Progress Of A Sort, Perhaps?

Progress campaigns for Labour to take the South and the countryside seriously, even if it does badly misread or misrepresent what that would entail in practice.

Progress advocates opening up the selection process for Labour parliamentary candidates, if nowhere near far enough.

Progress supports high-speed rail links binding the country together, not least by spreading prosperity, even if it does fall short of the necessary commitment to public ownership.

And Progress carries this important, and even quite beautiful, article by the Leader of Durham County Council, although one might have expected him to know that Stanley was not "a small town", unless he means the Stanley near Crook, which is a village.

But Progress tweets against trade unionists, as such, as candidates, and it publishes a frankly bizarre attack on the trade union movement by Alan Johnson, who would have been absolutely nothing without it. Progress agitates for councils to cut services, and therefore also jobs, doubly reducing the money spent in their communities' private sectors.

And my friend Tom Miller still has this, on the bullying behaviour of the Blairite Right within Young Labour and within Labour Students. Frankly, I am surprised that either of those still contains any Blairites. Do they also contain partisans of Tony Benn and Denis Healey, of Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan?

Still, that is what Progress is for, I suppose: to flash the Sainsbury cash in order to make sure that there is still a Blairite faction, and that it is still very factional indeed.

As someone once said, a lot done, a lot still to do.