Blue sky thinker

Maurice Glasman wants to make Labour the party that puts ‘real people’ at the heart politics and isn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers in the process. Clare Goff meets him

‘If you want a barney you’ve come to the right people,’ said Lord Maurice Glasman in the opening speech of this year’s CLES summit.

Propelled into political life when he was appointed a Labour peer in November last year, he has already rubbed managed to rub people up the wrong way. He called Locality ‘well-intentioned busybodies’ when the organisation was awarded the government’s community organisers contract, and he has blamed multiculturalism for ossifying communities.

He’s learning to put across his views in ways that will leave them less open to interpretation but makes no excuses for wanting to bring conflict back to public life.

Local authorities need to ‘dream of what they want to do and fight and organise for it’, says Lord Glasman.

His political campaigning life began when he joined the Citizens UK campaign for a living wage in London. During the campaign the then chair of HSBC John Bond refused to reply to emails requesting a living wage for cleaners and other low-paid paid staff at the bank. Citizens UK bought up shares in the company and sent a cleaner to its AGM to confront Bond. It led to a breakthrough in the campaign but when Lord Glasman went back to speak to Bond he was struck by how little the confrontation had impacted on him.

‘He said: ”I’m a business man. I have conflict every day”.’ To Glasman those outside the corporate sector are ‘conflict-averse in a world of conflict’. Conflict, he says, is the method you have to change relationships.

Changing relationships – through conflict if necessary – is at the heart of Blue Labour, Mr Glasman’s vision for the future of the Labour movement. Building relational power as a bulwark against the over-dominance of market and state power is key to his vision. A renewal of the power of citizenship, of solidarity, of faith and family will lead to a revival of the common good, he says.

He calls for city parliaments which will renew local democracy and a revival of traditional institutions such as trade unions around vocation, virtue and value. He wants to see the north of England renew its economic prospects through vocational training around its assets, using the sea to generate energy power in the northeast for example.

In preparation for his speech at CLES’s conference in Manchester he researched speeches given in the city by the likes of Churchill and Gladstone. ‘They paid homage to Manchester as a great municipal city,’ he says. ‘Manchester used to have a meaning.’ Today’s local authorities are little more than means of transmitting central power to the regions, he says, and calls for councils to find their purpose again. ‘They need to dream of what they want to do and fight and organise for it.’

Community organising is at the heart of the shift in power he wants to see take place in local areas, but believes the government’s plans for localism and the organisation of communities will do little to change the status quo. His attack on Locality was a defence of the purity of the definition of community organising, rather than an attack on the work it does, he says.

‘Community organising began in Chicago in resistance to the settlement movement. Locality is involved in community development which is a more placid form of change. I respect the work they do but want to protect the identity of community organising.’

Blue Labour aims to bring community leadership back to the Labour movement and introduce new models to bring hope, energy and power back to those places left behind.

‘We live in wonderful times. We’ve reached the end of the neo-liberal dream and state domination. It’s time for citizenship, imagination and growth.’

• Read more of New Start’s interview with Maurice Glasman in July’s ezine – out at the end of the month.