The RF is not to be confused with the Relationships Foundation, a tank based – for once, outside the enclave of SW1 – in Cambridge. It hit national headlines with its report The Family Pressure Gauge, which aims to ‘measure progress towards the goal of making Britain the “most family friendly country in Europe” – the stated intent of the coalition government’. On publication, the Mirror laid into said ConDems, thundering that ‘David Cameron’s claim to stand up for families was torn apart yesterday by a report saying the UK is one of the worst places in Europe to raise children.’ We topped only Bulgaria and Romania in the overall ‘pressure ranking’ with the second highest rate of teen pregnancies in Europe, sky-high childcare and housing costs, and some of the longest hours worked – 43 a week on average. The UK climbs to the sunny side of the barometer only on care responsibilities, on which we even beat the fabled Nordic countries, but we slip back into squally conditions on parental leave, with the ‘sandwich generation’ having to juggle the kids alongside elderly relatives.

Meanwhile, the ascent of blue Labour continues and is the interest of a number of thinktanks. Compass, Christian Socialist Movement, Fabian Society and Progress jointly put their name to The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, an e-bookon the Soundings website with a preface by Miliband. The seminars the paper is based on seek to be no less than ‘the beginning of a new revisionism following on from Anthony Crosland in the 1950s and the Third Way of the 1990s’, hailingthe Labour party as possibly ‘the most important institution in Britain in the 20th century’ and acknowledging both the successes and failures of New Labour. Blue Labour may not have the answers but it has pushed up the agenda questions about how to draw lost working-class voters back into the Labour fold, and recapture the sense of community many feel has fractured in the modern world. In the May edition of Progress, Graeme Cooke of ippr sought to mix New and blue to see what a resulting programme for government might look like. Prescribing a greater share of the nation’s wealth going to wages rather than profits might be one such outcome, and something that might catch the eye of the ‘squeezed middle’ in a concrete way.

Meanwhile, at the blue-only end of the spectrum, Taxpayers’ Alliance staffers have also been moving onwards and upwards, graduating to work for Tory bedfellows in Whitehall departments and taking time out to run the successful No2AV campaign. The TPA has always benefited from its niftily grassroots-sounding name, which evokes more a rally of black cab drivers, fuel protesters and Tea Partyers upstairs in a pub in Chelmsford than the denizen of SW1 that it is. It has maintained a high profile thanks to a rent-a-quote relationship with a media who can always rely on the Alliance to condemn any item of public spending large or small. Catching on to this fact, the Other Taxpayers’ Alliance devised the online random TaxPayers’ Alliance Quote Generator where you can create your own Daily Mail-esque headlines at will. The targets in the TPA’s sights are not universal, however. LabourList recently reported the deafening silence over David Cameron’s £700,000 refurbishment of Downing Street. Only after a blogpost and a barrage of tweeting was mild criticism of the prime minister extracted from the jaws of the Alliance. In this up-and-down world of politics, it helps to have friends who have your back. A little hand-up goes a long way, as the ‘squeezed middle’ in the world beyond Westminster know.

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