Maurice Glasman is a most unlikely peer. He was ennobled, courtesy of Ed Miliband, in November last year, and has been sitting in the House of Lords for the past four months. Or rather sitting at a table on the Lords terrace. Space is at a premium in the Lords, and he will have to wait for a few nonagenarians to pass on before he gets even the tiniest corner of an office. So he has made the terrace his office, plonked his laptop down, covered a table with scraps of paper, and sits there all day smoking roll-ups and drinking coffee.

The Lords terrace is a civilised place to conduct an interview. The only interruptions come from a bagpiper on Westminster Bridge and an ancient peer with a booming voice who is showing three guests around. "Lords tend to have extremely loud voices," Glasman whispers. He intends to be a sotto voce lord, and made a modest, self-effacing maiden speech earlier this month in which he thanked not just his fellow peers for making him welcome but the doorkeepers and two of the catering staff.

Pundits like to call the 50-year-old academic – he is reader in political theory at London Metropolitan University – Miliband's "guru". Glasman prefers the term "conversational partner". "Ed's his own guru," he insists. "He really does think for himself." He is best known as the originator of Blue Labour, a term he coined in 2009 to counter New Labour's combination of free-market fundamentalism and top-down managerialism. He disliked Blair's kowtowing to finance capitalism and Brown's reliance on statist solutions, and wants Miliband to develop a small-c conservative critique of the coalition government's free-market radicalism. Blue Labour thinking, with its emphasis on community-led solutions, is being touted as the party's version of the Big Society, and it's also possible that his emphasis on "family, faith and flag" will be a means of Labour outflanking the coalition on the right.

Sotto voce or not, Glasman is already making a surprisingly big noise. The Daily Telegraph this week put his call for a freeze on immigration – he believes it has undermined the job prospects and wage rates of UK workers – on the front page, and in an editorial on Tuesday the Daily Mail dubbed him the "Voice of Reason". "We've tended to accept a neo-liberal, globalised view of the movement of labour," he tells me. "Labour is seen as a transferable commodity that moves around the world seeking higher wages, and no thought is given to the fact that these are human beings with families and relationships. This works against any wage controls and wage settlements at the lowest end. The free movement of labour is a bosses' agenda that overwhelmingly benefits the highest earners. They benefit from cheap nannies, who they often exploit, and from the general supply of cheap skilled labour. We also haven't given enough thought to the people who live here, whose wages have been forced down. Immigration has been a de facto wages policy for the past 30 years."

He looks doubtful when I tell him he is now the darling of the political right, and says the Mail and Telegraph choose to ignore the anti-market capitalism part of his philosophy, but whether he likes it or not his anti-immigration, anti-EU stance will win him friends in some unlikely places, and could cause Miliband problems. Glasman wants all illegal immigrants now in the country to be legalised, and then a line to be drawn in the Dover shingle. "We've got enormous diversity, enormous pluralism, it's time to renew our common life, our common law. Businesses should be able to bring in people that they need, but by invitation only. My theory is about renewing solidarity and vocation, and if there's this endless churn of people then we're all at sea and there is no possibility of real politics."

There is, though, the little matter of free movement of labour under EU law. Glasman's answer is to remake the EU. "I've got a problem with the way the EU has gone, often under great pressure from British governments," he says. "It's gone from a union between France and Germany on pig iron and pig farms aimed at resisting commodification to free movement of labour and capital. It's administrative, it's legalistic, it's anti-political. People say: 'You can't do that, it's against EU law.' The EU has become a block on politics. It's full of lawyers, and that's not my kind of politics." He favours free movement of goods, of "real commodities", but not of what he calls "commodity fictions" – labour, land and capital. He supports a renegotiation of treaty obligations and a strengthening of labour rights in individual countries.

In essence, he is making a plea for rootedness, an organic rather than an atomised society, the reassertion of place and identity, and the re-creation of a society founded on stable work, or as he prefers to call it "vocation" – a key word in his lexicon. His approach is a curious mix of conservative and radical. It presupposes that the past 30 years have seen a coup by elites – primarily finance capitalists in the City of London – at the expense of working people, and he wants to lead a counter-revolution. Turning back the clock – to 1945 or, since Glasman hymns the way ordinary people resisted the enclosures, perhaps 1745 – becomes a radical gesture.

