Turning Point for Britain's Labour Party
Cruddas says he understands the resistance in Labour to self-examination, “partly because of the scarring that occurred in the ’80s,” when the party tore itself apart after every defeat. Also, at least during Blair’s early years in power, New Labour’s accommodation with capital seemed to deliver. “It allowed you to control the center ground politically,” Cruddas says. It also “allowed you to engage in a Faustian pact with finance capital, the City of London, which was the engine of growth that you could mildly redistribute off the back of. Then people say, ‘Can’t we just rebuild that model?’ Is it indulgent to go into all this heavy lifting and thinking at the expense of the day-to-day battles in Westminster?”
About the Author
D.D. Guttenplan
His own view “is that an epochal moment of social transformation demands new thinking. Especially when it lands on your watch. And especially when it undermines all of the central premises of your project, in terms of your collaboration with finance capital. That growth model. That fiscal transfer model.”
Which is where Cruddas and his policy review come in—and what makes this such an interesting moment in British politics. Thanks to the coalition government’s decision to fix the date of the next election in May 2015, the Labour Party has a luxury enjoyed by no previous opposition in British history: time to think. How will it use that time? Partly to answer Arnie Graf’s question: “What can political parties accomplish when they can’t make laws?” The idea is to open up a system designed to discourage participation by making politics relevant to people’s lives—which, initially at least, means making it local. Graf says that wherever he goes in Britain, people complain about the proliferation of payday lenders and legal loan sharks. “Some of the ideas we’ve come up with aren’t new, like collective switching”—organizing to buy gas and electricity as a group to save money and encourage green power. “But they’ve never been done by a political party before,” he adds.
Cruddas, too, begins locally. However, when asked whether Labour really has no grander vision, he rises to the challenge. “The notion of economic rights is something Labour has always run away from. But I find it quite interesting. Job guarantees: if you get into a rights/responsibilities framework from both the bottom and the top, where you talk about tax avoidance and welfare reform—they’re not equivalent, but you frame it that way. Can you then take that further in terms of really contesting economic power?”
What might that look like? Speaking in Newcastle in April, Miliband promised to give local government greater power to crack down on landlords who overcharge or fail to properly maintain rental housing. He also said Labour would introduce compulsory jobs guarantees for able-bodied adults and young people, paid for by a tax on bank bonuses and by reversing the present government’s tax relief for high earners. He also pledged to set up a government-backed British Investment Bank to support small and medium-size businesses—which would also be given incentives for taking on new employees.
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Cruddas himself has spent years arguing for massive public investment in new housing—and for using the government’s stake in Britain’s banks as a lever for economic regeneration. More recently, he floated the possibility that workers who lose their jobs could get more generous unemployment benefits than those who have never worked, to be repaid, like student loans, when they resume earning. Any of these ideas would represent a huge break with Blair’s legacy. First, though, Labour has to win the next election. “When you’re in opposition,” says Glasman, “theoretical power is real power.”
In June 2010, Cruddas brought the audience at Compass, a left pressure group, to its feet with what remains the best speech of his career. Rejecting calls from one former minister to “crack down on the welfare underclass,” and from another who urged the party to talk tough on immigration, Cruddas said that to adopt a “kiss-up, kick-down politics that blames the victim” would be “political death for Labour.” Instead, he called for a “root-and-branch policy review”—the same review he now leads. More than just a change in policies, Labour, he said, needed a “cultural reformation,” which could only come about through a rediscovery of the party’s deep roots in English radicalism.
Ask Cruddas about history, and his tall, stooped frame—which only a minute before had been drooping as he sleepily elaborated on the need to address “some of the architectural questions around bank reform and investment banking” (a coded allusion to trying to wrest some control over the economy from finance capital)—suddenly straightens up. “The history of the Labour Party is one long skirmish between two different traditions: the Independent Labour Party and the Fabians. The ILP were the romantic, anti-statist model built around human emancipation and self-realization, based on a reaction to capitalist commodification. And the Fabians, who basically won out in the 1930s, were the transactors, the lever-pullers, the owners of the calculus. And they’ve always won.
“The batt’l,” he says with an East London glottal stop, “is to reintroduce exiled traditions within Labour which are about human self-realization. What are the virtues that we want to nurture in people to allow them to live more rewarding lives?”
The stakes for Labour—and for Britain—have never been higher. For the first time in a generation, politics here offers more than a forced choice between managed decline and blind fealty to the market. The outpouring of emotion in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death revealed a country every bit as divided as it was when she was still in power—and along much the same lines. We are, indeed, all Thatcher’s children—but perhaps now that she has finally left the building, we can move beyond the sterile arguments about Europe, the unions and the limits of state intervention that have dominated British politics for the past thirty years and consider instead what this country, governed in the best interests of all its people, might become.
If that happens, Cruddas and his leader might bear in mind this scornful, yet prophetic, Nation report on Labour’s prospects as Thatcher first began to lose her grip. “Just how much of an alternative is Labour?” wondered the writer, a 19-year-old Nation intern. “Its leaders do continue to speak the language of social concern, yet their strategy is marked by extreme caution, an avoidance of any appearance of radicalism and a reluctance to argue for anything that might not command majority opinion-poll support. Of course, because of the government’s combination of dogmatism and ineptitude, this may not matter in opposition. But in power?”
The intern’s name: Edward Miliband.
In the April 9 issue, Gary Younge asked “How Did Margaret Thatcher Do It?”
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