And so, with an almost Blairite soundbite emanating from Neal Lawson's lips, along comes the hot topic of the moment on the Labour blogosphere. Compass - the group hoping to inspire a New Labour: The Next Generation.

I've held back from commenting much on Compass until now, as the group is still, even after well over two years, very much a work-in-progress. Its much-anticipated manifesto is not due to be published until the Autumn and so many criticisms at this stage will necessarily be based on the group's mood music, its personnel, its apparent means more than its stated ends.

Indeed, almost all the criticism I've seen on the blogosphere has been centred on Compass chair Neal Lawson. It's been variously his apparent love of the limelight (regular appearances on Newsnight, comment pieces in the Guardian, spamming all our in-boxes), his over-reliance on rhetoric, soundbites and clichés, and his call for Blair to go. If all the Compass critics can offer are thinly-disguised ad hominem attacks in lieu of a constructive critique of an unpublished agenda, then maybe it should be time to hold fire.

If Lawson is being too loose with his tongue, and I think it's certainly possible that he is, it doesn't change the fact that it is ill-considered to make attacks on him personally rather than the aims of the group he chairs. The politics of personality seem to matter more to some than what may well become a radical manifesto when it is finally published. Pre-emptively turning your back on a group before their ideas are fully formed does nobody any good.

In the handful of issues Compass has been active so far (primarily party renewal and education), they do appear to have been successful in reaching out to a certain type of party member - people somewhere in between Blair's ever-onwards march rightwards and, say, the hard left's head in the sand "principled opposition" stance, people who supported the party leadership in the first term, who wish to see Labour values inculcated in society at large but are not overly bothered about the ways and means taken to achieve this.  

In this, it seems Compass are advocating something similar to what David Cameron's superficial prima facie aims are for his re-branding of the Conservatives.  Continue the aims of New Labour, but with a more effective managerial bent, and one equipped to cope with 21st century problems rather than those of the mid 1990s. The centre ground of politics has moved left over the last nine years thanks to New Labour, but the party has failed to either realise this or keep up with these societal changes. The Tories would have had no chance of re-election if they'd not (at least nominally) taken a different tack from pushing ever rightwards, so why does Blair think Labour will be any different?

Overall, then, it seems Compass (on the limited evidence put forward so far) have managed to strike a chord with those in the party most in tune with what the public at large want - a social democratic governing party, strong on managerial acumen, with a strong ideological underpinning, but pragmatic enough to realise that the models of both the Thatcherite right and the hard left fail to achieve a suitably just economic and social settlement for all.

What they seem to need now is space to formulate pragmatically minded policy ideas designed to achieve further egalitarianism - taking the aims and ideals of New Labour and seeking new ways of achieving them in light of the successes (and failures) of the last nine years. The last thing they need right now is criticism from the right of the party for their falsely perceived "old Labour" tendencies and criticism from the rest of us for a few false starts and a few mis-hits.