The Baron
Once upon a time in Bilbao
By the Marquis
I must admit, my sympathies for Baron Maurice Glasman are more sentimental than political. This is a personal matter largely unrelated to the rest of this article, but since it has come under our roof, let us be good hosts and not let it depart until it has spent the night.
For some time, I worked stacking boxes at estate sales for a second-hand book dealer, ransacking the libraries of the dear departed Yidden of De Beauvoir Town and Primrose Hill and Belsize Park. Theirs is the class (on their character, the reader should refer here to J. Sorel’s most recent article in these papers) I was aware, as a child, made up the grey eminences hovering over the part of London where I grew up: friends’ grandparents I never met but was told had been preeminent sociologists or art collectors or Labour Party advisors. But we seem somehow to have missed each other at the pass, and in the end I never really knew them - except, like an archeologist, from their grave goods. To paraphrase a line from Céline: the North London of the last century - I can talk about it, I saw it end; we loaded its things into the van and I slunk home under the hanging gardens of the Dunboyne Road Estate. I have lingered in their empty drawing rooms long enough, I think, to sketch an outline of their intellectual habits; my findings are as follows:
The obligatory row of Loeb Classical Library editions we plundered from the Kensington houses does not make so great an appearance; reliably, the canon begins with Hegel, though here relegated to the role of ‘further reading’ on Marx. Otherwise, the 19th Century appears mostly via its novels, with a marked preference for Zola over Dickens. Freud is an obvious staple. In Trotskyite fashion, the Frankfurt School, Gramschi and Kojeve figure in a way Lenin, Stalin and Mao do not. Theology is largely absent, except in the person of Gershom Scholem (in one house, we found six copies of his complete correspondence with Walter Benjamin; if you happen to have been looking for this, and noticed a price drop on AbeBooks around Spring of last year, I can tell you who to thank) - the other exception will come in the form of myth and ritual as a subheading of anthropology, an apparent fixation. There is a general Germanophilia that the Third Reich does not seem to have really shaken out of the Jewish intellectuals of the 20th Century, expressed in a penchant for Holderlin and Rilke, better represented than any English or even French poet - and, it should go without saying, in a special affection for Weimar culture; dusty piles of art books on minor German expressionists, biographies of various avant-garde composers, anthologies of what I imagine to be quite tedious 1920s cabaret plays.
Perhaps some readers may find themselves at odds with this set of tastes - for one, a certain middle-class disdain for the public school curriculum has produced a canon that does not begin until the turn of the 19th Century and only really spans 150 years. But weighed against the likes of Mary Beard or Steven Fry, it is obviously a more serious Left-wing intellectual culture than whatever can be said to exist today. It has not been passed on to their children. How many times, how many times, while sculking around some willfully shabby Islington terrace house, wondering ‘How many monographs on Brecht can a man read,’ was I interrupted by the eldest son, arriving in a custom-plated Porsche Cayenne to ask in a very chipper voice, ‘So you’re into your books then?’ Though never a voice quite chipper enough to disguise a lingering note of shame, at not having found a better use for the library his father spent a lifetime building than to flog it off to yours truly - and for what was never, in the end, very much money. Baron Glasman, I fear, is the last of this vanishing type left in British public life. If he were to die, there would be no-one left in Parliament who knows who Jorge Luis Borges or Gustav Mahler were, no reprieve from an endless exchange of The Traitors references flung between Kemi Badenoch and Wes Streeting. Chas v’sholom.
