This looks interesting, perhaps even welcome. I could see myself joining it. I am in most things, and I am not being deceitful by being so. In any case, they all know who I am.
But at the core of this latest initiative are to be Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman alongside two former Shadow Cabinet members who failed to vote against George Osborne's economically illiterate attempt to write Budget surpluses into the Statute Law.
The Blue Labour world was badly divided by the Leadership Election, and especially by the abstentions of the three candidates who went on to lose over the tax credits cuts opposition to which is now the centrepiece of Labour's strategy.
In no small part, the turn to Corbyn at that point marked a generational split. Those who so turned were mostly younger, such as the undergraduate and recently graduated attendees at Blue Labour events, rather than the middle-aged headline speakers at them.
Tom Watson contributed to Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics, so he remains a key link figure. But so did even Ed West, who is an interesting and important writer, but whose inclusion does raise very serious questions about quite how broad the church is, or sustainably can be.
That level of ecumenism could be tolerated in a collection of essays. But a political alliance with Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna (who are among the most neoliberal, socially liberal, pro-EU, and internationally interventionist of Labour figures, and in Hunt's case also rather anticlerical and anti-Catholic) really could lead to a definitive parting of the ways.
But at the core of this latest initiative are to be Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman alongside two former Shadow Cabinet members who failed to vote against George Osborne's economically illiterate attempt to write Budget surpluses into the Statute Law.
The Blue Labour world was badly divided by the Leadership Election, and especially by the abstentions of the three candidates who went on to lose over the tax credits cuts opposition to which is now the centrepiece of Labour's strategy.
In no small part, the turn to Corbyn at that point marked a generational split. Those who so turned were mostly younger, such as the undergraduate and recently graduated attendees at Blue Labour events, rather than the middle-aged headline speakers at them.
Tom Watson contributed to Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics, so he remains a key link figure. But so did even Ed West, who is an interesting and important writer, but whose inclusion does raise very serious questions about quite how broad the church is, or sustainably can be.
That level of ecumenism could be tolerated in a collection of essays. But a political alliance with Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna (who are among the most neoliberal, socially liberal, pro-EU, and internationally interventionist of Labour figures, and in Hunt's case also rather anticlerical and anti-Catholic) really could lead to a definitive parting of the ways.
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