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The Labour conference fringe event was billed as an audience with the peer and ‘Blue Labour’ guru Lord Glasman about how the movement he founded had taken over the party.
The problem was Lord Glasman told them unequivocally that he didn’t think it had.
Instead he suggested that while Keir Starmer’s Government might be having a “Blue Labour moment” it had fallen well short of proposing the radical change that would be required if Labour was to retain power and regain the votes of working class people from Reform.
The event had been organised by Unherd, the media organisation founded by Conservative hedge funder and GB News co-owner Paul Marshall, which promises to “give a platform to the overlooked, the downtrodden and the traduced.”
What the audience of Labour members, lobbyists and journalists got from the Blue Labour peer was a tour de force of what he saw as the failures of British governments from the times of Thatcher to the present day.
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His told his audience that his political awakening came when he was 18 and Thatcher won the election. “What people have forgotten is that the first 18 months of her Government was a catastrophe” citing rising unemployment and inflation only to be turned round later by the Falklands War.
He was similarly scathing about Tony Blair’s Labour Gobvernment, warning his audience that anybody using the word ‘New’ to describe the party under Blair was not to be trusted as there really wasn’t anything new about it – more a continuation of a longstanding political consensus.
Glasman blamed Thatcher and Blair equally for the globalisation and deindustrialisation of the UK, saying that while Thatcher started it, “Blair consummated it”.
As for New Labour’s song slogan “Things can only get better” he described it as “idiotic optimism”. No wonder when I mentioned his name to Alastair Campbell, one of the architects of New Labour, who was wandering nearby after the session, I got a very frosty reception about a man he thought had lost his way.
While Glasman had little positive to say about recent governments and the ministers, the one exception was the new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who he praised for her commitments to stop the boats, “secure the borders” and deal with the implementation of the European Convention of Human Rights, adding that while he was “in favour of the rule of law” he was not in favour of “the rule of lawyers”.
He also praised Mahmood, who has been tipped on the right of a party as a future leader, for what he described as her interest in developing a ten year industrial strategy – something well outside of her current brief.
This all brought Johnny Ball, Unherd’s political journalist interviewing him, to ask the question “Would he join Reform?” to which Glasman replied that he wouldn’t – citing the Farage’s sympathies for “the despot Putin” and his actions in Ukraine.
However, while he refused to endorse Reform, he did condemn Starmer for calling Nigel Farage a racist. Indeed after the fringe finished he went as far to apologise personally on GB News to Nigel Farage for what he called Starmer’s “disgraceful slur” of the Reform leader.
Insisting that any politician who calls people racist or sexist is in the world of name-calling ‘student politics’, Glasman also took aim at the current media obsession with who should lead the Labour Party. In his view this is irrelevant and the real question is about which strategy is needed to save and revive the country. As a result, he told his audience he would not be voting in Labour’s ongoing Deputy Leadership contest.
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So what was he actually in favour of? As well as repeating his demands for a new industrial strategy to transform the prospects for working class people he also called for half the UK’s universities to be closed, with a switch to providing vocational training instead, in the era of AI.
The next day it appeared that Labour had got the message – with Keir Starmer using his speech to emphasise that vocational education had to have the same priority as an academic education, while promising greater resources would be directed to further education colleges and apprenticeships.
So what does Glasman – seen to be on the right of Labour – think about the Conservatives who will holding their conference in Manchester next week. He described them as a ghost party – at a ghost conference – and he contemptuously dismissed Robert Jenrick as a being any kind of meaningful saviour for the party should Kemi Badenoch fall by the wayside.