Postliberalism has often been, in the discourse of the British Right, a somewhat shaky category - one journal, in its first dedicated article on the subject, attacks it as essentially a thinly veiled Marxism, and in the next seems to position Connor Tomlinson as among its most prominent acolytes. The most concise definition I have found comes from the blog Assassination Poetics - ‘a conceptual refoundation of socialism in Catholic Social Thought’ - though we will probably not be steered too far wrong in leaving things at, to quote Justice Potter Stewart’s ruling on pornography, ‘I know it when I see it.’ The term seems to be employed most often as an invective, which is perhaps what has allowed a recent shift among these poor, oft-ridiculed Postliberals to have gone largely overlooked. A brief scan of the most recent publications on Blue Labour’s website - Baron Glasman’s outfit - reveals a more sober, less flabby, less gravy-stained political outlook than we have come to expect. There are no paunchy Milbankian tirades on the importance of hand-painted pub signs, or the virtues of the Diggers and the Levellers. The meaning of the ‘Blue’ in Blue Labour, which we otherwise might have assumed was a reference to a podgy Ruskinian left-conservatism, has been clarified, and refers, we are told, only to a mood of world-weary disappointment. Admirably, their Marxist heritage is worn on their sleeves, the central manifesto document borrowing its name from Lenin’s 1902 ‘What Is To Be Done?’ Overtures to ‘community’ or ‘the commons’ are thinner on the ground than I’d expected and, mercifully, the phrase ‘the common good’ has been entirely absent from anything written after 2021. The vision of a stodgy knot of reciprocal moral obligations at the foundation of a renewed social life, endless sparings of a cup of sugar, is more muted than we’ve generally heard from the disciples of Alasdair Macintyre, though still very much kicking. But I will be charitable enough to treat this as a gloss that does not totally sully what is otherwise a straightforward list of policy proposals, expounded with relative clarity.
The first of its three subsections, and very much the lynchpin of all this, concerns reindustrialisation. This is not uniquely a Blue Labour position, but it does here take on a more distinct, more ambitious flavour than elsewhere. There is an explicit comparison made with Keir’s present floundering and that of the early years of the Thatcher government, until the application of the recommendations of Centre for Policy Studies’ Stepping Stones toward the beginning of the 1980s - though it goes unsaid, in another sense the comparison goes much further. Like Thatcher’s ‘Mondeo Man,’ the potential electoral success of the Blue Labour pro-Worker program is premised on a demographic they themselves would have to summon into existence through a radical transformation of the economy: the future workers of a revived British Leyland, building nuclear-powered jet engines at a plant constructed in the hollowed-out shell of what we will have long forgotten was once Manchester’s ‘Media City.’ That represents a genuine change of tact for the postliberals, who have hitherto blithely assumed, on the basis of a misty-eyed Ken Loach-directed picture of jumper-for-goalposts ex-industrial Britain, that ‘left on economy, right on culture,’ is the organic disposition of the White working class; that the electoral base for Postliberalism is already in existence, and simply waiting for an out of touch political class to catch on. Perhaps in light of Trump’s victory in 2024, Blue Labour appears to be coming around to the notion that elections will not be won by appealing to vague cultural tropes about the mysterious Heartland, but on tangible demands like ‘Close the Border’ and ‘Open the Factories.’ So far, so good. Where I begin to raise my eyebrows is at the insistence that this will happen in tandem with a program of rearmament. I have no issue with this in and of itself but, under a Labour government, it seems inevitable that a platform of rearmament would be sold to the public with a doubling down on the fearmongering over Putin. Starmer will appear in Parliament in a Zelensky-style tracksuit, wittering on about ‘reaffirming our commitments’ to that lumbering 20th Century superstition, International Law. Bug-eyed apparatchik Mike Tapp will attack ‘plastic patriots’ for not thinking Notting Hill Carnival is sufficiently ‘brilliant,’ and issue Ostdeutsch denunciations of his political opponents as the running dogs of foreign aggressors. You will be asked to produce an ID confirming you are over 65 years of age before reading this article. I am hesitant to lay this at the Baron’s door. He campaigned for the Vote Leave team, raised his voice against the lockdowns, and has declared himself against Starmer’s proposed digital ID laws - it is as unblemished a record as any, and all this shall cover a multitude of sins. But he is not without influence within his party, and there is a danger his more malign comrades like McSweeney (founding director of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate) will find in Glasman’s soft-jingoism the rhetorical justifications for a deepening of the thuggish, authoritarian political culture Starmer has ushered in.
