With Labour potentially on the brink of a historic general election victory, the hard-fought question of what the party stands for has taken on an immediate, practical relevance.
At the outset of this twisty political history, Jon Cruddas, the outgoing MP for Dagenham and Rainham, admits he is not a neutral observer of Labour’s battle of ideas. His central claim is that Labour’s purpose cannot be reduced to a single statement or slogan – but embraces three distinct ideas of justice, whose hold on the party has ebbed and flowed over time.
First there is what he calls the “statist, labourist tradition of distributional justice” – who gets what – which he links to trade unions, and complains has too often dominated Labour thinking. Second, there is the pursuit of liberty, which Cruddas traces all the way back to Magna Carta. He sees the fruits of this strand of Labour thought in a slew of progressive legal and constitutional reforms, from equal pay to the Human Rights Act. Third, and closest to his heart, is an unfashionable concern with “virtue”, or what it takes to create a good society.
In his retelling of Labour’s tumultuous century of existence, it is when these three distinct traditions have been woven together that the party has been able to appeal most strongly to voters – and crucially, retain its sense of purpose in government.
Weighing up past leaders, Cruddas singles out Clement Attlee, John Smith and Tony Blair – in the first term of his premiership – as successfully representing all three strands of the party’s identity.
Rejecting the caricature of Attlee as “statist, technocratic and utilitarian”, he cites a speech the great postwar premier gave to the US Congress in 1945, in which he linked Labour with “those who fought for Magna Carta, habeus corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers and with the signatories of the Declaration of Independence”, and also spoke of “a world as orderly as a well-run town, with citizens diverse in character but cooperating for the common good”.
Smith picked up the thread before his untimely death, promising to build what he called “positive liberty – the freedom to achieve that is gained through education, healthcare, housing and employment”.
By contrast, Cruddas blames the tumult of the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments partly on what he calls “orthodox thinking”, which saw socialism as primarily about “a politics of redistribution” which “could not deliver without growth to redistribute”.
He claims that Blair – for whom he worked – married the three conceptions of justice in what he grandly calls a “triptych”, giving New Labour a clear political identity. The fruits of a long economic boom allowed for significant transfers towards the poorest once Labour was in power, while the government also enacted constitutional reform and human rights legislation. But Cruddas laments that “what began as a vibrant mix of political traditions dramatically diminished over time”. Instead of trying to remake the British economy, he argues, New Labour opted for “remedial cash transfers to the poor under the misplaced belief in unending growth”.
Cruddas exhorts Labour’s current leader not to allow his party’s defining mission to be reduced to “questions of utility”, at the expense of “deeper moral or spiritual questions and concerns for human liberty and freedom”. Rejecting the idea that Starmer is merely a Blair tribute act, Cruddas suggests that in his industrial policy and promise of more worker democracy, he is reaching back beyond New Labour, calling his stance “Wilsonian”. But he warns that, despite the commanding poll lead, something is missing, and urges Starmer to mine the party’s “rich radical tradition”. He must develop “a story of national renewal; one equipped with moral purpose”.
This dense history of ideas is not a breezy read – but it adds up to a heartfelt plea for pluralism from a Labour thinker whose parliamentary career is drawing to a close just as his party enters a new chapter.
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