Tangled Up In Blue

James A. Chisem
Aug 22, 2017 · 1 min read
Ed Miliband was an early convert to Blue Labour. Image courtesy of The Telegraph.

Rowenna Davis. Tangled Up In Blue: Blue Labour and the Struggle For Labour’s Soul (London: Short Books Ltd, 2011)


Blue Labour’s proponents might claim to be straight talkers, but, in reality, they’re quite the erudite bunch. That means that it’s easy for their core ideas to get lost in dense and often inaccessible scholarly prose.

Luckily, Rowenna Davis is much better at distilling and conveying the Blue Labour tradition, from small c conservatism and Christian democracy to mutualism and localism.

She’s also blessed with a talent for interweaving the political and the personal, which, in the case of her main subject, the academic Maurice Glassman and his philosophy, makes for a highly entertaining read.

And in the age of Brexit, populism, and globalisation, it’s an important one, too.


James A. Chisem is a freelance writer based in the UK. He writes about football, foreign policy, and anything else that happens to tickle his fancy. You can find the rest of his semi-cogent ramblings here, or follow him on Twitter @jachiz89.

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