Ken Coates MEP has been described (in the Guardian, so it must be true) as a "lost genius" of the labour movement. I think that what they meant was that he could have been so much more influential if only he had abandoned all those silly old ideas about workers' rights, the welfare state, nuclear disarmament and that sort of guff.

Anyway, when a genius speaks out, lost or otherwise, you'd expect people to want to listen to what he has to say. So I'd thought there might be something more in the paper that gave him that monicker than a paid advertisement to mark the launch of his Independent Labour Network's "May Day Manifesto".

There was certainly no shortage of Labour-oriented comment in the Guardian on that day and the next. There was Tony Blair himself celebrating his first year in government as "a good start . . . no complacency . . . a lot of progress still to be made". There was the Guardian's own leader, less restrainedly, praising "a golden year . . . perhaps the most successful first year of any administration in British political history". And there was Michael White over a whole page and David Marquand over two looking back at the triumphs of Year One and looking forward to those yet to come.

But of Ken Coates and the May Day Manifesto, not a jot or a tittle. The genius had been well and truly lost.

I note this absence not because Ken Coates (and his colleague Hugh Kerr MEP, the other co-founder of the Independent Labour Network) represent the ultimate in socialist analysis after the first year of the New Labour government, but as an indication of how narrowly circumscribed political discourse has become. If even the Guardian -- which is thought of as a sort of Trotskyite cell in some New Labour circles -- thinks that the likes of Ken Coates and Hugh Kerr have nothing of interest to say on the future of the labour movement, then we really are in danger of seeing the whole of political debate shunted onto a closed territory of the centre.

Writing in the Guardian on May Day, Tony Blair referred to creating "a new coalition of support". Like so much of the Blairite project, this wasn't very precisely defined. "We brought together traditional Labour supporters and new support," he wrote, in what passed as his analysis of the election landslide, but without telling us who the "new support" comprises. (Actually, the detailed breakdown of voting patterns suggests that there wasn't very much "new support" of any description for Labour last May, and that the party won, first, because significant sections of its traditional support returned to the fold after some years absence, and second, because large numbers of Tories simply gave up.)

The reality is that Tony Blair is seeking permanently to shift the nature of the Labour coalition, dropping the left, the trade unions and, in the process, large parts of the old centre and right of the Labour Party in favour of this still vague and vacuous notion of "new support". And this idea of being able to appeal to a kind of common-sense centrism -- capitalism with a conscience -- transcending the politics of left and right (hence the "Third Way", which Robin Cook so emptily embraced in his Social Market Foundation lecture a fortnight ago), is what lies behind the exclusion -- intellectually as much as organisationally -- of Ken Coates and company.

"My only promise has ever been," Tony Blair wrote in his Guardian piece. "I will never let the party slip back to the days of the late 70s and early 80s when a small group of utterly unrepresentative people hijacked the party and virtually tipped it into extinction." Now there were many things wrong with the Labour Party at that time, and some of those who called themselves the left must take their full share of the blame for that. But no "small group of utterly unrepresentative people" succeeded in hijacking the party then -- unless we are to believe that James Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the elected leaders of that period, were somehow mere cyphers for something more sinister -- and no amount of harking on about "new support" is going to change the essential nature of the Labour coalition today.

Look at how Tony Blair described that new support. "It has a social conscience . . . It recognises that we also need economic efficiency . . . It doesn't want penal rates of taxation . . . It does want strong defence and law and order." This is not political discourse: it is crass aunt-sallyism. Where, tell us, are the people, on the left or right or their own personal third ways, who would say the opposite? Who would stand on a May Day Manifesto declaring "We have no social conscience . . . We need economic inefficiency . . . We want weak defence and no law and order"? The arguments in the Labour Party (and the political sphere more generally) are about how best to achieve these things, not about whether we want them at all.

I have more than a sneaking suspicion that the Independent Labour Network will go the same way as so many other small splinters from the Labour mainstream. But at least Ken Coates & Co are keeping the flame of socialist discourse flickering. It's just a pity that the space for such discussion to flourish has shrunk so very consdierably.