'It's been a transformative week'

Glasman spoke in last week's Lords debate on phone hacking, and rounded on Rupert Murdoch: "Aristotle said that anyone outside law and relationships is either a beast or a god. In our contemporary life, Murdoch has been like a beast and a god: he could attack you and destroy you, or he could give you great power and glory. He was outside of constraints and outside of law." Glasman reckons the hacking saga has been a turning point for Miliband. "It puts all the doubts to rest," he says. "None of the other candidates who ran could have taken the fight so strongly to Murdoch. This is about challenging the power elites in the country. It opens up the possibility of genuine democratic resistance to the domination of the rich. It's been a wonderful and transformative week, not just for Ed but for the party."

Glasman sees Cameron as a "genuine one-nation Tory", but believes he is trapped because "he has nothing to say about capitalism, about the domination of the poor by the rich, and the consequences that elite domination of public life has. That has made him look bereft, almost drowning. He is clearly at one level appalled by phone hacking, but he has no idea how to deal with it and is completely tangled up in that elite. He can't express the complicity of his government in a Murdoch-dominated political agenda, or conceptualise the power of capitalism. He sees it as a progressive, modernising thing, and is now having to confront the fact that it's a criminal, dominating thing. He's very good at expressing state oppression, but he has no language to express market exploitation." To win the next election, Glasman believes Miliband has to grasp both.

As small-c conservatives go, Glasman sounds almost Marxist, with his talk of capitalism's criminal tendencies. "I'm a radical traditionalist," he says, which has gone down well in the Lords, where "everyone is a little bit country and a little bit rock'n'roll – they've got traditional and radical sides. They see that I'm for renewing the ancient institutions, not for abolishing them."

When Miliband called to tell him he wanted to send him to the Lords, Glasman was shocked. "I rang my wife to tell her," he says, "and she just laughed." She thought he was pulling her leg. Miliband had got to know him because of Glasman's work with community group London Citizens, which campaigned for a living wage in the capital. With Miliband acting as midwife, Glasman helped to write Gordon Brown's "Let me tell you who I am" speech just before the 2010 general election. "That was an act of loyalty to the party," says Glasman. "Brown's politics are the antithesis of mine – high moralism, low cynicism, completely technocratic, managerial, unrelational. One of the sadnesses is that he was from a very relational culture – a church culture. The speech was an attempt to reconnect him with himself, and it was an extraordinary event. He found a righteous fury." But too late to turn the election around or erase memories of Brown's deeply unrelational encounter with Gillian Duffy – an episode Glasman sees as symptomatic of all that had gone wrong with New Labour, which had lost the ability to connect with traditional Labour supporters.

Glasman, who lives with his wife and four children in a crowded flat over a clothes shop in Stoke Newington in north London – his title is Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill – looked every inch the unworldly academic when he was ennobled. But he has had a haircut and sharpened up his sartorial act – jackets and ties are obligatory in the Lords. He's a slightly nervous talker – his left leg twitches throughout the conversation – but he is extremely engaging and doesn't mind in the slightest when I tell him he looks like Ronnie Kray when he puts his glasses on.

Putting people back into politics

His background is as complex as his politics. He was born into a Jewish family in north-east London, where his father had a small toy manufacturing business that eventually collapsed, an early victim of globalisation. He went to a comprehensive, did well and studied modern history at Cambridge, where he says he was foolishly filled with class rage and railed against privilege. He then became a jazz musician for four years – he was a trumpeter with his own line in what sounds like Jewish soul – before returning to academic life, doing an MA in political philosophy at York and then a PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, where he became interested in the early 20th-century Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, who had tried to put people – rather than abstract concepts – back at the centre of economics.

