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.
Impressed by his grassroots activism and wishing to signal a break with the New Labour era, the party’s new leader, Ed Miliband, put him in the House of Lords in February 2011, and the adviser who arrived out of nowhere became an object of intense media interest. His first major interview – with the Observer – was headlined “Maurice Glasman – the Labour peer plotting Labour’s new strategy from his flat”. In his Stoke Newington study, books on the Tudor enclosures jostled with critiques of free market shock therapy in Poland and community organising in Chicago. Engaging, erudite, garrulous and with a gift for vivid phrase-making, Glasman seemed to be making Labour politics interesting again. Not long afterwards, things went downhill at breakneck speed.
Glasman remembers, with a shudder, the day he realised his career as the man the papers liked to describe as Miliband’s “guru” had come to an abrupt end. “My wife, Catherine, brought all the newspapers into the bedroom and said simply: ‘Fucking hell!’ I was on the front cover of the Telegraph, the Mail and not in a good way. I put the covers over my head and stayed in bed all day.” The catalyst for the disastrous coverage (the Daily Mail called him “the voice of reason”) was an interview Glasman gave to the Fabian Review, a party organ, in which he rejected the principle of the free movement of labour within the European Union. A year earlier, Gillian Duffy had famously interrogated Gordon Brown over free movement, and a toxic row had subsequently erupted over Brown’s private description of her as a “bigoted woman”. To compound matters, Glasman further suggested that Labour should attempt to listen to and win over English Defence League (EDL) supporters – remarks also seized upon with delight by the rightwing press. This was at a time when Nigel Farage’s Ukip was on the rise and the polarising political storms that were to take Britain all the way to Brexit – which Glasman later campaigned for – had begun to blow.
After Glasman later criticised Miliband himself in the New Statesman as having “no strategy, no narrative and little energy”, the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, spoke for many Labour members when he tweeted: “Glasman. You know sod all about politics, economic policy, Labour or solidarity. Bugger off and go ‘organise’ some communities.”
Regrets? He has a few. “Of course. Huge. It was definitely partly my fault. I should have been less naive; I thought I was having a discussion with the Fabians! I should have realised … I should have realised the nature of the game.” But on the arguments he made, he is unrepentant. “It should be noted that on the EDL I was talking about engaging with sympathisers, not the organisation itself or its leaders. I was trying to make an ‘organising’ point: how do you resist fascism? I believe it is by talking to those tempted by it, because the real issue is unfettered capitalism and the way it excludes and disempowers working people. But to have that discussion you first need to listen to their anger and rage.
“On immigration and freedom of movement the party needed to have a better debate. I thought it was a class issue because cheap labour was placing downward pressure on wages in certain areas. And it was a living theme among many working-class Labour voters. Gordon Brown predicted that the numbers coming from elsewhere in the EU would be in the thousands. It was in fact millions and Labour voters kept being told not only that it was impossible to do anything about it but that it was ethically wrong even to want to. This was about democracy and politics. If you don’t give it an outlet and listen to people’s concerns, then things tend to go to a much darker place.”
But too many red lines had been crossed. As much of the party turned on him, Glasman essentially took Prescott’s aggressive advice. “I basically didn’t talk to any media for about three years. I went quiet.”
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Now 61, far removed from “guru” status, and with a freer hand to think transgressive thoughts, Glasman is enjoying a more relaxed role in public life these days. Amicably separated from Catherine, he now lives in a small flat in Dalston. The books on Tudor statecraft and other matters have migrated to a rented office nearby, which radiates creative chaos and usually boasts a full ashtray. His connection with faith-based political thinking has deepened. He now teaches politics part-time at St Mary’s Catholic university in Twickenham and prays regularly at two synagogues in north London. Catholic social teaching, with its emphasis on maintaining a balance between competing interests in society, still provides the theory. And there continues to be plenty of practising what he preaches. He has been spending time in Grimsby setting up a community network which he hopes will give voice to the concerns and hopes of the town. “The idea is to bring people together, pool their concerns, hold those who influence its fate accountable, and deepen its sense of pride and identity. “Small, working-class towns,” he says, “have been among the most neglected, ill-used places in England.”
A couple of years ago he was involved in a more high-profile battle over the politics of place, lending baronial support to a campaign against a possible move by his football team, Tottenham Hotspur, from north to east London. “I had to point out that we weren’t West Ham, that’s not where we are from. The resistance campaign was called We Are Tottenham.” Indirectly, by raising Glasman’s Spurs-supporting profile, this led to a surreal 90-minute Zoom call with José Mourinho, in which his coalition-building skills were put to perhaps their severest test. “The campaign was greeted with tremendous hostility by the Tottenham board,” he says. “But when Mourinho came to be manager, he had the humility to understand that he needed to learn about the club. He was put in touch with me!” Glasman’s football politics could be described as romantic. “I suggested that for Spurs, aesthetics and a certain identity is as important as the result. Glory, not technocratic efficiency!” What did Mourinho, the pragmatist’s pragmatist in the world of football management, make of this? “He was very hostile! He basically said ‘Winning, winning, winning! I need to get you to win.’”
