Maurice Glasman

“Certainly getting the rotten vegetables and fruit from the supermarket and people having a chance to express their disgust at what they’ve been through, I don't think that's such a bad idea”

“It's impossible to live in London without having your mobile phone getting nicked on the street out of your hand. That’s palpable.I think we've got to think imaginatively about deterrence and punishment, I really do. This is vital.I'm quite in favour of public humiliation of these shoplifters, bringing back the stocks, pelting them with rotten fruit. The old ways are the good ways!”

“[Finding Trump's tariffs thrilling] I feel fantastic! All my life, I’ve been trying to develop a pro-worker settlement. This is the end of globalisation! Free movement is over. The Deliveroo economy is over. We have to produce again! [...] In a weird way, Trump’s behaving like a Marxist. Of course he’s no idea he’s executing a Bennite policy, but that is what he’s doing.”

“[There should be] a new economics ministry instead of the Treasury and Business in which priority is given to industry [and] the Chancellor should be moved out of Downing Street, which should become the political hub of the Prime Minister’s Office.”

“Speaking for myself, I believe the abolition of the Treasury is necessary for our economic renewal [...] It is an outdated institution at odds with contemporary reality. We have reached the end of the road in terms of monetary and fiscal policy and must embrace a different logic of reindustrialisation. The Treasury is ideologically neo-classical in its economic method and hostile to the interests of the country.”

“[President] Trump recognises people want our own industry protected and we want secure borders. That is what people in the UK want too.”

“This conference has a very weird atmosphere – it’s a different atmosphere. It’s an atmosphere of a superannuated student union. They’ve just stayed in the student union through a lifetime. Until we have the maturity and generosity to have a genuine understanding of New Labour our growth will be stunted. The present criminalisation and demonisation of Blair doesn’t help us get to that place.”

“Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state (1945), we tried the market (1997), then we tried them both together (2007) and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social.”

“Labour is apparently pursuing a sectional agenda based on the idea that disaffected Liberal Democrats and public-sector employees will give Labour a majority next time around. But we have not won, and show no signs of winning, the economic argument. We have not articulated a constructive alternative capable of recognising our weaknesses in government and taking the argument to the coalition. We show no relish for reconfiguring the relationship between the state, the market and society. The world is on the turn, yet we do not seem equal to the challenge.”

“What I've learnt is when you walk into a family argument and people tell you it's about principle don't get involved. There is more to life than principles.”

“We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital. Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first.”

“New Labour’s community development work was all private-sector driven, consultation-tinged regeneration that was done to poor people rather than being controlled by them. I found it, on the whole, a massive waste of money.”