[11] The movement has influenced a handful of Labour MPs and frontbenchers; founder Maurice Glasman served as a close ally to Ed Miliband during his early years as Leader of the Opposition, before himself becoming a life peer in the House of Lords.

Blue Labour argues that the party lost touch with its base by embracing anti-patriotism in the face of Brexit[14] and by undermining solidarity in local communities through bureaucratic collectivism, social agendas, and neoliberal economics.

The group further advocates a switch to local and democratic community management and provision of services, rather than relying on a top-down welfare state which it sees as excessively bureaucratic.

Additional elucidations on Blue Labour's ideas can be found in The Purple Book (2011) by Robert Philpot and Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2020) by Paul Embery.

[18] The London Metropolitan University academic Maurice Glasman launched Blue Labour in April 2009 at a meeting in Conway Hall, Bloomsbury.

[19] The philosophical basis of Blue Labour is a combination of Aristotelianism (especially the concept of virtue) with the critique of market society developed by the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi.

[23] Blue Labour sees the EU as a centralising force which limits the capacity for democratic decision-making about life in the UK.

[25][26] At a fringe meeting of the 2011 Labour Party Conference, Glasman reaffirmed some of these statements on immigration, argued for half of Britain's universities to be converted to vocational colleges and criticised the power of public-sector trade unions.

Praising the role of Ernest Bevin in developing the German economic model after the Second World War, he described the SPD as Labour's most important sister party outside the Commonwealth.

He contrasted the British post-war consensus negatively with the German model, saying the latter was closer to the pre-war Labour ethos of solidarity than the collectivism of Attlee, which he described as a continuation of wartime planning.

It talks of how Glasman was initially working for David Miliband's campaign and put forward ideas on much more community devolution and the Movement for Change.

The book is another collection of essays on topics ranging from political philosophy to an analysis of European models of capitalism and to immigration in Britain from a theoretical position that is for the most part indebted to Catholic social teaching.