likes to visit what he calls a ‘bike shed’ round the back of the upper chamber where he sits smoking roll-ups and shooting the political breeze. 

With his East End accent and affable manner, he is happy to engage. Ordering burgers and chips in the House of Lords canteen, he seems to know all the staff by name, whom he treats like peers rather than peers of the realm. 

And so Lord Glasman may – or may not – appear to be an unusual candidate to enter the eye of the storm since Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States.

Recently referred to as Number 10’s “MAGA whisperer” by The Times, he was the only British lawmaker invited to Trump’s second presidential inauguration, on a freezing January day in Washington, DC, earlier this year.

Glasman was invited there by a long-term contact – now the US Vice President – JD Vance, who admired his writing about class and had first approached him some years earlier, exploring whether the US Democrats could provide a new deal for workers. In DC, Glasman was overawed by the scale of the celebrations and the energy around Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement. 

He sought out, and was sought after, by some of the most important Trumpworld movers and shakers: Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; the influential ‘Dark Enlightenment’ thinker Curtis Yarvin, and – as Byline Times can reveal – the tech baron and Palantir data firm founder, Peter Thiel. 

This would be an impressive list of American contacts to make in less than a year, but more unusual still – given Trump’s well-known connections with Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage (who Glasman regularly debates on GB News) or the long-established links between the US Republican Party and the British Conservatives – is that Lord Glasman has been a left-wing Labour peer for 14 years. 

As a founder of the ‘Blue Labour’ strategy – which promotes the blue-collar union origins of the Labour movement – Glasman has often swum against the New Labour mainstream. 

An early critic of globalisation, he dislikes the term ‘diversity’ and rails against the way what he calls ‘progressivism’ has replaced working-class ‘solidarity’ with rules and regulations. 

Glasman voted and campaigned to leave the EU in 2016, and decries the ‘lanyard class’ of politicos and wonks. Though he believes in the rule of law, he condemns ‘the rule of lawyers’. 

He worked with Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, to see off the threat of the far-right BNP in east London in the Noughties – but does not appear concerned that a new far-right, centred around revived race science and Big Tech, could be using him to add an air of respectability around their access to the governing Labour Party.    

Previous reports have detailed Glasman’s appearance at Trump’s second inauguration, having his portrait painted alongside Curtis Yarvin, and his appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. But, for the first time, Byline Times can reveal that he was tasked by Morgan McSweeney to make contacts and connections in the Trump administration. And, at first, he reported back almost daily to Number 10.

This newspaper can also reveal that, at the inauguration, Glasman met Peter Thiel – whose company, Palantir, was recently awarded a £1.5 billion contract with the Ministry of Defence as part of the US-UK ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ announced by Donald Trump and Prime Minister at the recent state visit.

Glasman shared a cup of tea with Thiel while talking about AI, an area he has an avid interest in.

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‘Bloody Big AI Everything’

Peter Thiel is no ordinary tech billionaire.

One of the founders, along with X owner Elon Musk, of the payment system PayPal, he has become one of the most powerful Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have supported and benefited from Trump’s administration.

After becoming an early backer of Facebook and a founder of the data mining company, Palantir, Thiel soon made his way into media and politics. 

He funded a legal case by wrestler Hulk Hogan, which ended up destroying the once successful Gawker media site. Thiel also contributed to superpacs supporting Trump in 2016 after several Palantir staffers – including at least one senior employee – informally worked on Steve Bannon’s now-defunct digital campaigning firm Cambridge Analytica.

When Trump entered the White House in 2017, Thiel appeared to be leaving politics. But he still had a hand in the media. As his biographer Max Chafkin revealed in Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Thiel secretly seed-funded Quillette – the Australian magazine that has specialised in giving race science a new gloss. 

Meanwhile, Palantir expanded its operation with numerous US government agencies supplying AI-driven systems for its ‘lawfare’ against opponents, and embedding itself in core government functions, from the Pentagon to ICE deportations.

Palantir’s London office started growing, too. Within weeks of Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister in August 2019, he held a private, unminuted meeting with him and his chief advisor Dominic Cummings – later exposed in leaked documents. 

Within months, Palantir was running the Government’s COVID data platform. By 2023, it had secured a seven-year contract to run the NHS’ new Federated Data Platform worth between £330 million and £480 million, depending on extensions. Campaigners at Foxglove described it as “the largest NHS data deal ever signed”.

Come 2024, and Donald Trump’s second bid for the White House, Thiel was back as his most powerful backer, mainly through his funding and backing of JD Vance, who became (to the surprise of many) Trump’s nominee for Vice President in June 2024. The ‘Tech Bros’ had made their choice. 

Trump’s triumphant return at the election that year made Thiel the most powerful ‘broligarch’ figure in the ‘MAGA’ bloc, outstripping his fellow-born South African Elon Musk (who soon fell out with Trump), and the late converts such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. 

Thiel’s allies now permeate Trump’s inner circle. 

His protégé, JD Vance, provides a direct channel from the Oval Office. Thiel associate Jim O’Neill was installed as acting head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention despite his lack of medical expertise. 

If his business and social connections to the second Trump administration were not enough, Thiel is already on the record as one of the most vocal critics of democracy, having avowed in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. 

A devout Christian, Thiel more recently appears to believe that the world is about to face an apocalyptic moment – touring various universities with his ‘anti-christ’ lectures (he wonders if climate activist Greta Thunberg might fit that category), including the UK, where, as Byline Times can reveal, his influence and funding extend.

On the business side, the recent state visit by Trump to the UK sealed the deal for Palantir. A new strategic partnership announced by the Ministry of Defence will see Palantir invest up to £1.5 billion into UK defence AI innovation, establish its European headquarters in the country, and help build cutting-edge military decision-support tools, including blending surveillance with automation for the ‘kill chain’. 

So what did the founder of Blue Labour make of the chief broligarch and his influence? 

Maurice Glasman told Byline Times that his discussion with Thiel was mainly about how to stop Big Tech from driving more unemployment for blue-collar workers. “I believe in bloody big AI everything,” he said, “for the whole national system, draped with a Union Jack.” 

It was this joint fascination with AI, according to Glasman, that led him into the company of one of Thiel and Vance’s favourite thinkers, Curtis Yarvin, previously known as Silicon Valley blogger ‘Menci