High Profile
A Duty of Care
Paul Bickley
Few MPs have a bigger reputation for political passion and
integrity than
Dr Jon Cruddas. Third Way tracked him down to his office
in the old
Scotland Yard.
You have often spoken about your family. How did it shape
you?
I was one of five. My mother’s from Donegal, my dad’s from
Yorkshire – he was a sailor and she met him when he was at a naval
base in Derry. We were brought up on various naval bases, and then
in Portsmouth. We were very close. Irish Catholic.
It was the classic story, really. My parents left school very
early, so there was a sense of the search for education, to give us
opportunities that they never had – not to accumulate more, just to
be (purportedly) wiser and more knowledgeable. That was very
strong in-ground.
And we all went to college. Of the five kids, there were three
or four MAs, a couple of PhDs. But not everyone went into public
service – my middle brother joined the Carmelites.
Was that Catholicism a practised faith?
Oh yeah! It was quite devout. My mum looked after all the
neighbours, the priest came round for lunch, we were all altar boys
– it was very strong. But we were brought up more in terms of quite
practical concerns around duty, obligation, service.
So, when today you talk about ‘solidarity’…
Yeah, it wasn’t from the tablets of stone handed down by
Marxist theology, you know what I mean? It wasn’t an abstract
notion of solidarity on the industrial production line. It was
much more driven by Catholic social teaching. Concern for others
was just in-ground in us, really. You didn’t know anything other –
it was just the way it was. I mean, I wouldn’t have it any other
way!
Did Marxism shape your thinking?
Yeah, it did, it did. When I was young. I was very interested
in Marxism for a long time – in different Marxisms. And then in
the end I wasn’t, because in the end [politics] has to be anchored
in the everyday. You know, New Left thinking ended up
deconstructing everything, which was just useless.
You would be regarded now as very much a critic of the whole
New Labour project, and yet at first you were right at the heart of
it, weren’t you?
Oh, absolutely. I was massively supportive of what Blair was
doing from ’94 up to about 2001. New Labour then spoke in a really
rich, warm language about reciprocity and duty. It had a really
inspiring message, I thought. Still do, by the way. That’s what we
need to reclaim.
There was a kind of religiosity about New Labour. Do you think
that was accidental?
Oh no, I don’t think it was accidental at all. I think it was
deep within it. The interesting thing about Labour at its best,
compared with other forms of European social democracy, was that
it didn’t have a specific denomination and wasn’t specifically
secular. It included all of those elements and could be genuinely
pluralist – and from ’94 to 2001 New Labour was authentically
Labour.
But then that was
sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism, which has a conception
of the human being as a calculating rational economic unit, really,
rather than as embedded in social relationships and communities
and families, which is how I think of us. And Blair himself – his
early speeches were really interesting philosophically, but I
think his ‘journey’, so to speak, should have gone in the other
direction.
You see, in the early stages what he acknowledged was the
consequences of capitalism. My view has always been quite simple,
right? That capitalism is (as [Karl] Polanyi said) a ‘double
movement’: it’s a brutal, rapacious force that destroys
relationships, destroys families, destroys communities, but at
the same time creates countervailing forces that seek to nurture
families and communities.
New Labour at its best acknowledged the dangers of the
commodification of our culture, our children, our families, and it
sought to conserve things; but by the end it cherished that
commodification. In our second and third term, it became
preoccupied with a very one-dimensional notion of aspiration,
based around the purchase and consumption of things, driven by
economic growth and pitched in the South-East. By 2005, there was a
really empty materialism at its heart, rather than a sense of
solidarity and concern for others. Which, actually, Blair had.
That was a hallmark of New Labour at its best, a really
contemporary communitarian politics; but it became individual and
atomised, its language became harsh and authoritarian and it lost
the ability to talk about relationships and community.
You have yourself spoken sometimes about the idea of a broken
covenant, which is a word with religious connotations. When you use
that word, what do you mean by it?
Well, it goes beyond a simple trade or transaction.
Absolutely. It implies a sense of duty, though it’s not
necessarily religious. I think that things are going to get so bad
in this country that it’s incumbent on Labour to come up with
something radical and alternative. We need to re-embed a sense of
obligation to provide housing, education, health, whatever – but
also a modern sense of nationhood, a sense of belonging in a world
of profound change, you know?
Now, that is very difficult – it’s very difficult – and you can
only do it if you have a fundamental identity, a creed, a soul.