Glasman became a professor at Johns Hopkins University's European centre in Bologna, but after his father's death in 1995 he returned to the UK to comfort his mother, becoming a lecturer in the politics department at London Metropolitan University. "That was a hugely radicalising thing for me. I experienced the managerial authoritarianism of public-sector reforms. Departments were abolished. I was told what to do by people who had no idea what they were doing. A shelf stacker at Waitrose has more power in the corporate governance of the firm than I do as an academic at London Met." He also had to mediate between student groups of every religious persuasion – south Asian Muslims, African Christians, eastern European Christians – and experienced what he calls "really intense culture wars". Those experiences fed directly into Blue Labour.

"It taught me everything, really," he says. "It taught me about the limits of public-sector reform, and about the new realities of London. I met my friends who were at Oxbridge or Reading or York, and they just had no idea of the realities. They were having abstract discussions about multiculturalism, while I was trying to convene seminars where people could actually talk to each other. That led me to London Citizens, because I was trying to teach my students about citizenship. London Citizens then taught me how to organise and how to listen. Learning how to listen to and work with poor working people transformed my politics." He says London Citizens also gave him the opportunity to make trouble. "Annoying powerful and rich people is a great thing," he says.

From that trouble making and his response to the crash of 2008 came Blue Labour, which he says is "anti-finance capital but pro-business". An additional factor was the death in 2008 of his mother Rivie, to whom he was very close. One of five daughters born into a poor family in Stamford Hill, she had throughout her life been a staunch Labour supporter, as committed to her family as she was to the NHS. In some ways, Blue Labour is a love letter to her. Re-engaging with Labour after a life of largely inactive membership and founding an organisation that married family values with a radical worldview was a way of honouring her and cauterising his grief.

I ask him where the name Blue Labour came from. "In part it was a response to 'Red Tory'," he explains. "Cameron made the Hugo Young speech, where he claimed the co-operative movement, building societies, the mutuals, the early trade unions for the Conservatives, and we were completely silent. That's linked to the excessive statism of Brown. We had to reclaim Labour history. It was also a way of talking about capitalism again, and resistance to capitalism. And working [in London Citizens] with low-paid people, most of whom were women, had reminded me of their concern for their parents and their children, and their commitment to work and not wanting to be on welfare." "Blue" was also chosen to echo "the blues": it was a lament for the failures of New Labour and its misplaced optimism that "things can only get better", a phrase that sounds ludicrous in our new age of austerity.

'I look to history for inspiration'

Blue Labour has many critics in the party. "It's been misunderstood," Glasman says. "Billy Bragg said it was neo-liberal, and other people say it's sexist or misogynist." Shadow prisons minister Helen Goodman accused it of being an "all-male clique" that "seems to be harking back to a Janet and John 1950s era". She believes it has a patriarchal view of society and wants to put women back in the home. "This is just crazy," he says. "It's a terrible accusation and so wrong. Helen Goodman got completely the wrong end of the stick. I've always worked with women, particularly low-paid women. They've been my greatest teachers. We are completely committed to meaningful, powerful lives for women. We reject this economistic view that more powerful women mean less powerful men. It's not a zero-sum game."

Goodman is not the only one of Glasman's critics to label him a nostalgist, hankering after the economic stability and social cohesion of his boyhood. How does he plead? "I would consider myself completely anti-nostalgic in the sense of a glorification and simplification of the past," he says. "But what they really mean is that I look to history for inspiration, whereas liberalism and neo-liberalism despise all forms of historical association." While the coalition are now self-proclaimed Maoists, Glasman wants Labour to rediscover its inner Churchillianism. These are strange days in British politics.

Even before this week's storm, Diane Abbott was sniping at Glasman for his views on immigration, and he accepts he made a mistake in saying in April that Labour should have a dialogue with supporters of the far-right English Defence League, because that was interpreted as showing sympathy for their views when all he was trying to say was that the party needed to relate to "their sense of dispossession and rage". He is clearly anxious that arguments over immigration could derail the whole Blue Labour project and marginalise him within the party. He wants to be a maverick who wields influence – a tough circle to square. Perhaps by accident, Ed Miliband has created an interestingly troublesome baron.