Lord Glasman and the anti-Labour conspiracy crowd

Fresh from advising Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney last week, Labour peer Maurice Glasman spent Sunday holed up with a few more people who have a loose grip on reality.

Glasman, the figurehead of the ‘Blue Labour’ movement and an ally of home secretary Shabana Mahmood, was a keynote speaker at the Together Declaration’s annual conference on November 16.

As reported by DeSmog, Together Declaration was founded in 2021 to oppose lockdowns and spread doubt about the safety of Covid vaccines, and its leaders are not exactly friends of the Labour cause.

Its founder Alan Miller has claimed that Labour has “contempt for us all”, that “Keir Starmer is trying to destroy Britain”, that the prime minister is turning Britain “into [a] police state”, and that he and his chancellor Rachel Reeves are “bandits against [the] British public”.

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This all reflects the language of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has a much warmer relationship with Together.

Prominent Reform councillor Laila Cunningham spoke alongside Glasman at the conference, posting on X after the event that the Labour peer “had us all laughing”. The event also featured Alexandra Phillips – one of Farage’s former MEPs and advisors, now a presenter on Talk – who famously threatened to sue Channel 4 for (correctly) reporting that she formerly worked for Cambridge Analytica’s parent company.

Together Declaration hosted a panel at Reform’s annual conference this year featuring Aseem Malhotra, the controversial cardiologist who got on stage and claimed without evidence that the King’s and Princess of Wales’s cancer cases may have been thanks to the Covid vaccine. Reform has denied Malhotra is an adviser to the party, despite chair David Bull introducing him at its conference in September as someone who “worked with me to write Reform UK’s health policy”.

A spokesman for Lord Glasman said that he “regularly engages with people with whom he does not agree, such as in this case. That’s the nature of politics. He will continue to listen and debate on the work of renewing our country.”.

It’s unclear how hanging out with cranks and anti-vaxxers helps with “the work of renewing” Britain, but who would doubt the wisdom of this McSweeney-whisperer?