EP #70 A Politics of Restoration - with Maurice Glasman - Leaving Egypt Podcast

Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair welcome Maurice Glasman back to Leaving Egypt for a second conversation. Maurice traces the exhaustion of a settlement built on progressivism and globalisation -one the church has too often been co-opted into rather than resisted. In its eroding, he sees opportunity for a politics built not on elite abstraction but on ordinary virtues - commitment, constraint, solidarity, family, place and nation - drawn from the well of Catholic Social Teaching. Water, land, the human person: for Maurice these are gifts of God, not commodities, and recovering that conviction is where renewal begins. He argues the divide is no longer left versus right but sovereignists versus globalists, those who want power to rest with peoples and places, versus those who would transfer it to borderless, unaccountable systems of capital, ideology and technology. He turns to two countries close to his heart: confronting Iran’s regime and backing its people’s resistance, and Ukraine’s costly defence of its sovereignty. What may be coming, he senses in a yearning for settled life from working-class Britain to Ukraine and the Iranian people, is restoration: the recovery of family, faith, place and nation: a hopeful story the church could yet join, if only it had eyes to see it.

Lord Maurice Glasman is a British politician, political theorist, commentator and community organiser who has served as a Labour life peer in the UK Parliament since 2011. He is best known as the founder of Blue Labour, a movement launched in 2009 to address Labour’s drift from its founding roots, challenging both New Labour’s neoliberalism and progressive identity politics. Drawing on Catholic Social Teaching, Aristotle and the thought of Karl Polanyi, he promotes a politics of the common good. Alongside his parliamentary work he remains active internationally, particularly in relation to Ukraine and Iran. He has a longstanding commitment to community organising, most recently in Grimsby, through the Common Good Foundation, which he founded and directs. Born into a Jewish working-class family in North London, he studied at Cambridge, York and Florence. His official title is Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill.

LINKS

For Maurice Glasman:

https://x.com/blue_labour?lang=en

https://www.bluelabour.org/

https://www.commongoodfoundation.org.uk/

Books:

Blue Labour: the Politics of the Common Good

Unnecessary Suffering: Management, Markets and the Liquidation of Solidarity

For Alan J Roxburgh:

http://alanroxburgh.com/about

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork