Ten years ago, political theorist Maurice Glasman was one of Labour’s brightest stars – until a fall from grace. Now, back with a new book, he talks about conservative socialism, backing Brexit – and why Keir Starmer must seize this moment
Wearing a vintage Tottenham Hotspur top and preparing to smoke a restorative roll-up, Maurice Glasman seems slightly discombobulated when we meet. “I’ve woken up today feeling like I’ve got a shocking hangover and I haven’t been drinking anything! I think everything’s finally caught up with me.” Our interview was due to take place a day earlier but was postponed because of a mini-crisis in Grimsby, where the Labour peer has become involved in setting up a community organising network. But Glasman is also feeling the effects of an intense few months, much of which he spent travelling in Ukraine. Most stressfully of all perhaps, there is the publication of his new book, Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good. On the eve of the Labour party conference, it is, as he notes with a mock wide-eyed expression, “suddenly, shockingly out”.
If Glasman is nervous about its reception, that’s understandable. At times over the past decade, relations between the Labour party and Lord Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill have seemed stretched to breaking point. In the years after the financial crash, Maurice Glasman briefly became one of the brightest and most arresting stars in Labour’s firmament. A Jewish political theorist, teaching at London Metropolitan University, he came to prominence through community organising with London Citizens and a successful campaign for a London living wage. Partly drawing on that experience, in 2009 he founded Blue Labour as a campaigning group within the party. Drawing on an eclectic range of intellectual resources, including Catholic social teaching and the 20th-century Hungarian social theorist Karl Polanyi, Glasman’s politics foregrounded communal bonds and mutual obligations rather than individual rights and autonomy. His argument was that Labour had become a middle-class party. It had embraced a marketised society and lost touch with its vocation to tame capital on behalf of labour and local communities. This version of progressive politics was, he said, ignoring the disenfranchisement and disillusionment of blue-collar workers who were suffering the effects of globalisation and de-industrialisation. The “Blue” in Blue Labour was partly intended to signify sadness at this alleged abandonment of the party’s original reason for being. Glasman’s solution lay in a new focus on the dignity of labour and greater influence for workers in the running of companies, and a far greater role for local government and civic bodies that could restrain the excesses of the market.