We then come on to immigration. It seems ill-advised for the Blue Labour cohort to dedicate any great amount of airtime to this. As it stands, the faction is hamstrung because the current Secretary of State, Shabana Mahmood, is already one of theirs, reverently endorsed by the Baron. This leaves a hypothetical Blue Labour government, were they to wrest control from Starmer’s ‘Labour Together’ faction, with no proverbial ‘ace in the hole’ with which to distinguish their own stance on immigration from that of the present regime. Mahmood’s feigned hardliner act in the proposed changes to asylum law announced in November 2025 did not change the public mood on Labour’s performance in this regard one bit - in part, because she could not help but confess their motive was not purely to stem the tide of mass immigration, but also to prevent “Division,’’ that horrid load-bearing cliché in the Starmerite vernacular. Nul points for style aside, this immediately dilutes any erstwhile critique of mass immigration in and of itself, and makes it very difficult to see much more in her proposals than a ploy to curtail support for Reform. The added detail about requisitioning the personal belongings of asylum seekers to cover their processing costs was an insult to the British people. It implies, as is the thinking among a good portion of the Left, that the reason a clear majority of the public would prefer lower immigration is out of sheer xenophobic spite, and that we’d be placated if the government let us watch some poor Albanian man get shaken down for a Cross pendant we’ll get £20 for at Cash4Gold. A personal friend who works with some of these people speculated that this was never really intended to be implemented, but proposed on the basis it could be announced with great fanfare to sway potential Reform voters, and subsequently scrapped to appease progressive Labour backbenchers and aid the rest of the bill through the Commons. I find this plausible, but in either case it was a stupid idea that backfired predictably, and the British people deserve some credit for not having fallen for it. This is not to say Blue Labour’s anti-immigrationism is entirely cynical; the Baron, for one, has been admirably severe on the issue of the grooming gangs, articulating the concrete demand (this was before Labour coalesced and, following the successes of the Hutton and Chilcot Inquiries, nobly took it upon themselves to investigate their own misdeeds) that any national inquiry should be given powers of arrest - which Farage did not. Regardless of his personal feelings on the matter, this does not seem like a battle worth fighting within the Labour Party; Reform have too successfully cemented the acronyms ‘ILR’ and ‘ECHR’ as fundamentally irredeemable in the political consciousness of anybody right-of-centre, and no party committed to defending them from the threat of abolition will succeed in convincing the public they are serious about immigration restriction.
The final point concerns an overhaul of the civil service, and as much as I’m in broad agreement on this it’s difficult to get too excited. As with immigration, nobody has ever won a general election on the promise that they will increase administrative bloat. But it has happened nonetheless, and being a relatively brief document, the Blue Labour manifesto does not enumerate any particular policy proposals, beyond the boilerplate ‘bonfire of the QUANGOs’ material, that meaningfully separate it from the pledges David Cameron made at the 2010 election. There is also the prickly issue of why the Labour Party, particularly in the more overtly Workerist iteration the Baron is after, would be best placed to achieve any of this, given its (to use an especially Glasmanite term) covenant with the unions - Unite, Prospect and UNISON all being well represented among public sector employees. The closing note of this section makes some unpleasantly New Labour-sounding noises about devolution (‘We should trust local people and organisations to deliver services, wherever possible.’) which I felt myself instinctively raising my hackles at but are too woolly to really sink one’s teeth into. All that being said, anyone who spends any time listening to the Baron’s interviews will be fast acquainted with his very vocal disdain for the so-called ‘lanyard class’ - that does not make Blue Labour’s proposals on the civil service question any more substantial, but it does lend them a laudably venomous undertone, totally absent when similar critiques are voiced by the likes of Keir Starmer.
