High-profile Labour peer Lord Maurice Glasman was one of the keynote speakers at the annual conference of the Together Declaration, a conspiracy theory group with ties to Reform UK.
Together held its fourth anniversary event on 16 November, which featured prominent Reform councillor Laila Cunningham, and former Brexit Party politician Alexandra Phillips.
Together, which also hosted a panel at this year’s Reform conference, was established in 2021 to oppose measures to control the spread of Covid-19, including lockdowns and mandatory vaccines.
The group and its founder Alan Miller have spread misleading claims about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccine, claiming that “we were threatened, nudged, coerced and mandated” into an “experimental” jab.
Together has launched a campaign against the UK’s target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, claiming it’s a “crazy” policy that is “destroying” Britain. The group has suggested that the aim of “climate alarmism” is to keep the population “in a permanent state of emergency” in order to control our lives. This has fed into unsubstantiated claims from the group that an unaccountable progressive elite is trying to manipulate people via global institutions like the World Economic Forum, and C40 Cities.
Glasman, a Labour peer since 2011, is influential among Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s top team. The Sunday Times reported that Glasman spent several hours advising Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney last week. Glasman, a leading figure in the ‘Blue Labour’ movement, is a prominent admirer of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who this week announced a series of policies designed to curb the rights of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.
Meanwhile, Together is vocally and aggressively hostile to the Labour Party and its current administration. Miller has claimed that Labour has “contempt for us all”, that “Keir Starmer is trying to destroy Britain”, that Starmer is turning Britain “into [a] police state”, and that Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are “bandits against [the] British public”.
A spokesman for Lord Glasman said that he “regularly engages with people with whom he does not agree, such as in this case. That’s the nature of politics. He will continue to listen and debate on the work of renewing our country.”
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Other keynote speakers at the Together conference included Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who’s a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s foremost climate science denial group. She was joined by Jay Bhattacharya, a Trump-appointed U.S. public health official and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – the Covid-era manifesto that called for lockdowns to be scrapped and instead for the virus to be allowed to spread through the population.
Speakers also included Montgomery Toms, who has complained online about the supposed “Islamification” of Britain, Renée Hoenderkamp, who has campaigned against Covid vaccines for children, and Dan Astin-Gregory, who has promoted the view that Covid vaccines should “be withdrawn immediately”.
Glasman isn’t the first Labour parliamentarian to forge ties to radical right-wing, anti-Labour groups in recent months. As revealed by DeSmog, Labour MP Graham Stringer, also a GWPF director, recently signed an open letter drafted by a far-right group protesting against the government’s foreign policies.
The Labour Party referred DeSmog to Glasman’s statement. Together didn’t respond to our request for comment.
Together’s Reform Ties
Together has been forging close and active ties to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK over the past 18 months.
Alan Miller joined Farage on the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 general election and has repeatedly praised the Reform leader on social media – in particular his opposition to climate action.
Together also hosted a panel at Reform’s 2025 annual conference in Birmingham. The panel featured the cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, who used a speech at the conference to falsely claim it’s “highly likely” that Covid vaccines were a “significant factor” in the cancers of King Charles and the Princess of Wales.
Reform’s chair David Bull claimed at the conference that Malhotra had helped the party to write its health policies, although later denied this assertion.
Together’s event at Reform conference also featured the protest group Farmers to Action, which works closely with Together.
The leader of Farmers to Action, Justin Rogers, has claimed that “climate change is one of the biggest scams that has ever been told”, propagated by “our governments and their puppet masters.” He has also claimed that oil and gas are renewable, and that carbon dioxide cannot be dangerous because it “feeds plants”.
At an event co-hosted by Together and Farmers to Action in February, Farage endorsed a conspiracy theory popular among the far-right.
The Reform leader insinuated that the Labour government had a “sinister agenda” to acquire “lots of land because they’re planning for another five million people to come into the country”.
This claim is borne from the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that progressive immigration policies are a mechanism to replace white people in the West.
A version of this article was published by The New World.
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