Otherwise, people will think it’s just an exercise in positioning
and there’s nothing enduring in it. I think that’s the danger, that
people feel that about us now. They might have a residual
attachment to the Labour Party but it’s creaking, and what we have
to do is get on that journey to actually define what we are. If you
accept that Labour is in crisis tantamount to [those of] ’31 and
’81, there is no immediate reshuffling of policies that is going
to resolve it. It’s a much deeper decay that has to be remedied.
There has been a rupture with key elements of the population who
can no longer understand what Labour is. I don’t understand what
it is at the moment.
I think [David] Cameron has managed to do a bit of that for his
party, but not enough – he’s not radical enough, not enough of a
moderniser, and he’s letting go of some of this ‘big society’ stuff
and the danger is that the Thatcherites will win out.
At what point did you first feel about New Labour, ‘This is
going a bit sour. We need to stop and rethink things’?
To me, the real turning-point was the issue of differential
top-up fees in the second term. You know, it was a supply-side,
human-capital story rather than a search for wiser citizens, and
that signalled to me a fuller embrace of a model of individuals as
economic actors. And with that went the more systematic
appropriation of the focus group as the driver of political
positioning.
But the solution is not to throw out New Labour, it’s to reoccupy
that space where it was good, pulling together again those
elements that were radical in its confrontation with the relentless
commodification of our world.
You are a politician who thinks globally but sees very local
implications. You’ve often said that what is highest on your agenda
is not what is going on in Westminster but what is happening in
Barking & Dagenham.
Well, in one sense our part of London is a microclimate for
globalisation. It’s got the lowest-cost housing market in greater
London, so it’s seen extraordinary demographic changes, and at
the same time we’ve seen a lot of the effects of the decline of
manufacturing, the lack of a housing strategy – and these are all
generic forces but they ricochet through our community because of a
particular combination of factors. Barking is an interesting place
from which to view the world, because it’s intense and
extreme.
There is also extremism, as a result of the lack of hope, a
sense of deep loss of a sense of belonging in a period of profound
change, and the sense of anger that goes with it. You see the
relentless commodification of the world at the local level – it’s
not an abstract thing. And its consequences have to be confronted:
the disintegration of family, of culture, and the proliferation of
other forms of what are euphemistically called ‘symptoms of
our social recession’ – or ‘broken Britain’.
As an MP, what do you feel you can do?
I find it very difficult. We have been pretty successful in
local elections and general elections, you know, but that is a very
defensive thing, about blocking [extremism] rather than creating a
more optimistic, positive route-map through it. At the moment, it
is really about holding a line. But, you know, I know a lot of
people who vote BNP and these people are not booted and suited
Nazis. They are people who feel threatened and vulnerable. And that
needs to be respected and we need to have answers and remedies.
The problem with New Labour was that our take on globalisation
meant that we belittled people who were its fall guys. So, the
first thing to do is to acknowledge where we went wrong, not to
trash our record but to say: We need to reclaim this territory and
reanchor ourselves in everyday experience, as Labour has always
done, and then to build illustrative policies, or testimonies or
allegories or stories, out of it. Not to retreat further into
liberal righteousness, but to re-engage in the mainstream of
popular culture.
You have to remember that a lot of these issues have arisen
against the backdrop of 15 years – 60 quarters – of economic
growth. We’re only really beginning to see the impact of [what
happened after Lehman Brothers became insolvent in 2008], the
first little skirmishes with the students; but the deeper effects
of the political responses to the crisis haven’t been seen yet.
There is a major realignment of the centre-right, a major assault
on the whole public realm – a major ideological assault as well
through the notion of what constitutes a ‘big’ society. The
Coalition carries it light, but the effects of this will be
dramatic and I think will alter the whole character of this country
over the next few years.
Do you think a more confrontational politics is in store for
us?
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt – and I think it’ll be played out
around issues of culture, family, faith and race, you know, rather
than education, health… You can see the way it is being reframed
now across Western market economies, with the whole thing about
‘the other’ – the other constituency being Islam. I think it’s
going to be quite dangerous and brittle and uncomfortable for
years, besides the consequences of these economic cuts and, you
know, the coarsening of the language, the demonisation of the weak
and vulnerable. The whole of our culture will be affected by it, in
an as yet unpredictable way. I’m not awash with optimism, I’m
afraid.
I was talking to someone the other day, 88 years old, who
remembered the hunger queues in Manchester [in the 1930s], and he
said: ‘Thank God there’s no Mosley out there at the moment!’ You
know, we may be seeing the end of the BNP, but the trouble is, what
comes in behind them? There are hidden forces behind the English
Defence League that want a street militia. And they want something
deeper as well, in terms of a major realignment.