In Ukraine this summer, where he met civic leaders on behalf of the Common Good Foundation charity he founded, there were more improbable encounters of a slightly darker kind. In recent years, Glasman has spent a lot of time researching and writing movingly about his family forebears on his father’s side, who were part of a thriving Jewish community in a small shtetl near Odesa. His grandfather fled Winkowitz in 1905, to escape the pogroms that followed the failed Russian revolution of that year. Aiming for the US, he wound up in London, where he founded the family toy business. Ukrainian fascists finished the job of destroying Winkowitz in the second world war. “I feel like I owe him,” says Glasman of his grandfather with heavy understatement. Three years ago he undertook an epic pilgrimage to the lost settlement.
On arriving at Kyiv station last month, it was therefore a fraught encounter when a far-right Ukrainian militia insisted on acting as personal bodyguards to the English lord. Having realised their political affiliations, Glasman refused to have his photograph taken with them and eventually he gave them the slip. But not before a characteristically drawn-out debate that lasted well into the evening at his hotel in Independence Square. “I explained it to them: ‘I’m a Jewish leftist whose ancestors lived in Odesa; your lot wiped out my lot in 1941’. We argued. They eventually came to terms with it.” An earlier picaresque episode involved a coach trip with a group of American Catholic pacifists, who had arrived hoping to persuade Ukrainians to lay down their arms. “I tried to dissuade them from this unpromising course of action,” he says wryly, “and argued that they should turn their attention to the Russians.” He is a passionate advocate of Ukraine’s cause, and the moral obligation of the west to give it the means to fight. Vladimir Putin he describes as a tsarist white, (“my people fought with the red army” he notes) whose authoritarian nationalism was forged in response to the economic chaos and lawless capitalism that took hold when the Soviet Union collapsed.
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Much of this sounds like Lord Glasman of Stamford Hill in his old organising element, attempting to convene, mediate and build bridges. So why, a decade on from his fall from grace, has he risked reopening wounds by publishing a book called Blue Labour? Reading the slim, well-written volume, it becomes clear it is partly out of a sense of vindication given how things turned out. “I really hate know-alls” he says, “who say ‘I predicted all this’.”But blue-collar workers, points out Glasman, played a “decisive” role in the Brexit referendum and the issue of freedom of movement became arguably the symbolic dividing line between remain and leave. Swaths of leave-voting working-class voters in post-industrial towns deserted Labour for the Conservatives in 2019, feeling their interests and views were not reflected in the modern party. Labour is still trying to woo them back.
“Not listening to people like Gillian Duffy continued over the past decade,” he suggests. “Brexit was dismissed as racist, nostalgic and imperial on the left, but those critics were not paying attention to the democratic dimension. Meanwhile globalisation has run into problems – see the new debates about national security and supply chains post-Covid. The nation-state is back as a central player – throughout Covid and now with the energy crisis. And there has never been more discussion about the working class, its future and the future of the places where they live. Labour must own this territory or it’s doomed.”
On the practical economic benefits of Brexit thus far he says he is optimistic. But there is an uncharacteristic caginess: “There was the development of the Covid vaccine,” he says. “But we are still in the very early stages. We’ve had the pandemic and now Ukraine.” For Glasman, though, the main goal has already been achieved: “There’s a sense in the country now that if you don’t like something you can do something about it. You can change it, rather feeling nothing can be done because the global economy is a kind of juggernaut that can’t be stopped, like fate. I think the fact that this is sensed is part of the wildness of our politics right now.”
“The source of sorrow,” he says, “is that it was the Conservatives who colonised all that territory.” Or at least they did for a time. Glasman campaigned with Michael Gove and Boris Johnson during the leave campaign and he believes that it was transformative for Gove in particular. “When it started it was all about Singapore and free trade,” he says, “but there was a shift. I think Gove did begin to understand the problem with unfettered capitalism – the concentration of capital in big cities, the abandonment of small towns, the need for a coherent industrial policy and to redistribute assets and power to local communities. Johnson was always more ambiguous but he could articulate it.”
The demise of Johnson and that “levelling-up” agenda, and the eventual arrival of a free marketeer such as Liz Truss in No 10, was always on the cards though. “The problem with English conservatism is that it just doesn’t see the mayhem,” he says, “the dispossession and the undermining of everyday life that unrestrained market forces deliver. All this is back with Truss. Their naive faith in markets inevitably creates a dreadfully unbalanced society. Capital is allowed to bully workforces and places which are subject to its domination.”
Presumably therefore, he believes Truss represents an enormous opportunity for Keir Starmer’s Labour to seize the moment? Gesturing vigorously with his roll-up, the non-alcoholic hangover forgotten, Glasman changes vocal register and delivers a mini-address: “If you look at Labour, as a historical tradition, from its inception to round about … let’s say 1992, you would say that Labour had a greater commitment to the participation of the state in the economy; that it had a particular interest in representing the interests of working-class people, and you would say it had an equal interest in improving the lives of poor communities. All these themes have returned front and centre of our politics.
“Take Mick Lynch and the rail strikes. Labour should be recognising the excellence of the organising of the RMT; recognising that it is absolutely the case that workers’ living standards should not be sacrificed for the profits of privatised owners. Strikes are an extremely important tool for the labour movement and this was a very good one. When Mick Lynch went on television and said: ‘Look at the returns to labour. Look at the returns to capital. Look at what’s been going on for 30 years. We get screwed and they get richer…’, people said ‘Yeah, he’s right.’ Labour needs to seize this moment. It needs to be itself. Be itself.”
John Prescott may not welcome the development. But Maurice Glasman appears to have found his voice again.
Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good by Maurice Glasman is published by Polity Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
