May 7, 2025 - 4:15pm
Maurice Glasman has warned that a Tory-style destruction awaits Labour. Due to its embrace of “progressive liberalism”, the Labour peer claimed that voters will abandon Keir Starmer as they did the Tories in the last election.
“The penetration of progressive liberalism has ended the conservatism of the Conservative Party, and in doing so it has eviscerated the Conservative Party as a living body: it shows no sign of resurrection,” he said at a Policy Exchange event today. “The same fate awaits Labour, as it has abandoned both socialism and conservatism in order to embrace the procedural liberalism that is hostile to political action and solidarity.”
The Blue Labour founder’s comments came less than a week after the local elections, where Labour lost 187 seats and the Conservatives 674. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gained 677 councillors, as well as a fifth MP when Sarah Pochin won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes.
“On May Day we bore witness to the rupture,” Glasman said. “County Durham, the birthplace of the Labour movement […] has been Labour for 100 years. And after May Day, Reform has 65 seats and Labour has four. Our cradle has become our tomb.” He labelled the Reform surge “a working-class insurrection against the progressive ruling class”, adding: “The only way to counter it is for the Labour government to lead the insurrection, to celebrate the collapse of globalisation, to embrace the space of Brexit, the renewal of the Commonwealth, the restoration of vocation, the primacy of Parliament.”
Writing in The Sun in the wake of the local elections, Glasman spoke of his attendance at US President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In a similar vein, he said he “witnessed first-hand the energy of the MAGA rallies. It was an act of defiance against the ruling classes.” He warned the UK government: “Labour must beware — it is happening to us,” and said that Farage “understands the anger of our people and knows how to direct it against us. That is the terrain upon which we must now fight.”
Glasman has issued such warnings before. Last year at the Labour Party conference — its first such conference as the party of government in 15 years — he said voters’ “disenchantment is real and we have to find a way of reaching out” to them. “Reform is not something that can be ignored.”
In his speech today, the Blue Labour founder took aim at the previous decades of globalisation, arguing that “this whole period through Thatcher, through Major, through Blair, through Brown was a nightmare of commodification […] which led to the disintegration of society.”
He added: “All these assumptions destroyed conservatism in a really profound way, and the same fate will befall this government unless it moves into the space that the Conservatives vacated.”
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