Answering the wrong question

The return of Blue Labour

First, thank you for all the comments, emails and follow ups I’ve had about last week’s post tracing the ideological history behind Muskworld. Apologies that I haven’t been able to reply to everything directly. I will be returning to the topic next week. But this week I’m back on UK politics, albeit with a Trumpian-twist.

Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney.

Only one Labour parliamentarian was invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration: Lord Maurice Glasman, the founder of the “Blue Labour” concept.

He was invited by JD Vance, with whom he bonded years ago over their shared dislike of liberals. Since then he has deepened his relationship with MAGA-world. Morgan Jones and David Klemperer have uncovered a speech he gave on “post-liberalism” last year eulogising Trump’s victory:

“Multi-ethnic, interfaith, working-class coalition against progressives – that’s the enormity of what we’re talking about. Kamala Harris was for they/them, President Trump is for you. That’s all you really need to know about the American election.”

Glasman has also appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast slamming progressives as the “the enemy…because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love.” This is the kind of extreme, nonsensical, use of language one now sees all the time on the right, but Glasman still holds the Labour whip and sees himself as someone who can save the party from these terrifying sounding “progressives”.

Last week he was interviewed by the New Statesman’s George Eaton and unleashed a stream of invective against various government figures including Rachel Reeves (“a drone for the Treasury”) and Attorney General Richard Hermer, who seems to have become a all-purpose whipping boy for the illiberal wing of the party.

You might reasonably be wondering why any of this matters. Glasman is hardly a household name. For most of the Labour movement his recent comments put him so far outside the tent that he cannot be considered a serious participant in internal debates. As Jones and Klemperer put it:

“There is much truth in the…cliché that politics is ultimately about friends and enemies; when Glasman declares before a public audience that ‘the only place to build a house now is on the left side of MAGA square’, we need to understand that he has left our house – that of democratic socialists and social democrats – and crossed the street to build a new one amongst our enemies.”

The reason for paying attention, though, is Starmer’s chief adviser Morgan McSweeney. He has a longstanding relationship with the Blue Labour crew. As Glasman told Eaton: “Morgan’s one of ours, we love him”. And, as the big new book on Starmer’s rise to power – “Get In” – by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund has reminded everyone, this government is as much McSweeney’s creation as his notional boss.

So in the rest of this post I’m going to start with a brief history of Blue Labour and McSweeney’s involvement. Then I’ll look at what that might mean for the government’s political strategy, why the politics of illiberalism don’t work for them, and the real question about Blue Labour McSweeney should be asking.