When blue Labour first emerged it resembled, according to Sunder Katwala, ‘a cult band given quasi-legendary status precisely because it broke up before recording anything’.

The band has been back in the recording studio, and the result is Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics, a new collection of essays from prominent blue Labour thinkers. The problem is that, except for a few notable interventions, the record plays like a cassette in the age of Spotify.

The blue Labour critique of where Labour went wrong in office is simple enough – politics has been too quick to do things to and for people, rather than with them; too top-down; and too managerial. This led to communities feeling humiliated and with a sense of loss and betrayal.

From this broad critique, good ideas begin to emerge, particularly from the parliamentarians aligned with blue Labour. Jon Cruddas, whose policy review document should continue to define Labour thought and policy throughout Ed Miliband’s premiership, is the most prominent. Maurice Glasman provides a number of practical suggestions, such as the democratisation of institutions would mean boards are made up of one-third funders, one-third workers, and one-third users.

But away from these key thinkers, the debate on the fringes of blue Labour is marked by a misunderstanding of what it is that people have lost. The common blue Labour suggestion is that the void can be filled by the comfort of tradition and virtue informed by religious ethics. It is true that Labour owes more to Methodism than Marxism, but in modern Britain rigid dogmas rarely mix well with Labour’s hopes of a fairer country.

What blue Labour misunderstands is that it is not tradition which working people want back, but a stake in society. The common thread which runs through most of the challenges Britain faces is inequality of power; a frustration from people that they lack the opportunity to change the communities and services they use for their own – not a top-down – common good, which has made us insecure and uncertain of the future.

For a long time, redistribution of wealth was enough to neutralise the worst inequalities. But over the last 30 years the impact of market forces and managerial public services has been to erode that idea of a stake in society. Labour is now limited by the realisation that a centralised politics can no longer make things better on its own.

Similarly, blue Labour flourishes when it wriggles free of the theological prescribed idea of what virtue or the common good is. Broader themes of mutualism, people-powered public services and stronger trade unions are vehicles for giving a stake in society back to the people. They have undoubtedly emerged from the original blue Labour debates, but they have more in common with the ethical socialism and communitarianism of Labour in the early 1990s than abstract notions of virtue.

The insistence on justifying policy ideas in tradition and religious virtue means that the presentational problems the movement had in the early half of this parliament now look more like serious faults in its foundations. Three of the 16 chapters in the new book are written by women; not only doing little to challenge assumptions that blue Labour is a model of politics for and by men, it also reveals the underlying problem with most of the grouping’s ideology – it can be deeply alienating.

It also understates the importance of social changes made by the type of groups outside conventional politics – and outside religion – which blue Labour otherwise champions as the future of politics (think community organising). The chapter on family values runs very close to the social conservatism of the Tory right, presenting as problematic the gains made by the feminist movement in ‘removing all obstacles, biological and familial, to [mothers’] re-entry into the workplace’.

Blue Labour has contributed greatly to Labour’s programme for government but it is in danger of cornering itself into a position which cannot hold in a pluralist age. Glasman and Cruddas realise (as, crucially, does Ed Miliband) that what people have lost is not simply tradition but a stake in how society and the economy are run. Accepting that the people who have abandoned the Labour movement in favour of the populist-nationalist parties on both our right and left are doing so because they feel powerless is the first step. The second step is much harder, but Labour’s plan for government is committed to handing power back. The answer can never be to halt progress, as the conservatism of blue Labour hints at – it can only be to do things differently.

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Alex White is a member of Progress. He tweets @AlexWhiteUK

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Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics

Edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst

IB Tauris | 288pp | £14.99