Turning Point for Britain's Labour Party
As an elected politician with his own base, Cruddas was always going to be the dominant member of this triumvirate. Yet it is his credibility and career, almost as much as Miliband’s, that are at risk if Labour fails to regain power—or if Labour merely regains power. Graf can always return to Baltimore. Glasman has the academy—and a life peerage. For Cruddas, there is only politics. Can Britain really shift from the emollient neoliberalism of Blair and Cameron to a different model based on mutual obligation, where prosperity doesn’t always trump equality? Has the financial crisis opened new possibilities for social and economic organization—or just left governments to referee the bankruptcy of the old order? Though Cruddas is circumspect in his language, there is no mistaking the radicalism of his ambition. Or his delight in being called back to the front line.
About the Author
D.D. Guttenplan
“I never thought this opportunity would come around,” he says. “I thought it had gone.” We are sitting in Cruddas’s office in one of the more remote corridors of Portcullis House, across the street from the Palace of Westminster. On the shelves behind his desk, I see copies of Rawls, Marcuse’s Negations, Ernest Gellner, Trotsky, Marx and Richard Dawkins. How did he get here?
“We were Irish-Catholic working-class Labour,” Cruddas says. “I joined the Labour Party; my brother joined the Carmelites. But I have a bit of an uncomfortable relationship with the Catholic Church—to say the least.” A product of Britain’s state-funded Catholic parochial system, Cruddas left school early and went to Australia, where he worked in construction. Eventually, he enrolled at Warwick University, graduated with a degree in economics, completed his master’s and then embarked on a PhD on “value theories in economics,” spending the two years after Thatcher won her third election victory at the University of Wisconsin.
“I had a research fellowship at Madison, because I’d run out of money,” he said. “I took Erik Olin Wright’s Marxism course, and [Nation contributing editor] Joel Rogers was teaching it, so I went along and sat in the back.” Returning to Britain, Cruddas got a job in the Labour Party research department, “which was historically the battleground in the party between the left and the right.” Recruited onto Blair’s staff after Labour’s 1997 victory, Cruddas worked on Britain’s first national minimum-wage law and helped to roll back some of the Thatcher era’s anti-union legislation before leaving in 2001 to run for Parliament from Dagenham, a town built around what was once the largest Ford factory in Europe. “You could see the party becoming more orthodox; the energy was drying up. I thought it was time to get out,” Cruddas says.
Dagenham’s story over the past half-century—from a factory workforce of 40,000 in the 1950s to less than 4,000 today—has been one of steady deindustrialization and decline. Yet the plant was also the site of the 1968 strike by women workers, dramatized in the film Made in Dagenham, that led to the passage of Britain’s first equal-pay legislation. By 2010, the far-right British National Party held twelve seats on the local council—until a campaign led by Cruddas and the anti-fascist group Searchlight brought about a complete rout of the BNP. It was one of the few bright spots in the election that brought David Cameron to power.
All members of Parliament like to talk about their constituencies. For most, though, the local connection is simply a flag of convenience—a place to rent a flat, open a constituency office and spend as little time as possible away from the real business in Westminster. Dagenham may not be the center of Cruddas’s universe, but with its mix of immigrants lured by what he calls “the cheapest housing market in London” and working-class survivors from Britain’s industrial heyday, the town is never far from his thoughts.
“I was at Dagenham Boxing Club last night, which is my favorite place in the world. It’s the most elite sporting institution I’ve ever come across; we’ve got future British champions. And it is the most socially inclusive model I’ve ever come across—drug rehabilitation projects, men, women, black, white. Last night, we had these real tasty Lithuanian kids. West African fighters. A bloke who is fighting for the British championship. This is the total Big Society,” he says.
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The nod to Cameron’s Big Society—an early campaign slogan meant to emphasize a compassionate conservatism abandoned long ago to the merciless calculus of austerity—is no accident. Cruddas is one of the few confessed admirers of the Big Society, and even of its political progenitor, George W. Bush’s July 1999 Indianapolis speech on “The Duty of Hope.” Government, the young Texas governor reminded his fellow Republicans, “is not the enemy of the American people. At times it is wasteful and grasping. But we must correct it, not disdain it. Government must be carefully limited, but strong and active and respected within those bounds. It must act in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need.”
“A brilliant speech,” says Cruddas. “Delivered in the same place as Bobby Kennedy’s ‘Mindless Menace of Violence’ speech” after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. “Not dissimilar speeches—they all talk about ethics, duty, hope, all refracted through little stories. It’s incumbent upon us to work out how they [conservatives] colonize language, offer hope, and counterpose that to our desiccated transactional, managerial project. So that can be reversed again…. I don’t love that speech as an embrace of Bush, but as a pitch-perfect model of political storytelling and warmth.” He pauses, then adds: “And look where that ended up.”
The sardonic twist at the end is a salutary reminder that Cruddas is no romantic. His job is to come up with a program and a set of policies that will win Labour the next election. In early April, the polls put Labour ahead of the Tories by 42 to 28 percent, with 12 percent for the Liberal Democrats and 11 for the UK Independence Party—the anti-European refuge for many disgruntled Tories.
“The basic fault line in Labour is ‘Well, if we keep our mouths shut, we might win.’ This is our biggest poll lead in a decade,” says Cruddas. “But we’ve just come off of our worst defeat since 1918. The notion that you do nothing about that is disrespectful to the electorate. Where is the reckoning? Where is the acknowledgment?”
