“It’s a freight train. It’s heading straight for the Labour Party and the Conservatives too, and it’s already here."
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman, is the founder of the Blue Labour movement, a “small-c conservative” strand of socialism that champions tradition, community, and civic association. A life peer in the UK’s House of Lords and Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University, Glasman is a rare figure on the British left: a political theorist who draws inspiration from Jewish socialism, Christian democracy, and the moral economy of guilds and trade unions. A longtime Labour member, he rose to prominence after 2008 by arguing that the post-1945 welfare state lost touch with the working-class culture it claimed to serve.
More recently, Glasman has unsettled mainstream Labour voices by aligning with populist movements that cut across conventional left-right lines. At the 2024 Postliberalism Conference, he hailed Donald Trump’s re-election as “world historical,” praising what he saw as a multi-ethnic working-class revolt against liberal elites.