As for the overarching theme in all this, the spirit of the law, let me quote at some length from a piece by Glasman, published in the Catholic Herald toward the end of last year, on the coming century:
‘This age of restoration is paradoxical: dark and light, loving and hateful, violent and holy, fearful and hopeful. [...] The old era was contractual, the new is covenantal. The old era was characterised by the domination of financial services, in which money became the ultimate measure of value, whereas the new requires industry and a priority for national security. Free movement will be replaced by borders, corporate social responsibility by a national economic strategy, innovation by invention, reform by restoration, process by courage, diversity by solidarity, students by soldiers, TV production by weapons production. [...] The election of Donald Trump was the final confirmation of the end of the old, which had been brewing for two decades, but it is only the beginning.”
What I find notable here is that the Baron’s picture of the world to come is not presented as a set of demands but of historical inevitabilities. In fact, a set of inevitabilities that his own party, even his own faction within the party, need not play any serious role in bringing about - its chief engineers being Trump, and by implication vis-à-vis our own country, Farage. Both of whom he seems perfectly chummy with. In nothing he has said or written does one detect any real anxiety on his part over the looming possibility that Labour, and Blue Labour with it, will be eviscerated in 2029. Well, why should there be? In its essential points - the drive toward reindustrialisation, with an emphasis on energy, immigration restriction, and streamlining the civil service - the manifesto of every major political party (excepting the Liberal Democrats but, crucially, including Reform) running at the next election will broadly resemble that of Blue Labour; not because of the Baron’s far-ranging influence, but simply because this is the emerging consensus being born out of the concessions made by both the Left and the pre-2016 Right in the wake of Brexit and Trump. Glasman appears to be preparing his party to play the same role, after Farage, that Conservative Prime Ministers like Eden and Macmillan did in the post-war landscape brought about under Atlee: not excluded from government, but entering only as the custodians of a world they will not have been the authors of and will not have a mandate to seriously challenge.
This melancholy resignation to history seems to me the most dignified path for the Left today, the alternatives being what they are. On the more liberal wing, we have watched 20 years of listlessness come to its zenith in Keir Starmer, the product of a professional class whose political outlook is defined by nostalgia for conditions they do not understand the causes of, and are powerless to reproduce. I am talking, of course, about the 1990s. Thanks to the sale of our state assets, along with the opening of the ex-Soviet and Chinese markets, a huge amount of new capital was suddenly unleashed which the financialisation under Thatcher put us in a prime position to take advantage of; by 1995, the stock of inward direct investment had tripled in the space of a decade and foreign investment sat at around 21% of GDP. This is compared with about 10% in the US and 8% in France for the same year, and 3% for the UK today. Those who graduated university around the turn of that decade received this windfall in the form of relatively high starting salaries, boozy lunches on the company card, and deposits on houses in Primrose Hill that would increase five-fold in value over the next 30 years. They are yet to understand this was ‘making hay while the sun shines,’ and cannot explain why it did not carry on indefinitely without reference to empty shibboleths like ‘Populism,’ ‘Online Hate,’ and, of course, the mysterious machinations of Vladimir Putin. In the other corner, we have the remnants of the so-called ‘Old Left’ - Jeremy Corbyn, currently the subject of a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ situation at the hands of a ragtag band of ‘no-win-no-fee’ criminal lawyers and grey-market landlords, Bradford’s ‘Hundred and Twenty Thousand Dollar Men,’ fighting it out with Brighton Pier fortune teller Zack Polanski, the world’s oldest fan of ‘Dan & Phil.’ Whatever minor successes these two might be enjoying in British politics today is entirely despite the personalities involved, not because of them. For the thinking man of the Left, what is to be done? For all their flights of fancy around ‘reenchantment,’ and the ‘return of the sacred,’ the answer from the Blue Labour bench is surprisingly dour. With no great cause for anxiety at the threat of a Reform majority, no great horror at Trump’s election, no great enthusiasm for figures like Polanski or Mamdani, they can answer (in a tone perhaps not quite disguising a lingering shame that things could not have been otherwise) ‘Nothing’ - at least for a while, nothing at all.