brothers keeper he took the scars

Glasman And Blond Do Drinks On The Lords Terrace Today: Parents of ...

Efforts to spice up its life with ‘ethical socialism’.  I noted Wintour  referred to Tony Blair’s Christian socialist ‘period’ (that’d be all those articles on John McMurray and Blair’s Ozzie Anglican clergyman mate from Oxford) that I should have mentioned.  But  then it suddenly struck me why Maurice Glasman’s take on big societies felt so familiar: Blue Labour is surely but the modern  manifestation of Amitai Etzioni  - but with a Germaine Greer love in with the working class chucked in to improve the , er, action. (I’m not being disrespectful here but simply recalling an offer that Etzioni fan Bill Clinton made to Ms Greer when she averred that physical (we could say political for the present argument)  relations with the middle class were less ..fulfiling..than the proletarian alternative).

Thinking that I may be wrong I reached to my shelves for Etzioni’s excellent  autobiography My Brother’s Keeper and there it all was: It was 1990 and Blair and Brown were looking for a guru. They noticed Etzioini because he’d worked for President Carter and he  was close in to the Clinton/Gore team. Geoff Mulgan   had registered Etzioni’s work too publishing a pamphlet (which I still have somewhere in the loft) entitled The Parenting Defecit  pitched up with plenty of coverage and the offer of an op ed to boot. Nevertheless,  within weeks  of reaching Number 10 , just a few years later  Blair/Brown were ready to reinvent government and turn Michael ‘deliverology’ Barber into their default guru when it came to the crunch.  Questions regarding ‘what worked’ squeezed out ‘what mattered’.