Blue Labour Crashes Into a Green Wall

The historic losses suffered by Keir Starmer’s party in this month’s local elections have finally exposed the flawed approach of abandoning its progressive base to appeal to Reform UK voters, writes Adam Bienkov

The founder of the ‘Blue Labour’ movement, Maurice Glasman, appeared on former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast last January to talk about what he described as the evils of “progressivism”.

“Progressivisim is a sickness to me, it is a palsy,” he told Bannon, before adding that “they [progressives] are the enemy … because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love. They don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife.”

Glasman, who sits in the House of Lords as a Labour peer, had been invited onto the podcast following a recommendation by Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage, who told Bannon that he was “the one guy you’ve got to meet in the United Kingdom”.