27 September 2026 - 6:00pm
Labour peer Maurice Glasman has claimed that there is a “strategic void” at the heart of Andy Burnham’s premiership.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool on Sunday afternoon, the Blue Labour founder said, in reference to the Prime Minister’s first two months in the role: “I get mixed messages every day about the direction and orientation of this.” He added that there is still “huge working-class dissatisfaction with the scale of immigration”, and that “it’s really important we shift towards a politics of solidarity, and not of excessive diversity.”
Glasman, who established Blue Labour in 2009 as a political project seeking to combine economic interventionism with a socially conservative outlook, has previously praised Burnham. After the Makerfield MP replaced Keir Starmer as Labour leader and prime minister in July, Glasman claimed that the party had “come back from the dead”, having been “moving quite rapidly towards extinction”. He hailed Burnham’s Cabinet as a “proper Labour government, like something from the Sixties and Seventies”, also highlighting the importance of the PM’s Catholic faith.
One area in which Glasman has criticised Burnham is European reintegration. Ahead of the Makerfield by-election in June, the peer argued “there is no way forward for Andy Burnham if he doesn’t genuinely embrace the people of Wigan,” and “that means no rejoining the EU under any circumstances.” The Prime Minister said earlier this week that he is looking to conclude negotiations for a reset with the European Union by the end of 2026, and has previously expressed his hope that Britain will rejoin the bloc within his lifetime.
During this afternoon’s event in Liverpool, Glasman suggested “one of the features of the era we live in now […] is that it is bilateral. We need to form partnerships.” Nonetheless, he added that “it’s in our interest not to let Ukraine join the EU,” because “we want to keep it an East-West bilateral.” He also criticised the UK’s lack of industrial capacity, and said Burnham’s government has “to show there’s a willingness to engage with our national debt”.
Glasman has regularly argued that Labour faces collapse if it continues on its current course. In May, he suggested that should Burnham lose in Makerfield, the party would be “finished”. Last year, he claimed that it faced an electoral defeat as serious as the 2024 Conservative loss if it persisted with a message of a liberalism which is at once “progressive” and “procedural”. Today, the peer said that he was “in a terrible position in Labour, advocating for both nationalisation and welfare reform”. He added: “I love the rule of law. I hate the rule of lawyers.”
