The Globe-Trotting Prophet of Post-Liberal Populism: How Maurice Glasman Became Every Nation’s Favourite Dinner-Party Villain
Blue Labour’s Globe-Trotting Cassandra: Why Maurice Glasman Haunts Every Populist, From Detroit to Doha
By our man in the departure lounge
If you’ve never heard of Maurice Glasman, congratulations—you’ve been sleeping more soundly than most of the world’s political consultants. The mild-mannered academic from London Metropolitan University has become the ideological Typhoid Mary of post-liberal politics, exporting a virus that mutates faster than a cruise-ship norovirus. From Warsaw’s Law & Justice headquarters to the rusted-out union halls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, his “Blue Labour” cocktail—economically red, socially navy—has become the house special for anyone who wants to yell “globalisation sucks” without sounding like a 1930s newsreel.
Glasman’s shtick is deceptively simple: rescue patriotism from the nativists, rescue socialism from the students, and do it all while quoting Aquinas in a pub. The result is a worldview that treats the European Union like an overbearing mother-in-law and free-market liberalism like a drunk uncle who’s maxed out the family credit card. In 2011 he coined the phrase “the immigration that dare not speak its name,” thereby ensuring that dinner parties from Islington to Istanbul would descend into fork-flinging within minutes.
Internationally, Blue Labour has become a sort of Ikea flat-pack populism: easy to ship, maddening to assemble, and missing three crucial screws. Matteo Salvini borrowed the aesthetic—flag-draped stages, nostalgic hymns to factory work—while conveniently forgetting the anti-corporate bits. Japan’s Kishida administration flirted with “community, family, and small business” rhetoric straight from Glasman’s pamphlets, then quietly shelved them when Toyota’s lobbyists arrived. Even Chile’s new left, fresh from rewriting Pinochet’s constitution, has been spotted flicking through English translations of Glasman’s essays in search of a less Twitter-poisoned vocabulary.
The cruel irony, of course, is that Glasman himself remains a tenured cosmopolitan, the sort who flies business class to conferences on “rootedness.” At last count he had delivered keynote speeches in 27 countries, each time lamenting the evils of rootlessness. One can picture him sipping a flat white in a Berlin co-working space, earnestly telling startled coders that Uber is the Antichrist. The contradiction is so perfect it could be Modern Art.
Yet the global appetite for his message keeps growing, precisely because it offers a guilt-free xenophobia: you get to hate both Goldman Sachs and open borders without being branded a fascist. In South Korea, disgruntled millennials who can’t afford Seoul rent have begun quoting Glasman’s line about “protecting the labour interest of the settled community” while live-streaming their rage. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, activists fighting Chinese land grabs repackage Blue Labour slogans into pidgin tweets: “Our soil no be Alibaba warehouse.”
Why does a soggy-island academic resonate from Lagos to Louisiana? Because everywhere the same vertigo: wages stagnant, rents ballistic, culture atomised, and the only available narratives are Silicon Valley techno-utopia or blood-and-soil ethno-masochism. Glasman’s muddled middle feels like the last bar stool still standing after last orders. It is, of course, a mirage—no amount of parish-hall nostalgia will revive the Detroit assembly line or cool the Sahel—but mirages sell; just ask Evian.
The darker joke is that Glasman’s crusade against “market state cosmopolitanism” has itself become a lucrative export commodity. Blue Labour think-tank retreats now cost £3,000 a head, held in converted monasteries with Wi-Fi named “HolyOrders_5G.” Delegates leave clutching artisanal manifestos printed on recycled papal bulls, ready to return home and explain why their own country’s problems are England’s fault circa 1997.
So, as COP delegates argue over carbon quotas and crypto bros mint new religions, Maurice Glasman continues his peripatetic sermon: local banks, mutual credit, tariffs on avocados flown 5,000 miles to assuage middle-class brunch guilt. It probably won’t save the planet, but it will keep the conference circuit humming until the oceans rise high enough to drown the PowerPoints.
Conclusion: Glasman’s greatest achievement is proving that even in a globalised age, the most exportable product is still a grievance wrapped in a flag and tied with a pseudo-theological ribbon. The world keeps buying it because, at 3 a.m. in an airport lounge, everyone is nostalgic for somewhere that never quite existed. Until the next prophet of parochial doom appears—possibly via TikTok—expect the Blue Labour virus to keep spreading, one angry electorate at a time.
