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According to at (east one of the major figures behind it, 'Blue Labour' is no more. Jonathan Rutherford announced in late July that 'the small group of people associated with Blue Labour [had] disbanded itself (Rutherford, 2011b). Nevertheless, despite Rutherford's declaration, it is not at all clear that Blue Labour really is finished.
It is surely significant that in the same article Rutherford also argues that the current political conjuncture 'requires Labour's politics in England to be both conservative and radical' - the core idea animating the Blue Labour project - and goes on to set out what is effectively a restatement in all but name of the Blue Labour approach as the necessary political response to this conjuncture on the part of Labour.
Elsewhere it has been reported that Rutherford and Jon Cruddas (another key figure behind Blue Labour) 'hope that it will be possible to salvage some of the ideas and themes' (Hodges, 2011) that Blue Labour has been developing. It is clear, then, that there is still some sort of future for Blue Labour ideas even if, as seems likely, any reformulated project discards the Blue Labour label.
It certainly strikes me as unlikely that Blue Labour ideas will disappear without trace. The Labour Party requires, pretty urgently, a new political-ideological narrative of purpose and identity to fill the post-New Labour void and also to reposition itself in the context of the unfolding economic crisis which is slowly but very fundamentally reshaping the political terrain. It is hard to see Labour returning to New Labour territory. Blair's discourse of individualist 'aspiration', 'choice' and wide-eyed veneration of 'globalisation' is wholly inappropriate for a new era of austerity. The set of ideas advanced by Blue Labour provides, to date, by far the most coherent alternative organising ideological narrative for the Party and, in the absence of any other developed approach, it is difficult to believe that they will simply vanish.
Given, then, that Blue Labour is probably not quite as dead as it might at first appear but is, rather, in a state of flux and recomposition, it seems an appropriate time to reconsider the terms of the debate surrounding this set of ideas. Critical discussion of Blue Labour has, in the main, tended...