Dr Maurice Glasman is Director of the Faith and Citizenship Programme and senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University. He has, in partnership with Dr Luke Bretherton at King’s College London, been awarded a three year Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant to study religion and politics in London. His research interests focus on the relationship between citizenship and faith, the limits of the market, the theory and practice of community organising, and Jewish conceptions of community self-government. He is an acknowledged international authority on the work of Karl Polanyi.

In February 2011, he was created Baron Glasman, of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill in the London Borough of Hackney.  He sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords.  His ground-breaking work with London Citizens – an alliance of faith institutions, universities, schools and trade unions that he brought together to run community projects. Suddenly, his political philosophy of local activism has been touted by some as Labour’s answer – its possible trump card – to David Cameron’s “big society”.

Glasman is the inventor of the term ‘Blue Labour’ which he defines as a small-C conservative form of socialism that attempts to return to the roots of the pre-1945 Labour Party through encouraging the political involvement of voluntary groups from trade unions through churches to football clubs.  In April 2011, he called on the Labour Party to establish a dialogue with sympathisers of the English Defence Leage (EDL) in order “to build a party that brokers a common good, that involves those people who support the EDL within our party. Not dominant in the party, not setting the tone of the party, but just a reconnection with those people that we can represent a better life for them, because that’s what they want.

Dr Maurice Glasman was born in Walthamstow and went to JFS Comprehensive School and Cambridge University where he studied Modern History. From there he went to the University of York to do a Masters in Political Philosophy and did his Doctorate in the European University Institute in Florence. His Doctorate, Unnecessary Suffering, was published in 1996.