Can we please stop taking Blue Labour’s Glasman seriously?

In the middle of October, Channel 4 airs a one-off reunion special of Brookside, the soap opera set in a smart Liverpool cul-de-sac that turned out to be home to furious feuds, seething resentments and nasty secrets hastily buried under the patio. One of the show’s leading characters was Harry Cross, a forthright, bespectacled bore with little time for the opinions of others.

Those who simply can’t wait that long for a dose of Merseyside-based backstabbing and double-dealing hidden beneath a seemingly calm veneer are directed to the Labour Party’s conference at the Exhibition Centre at King’s Dock, which starts on September 28. With actor Bill Dean sadly unavailable (he died in 2000), the part of Harry Cross will be played by Lord Maurice Glasman. He is the forthright, bespectacled founder of Blue Labour, the culturally conservative campaign group whose ideas Keir Starmer has embraced with such stunning polling results.

Once an adviser to Ed Miliband, Glasman fell out of favour in 2011 when he suggested that Labour should reject free movement of labour within the European Union (he later backed the Brexit campaign) and that they should listen to what voters for the far right English Defence League had to say. Long rehabilitated, Glasman and Blue Labour took some credit for the 2024 election victory and have a fan base that includes new home secretary Shabana Mahmood and Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.

Harry Cross was fond of shouting at the telly. Things have moved on, and Glasman’s droning comes while he appears on it. In the past few days, he has popped up on Sky News, on GB News presenter Christopher Hope’s podcast and on chumpish, Trumpite Sun hack Harry Cole’s Save the West show to proclaim how lost and moribund the Starmer government is. Much more Maurice lies ahead between now and the end of Labour’s conference on October 1 – as I write this, Glasman is about to appear on Iain Dale’s LBC show.

And no wonder. Glasman can be relied on for a viral quote, having told the sweaty and vile MAGA influencer Steve Bannon earlier this year that “progressives” are “the enemy because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love, and they don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife”. Since then, Glasman has called on Labour to put the Royal Navy in the channel to deter migrant boats, and to bring back stocks in public squares, so that shoplifters can be pelted with rotten fruit.

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This week, even more ludicrously, he told Cole: “Obviously, the problem for us is that we haven’t really grasped the possibilities of Brexit. Brexit is a magnificent thing. If you want to believe in your country, believe that we voted for Brexit against all odds, that’s what gives me huge hope in my country.”

Glasman will say almost anything, yet there are two things you won’t hear from him. One is a credible explanation of how the Blue Labour economy would work – his notions of a self-sufficient, reindustrialised nation belong to the distant past. The other is an admittance that the lost, moribund Starmer government became so by following his 2011 prescription almost to the letter.

Starmer is targeting the concerns of far right voters; he is socially conservative and flag-friendly, he rejects a return to free movement or the EU. Yet he is at 20% in the polls and can’t grow the economy. Cheers, Maurice – any more good advice?

Well, of course there is. Telling Cole that “Nigel Farage is leading an insurgency [and] the Labour government has to champion that insurgency”, Glasman continued: “People want democracy. People want sovereignty. And what we’ve still got is the ECHR… we have to withdraw from the ECHR, we have to scrap the human rights act.” These are ideas so bad that even Keir Starmer has thought twice about them.

In Liverpool, the prime minister should follow the example set by the residents of Brookside Close when a fatal virus descended on the close in 1995, and avoid this toxicity like the plague.