How can we restore that sense of solidarity you speak of to
the heart of mainstream politics?
Well, I think the evidence is that it’s how people already
live their lives. There’s a lot of empirical evidence that it’s
exactly how people live.
I’ll give you an example. The local council has a policy to
make people look after their front gardens, right? And one guy
says: ‘You can’t make me. It’s my garden.’ And you see these
abstract debates about liberalism and communitarian philosophy that
have dominated political philosophy for years played out in that
front garden. Where do you draw your line on that? For me, the
covenant is with the street, not with his ownership. But others
disagree. In my own party there are those who would say: ‘No, no,
no, his aspiration is to do what he wants with his front garden.’
Now, there are boundaries in all this, and proportionality; but
unless we have a sense of a common good, a life that we share, and
unless the institutional arrangements that mediate between us seek
to replicate that sense, I think we’re in trouble.
But that is controversial!
You said that you’re ‘not awash with optimism’. Where do you
find any sense of hope?
I would say, in the possibilities of returning to fundamental
questions of philosophy and society, about what we are, what we
want to be, what we want to nurture, the forms of just institutions
we want to create to allow people to realise their different
potentials.
Now, what is interesting is that this is more a debate on the
right at the moment. Jesse Norman has written a book called The Big
Society1 which is a critique of neo-classical political economy
from the right, which tries to embrace a warmer politics of
solidarity. I don’t see a lot of that on the left, but that’s where
we have to be – and that’s why I’m interested in the notion of the
good society.
Who can you have a conversation with about these ideas in
your party, as one might with Phillip Blond2 on the Tory side?
There’s Maurice Glasman,3 but he’s not really –
He will be. He’s the guy. He’s just been put in the Lords and
I’ve got no doubt that over the next few years he will be our point
man philosophically in a lot of this. I hope he is. I do quite a
few things with him and when he talks, people say: ‘Whoa! What’s
all this about?’ But their second thought is: ‘Actually, this is
very interesting.’ I think he’s discovering a political language
that is very threatening to a lot of Labour orthodoxies, but it may
prove popular as well and I think Labour will end up there. The
question is whether it will be a long or a short journey – and I
hope it’s short.
So, Phillip Blond interests me, Jesse Norman interests me, this
whole ‘big society’ thing; compassionate Conservatism interests me
a lot. And Labour needs the equivalent [conversation], to shine a
light on where we have to go. That’s how I look at it. Whether we
will or not is up for grabs, but Ed Miliband referred to the good
society three or four times in his inaugural speech [as party
leader], and in that there is hope.
You see, to me the way you confront this reframing of politics
from the hard right around race and identity is not to retreat to a
liberal, metropolitan disposition aligned with bits of the public
sector. That’s deadly politically, because you’re never going to
get across the line. You have to go back to broader sentiments that
have occupied Labour for generations. I think that actually
allows us to be proud of who we are again. It anchors us in our own
history and recreates a connection with people in the everyday, an
ability to talk about what we want to do. And out of that comes
what Ed Miliband calls our ‘optimism’. And it could be crystallised
around this notion of a good society.
Now, you’re joining a lot of dots there, aren’t you? But that’s
the political task at hand, it seems to me.
You supported David Miliband for the Labour leadership on the
basis (if I recall rightly) that in the past you had mistakenly
voted for people who shared your views, but now you vote for people
who could ‘get Labour across the line’. Isn’t that part of the
problem you had with New Labour, though, that in the end it was all
a matter of electoral calculation?
I think you’ve put your finger on the dilemma of being
involved in party-political dialogue. You see, the search for
purity doesn’t interest me, because it’s an indulgence. I mean, I
can search for purity because I’ve got nothing to lose – you know,
I’m pretty well paid, and settled; but we have to win. So, for me
the question is: How can we build a new coalition in and around
Labour that has the coherence to win? I didn’t see that much
difference between the different candidates, apart from Diane
[Abbott], so for me the bottom line was: Who would probably get the
best response from the public? And that is basically a
calculation.
But also, I think, more than any of the other candidates, in the
campaign David began to look for a rehabilitation of some of those
best bits of Blair – which I think is the task at hand, really.
He also more or less
repeated Blond’s argument about the need to ‘recapitalise’ the
poor.
Absolutely. And that’s not just about handouts – there is a
much more radical element of redistribution. Now, are we going to
go that way, in contrast to orthodox New Labour approaches to
welfare reform? The jury’s out. Don’t know. But David showed more
signs of being prepared…
But that’s conjecture now – and he might have just hit the
rewind button and become, you know, the continuity candidate.
You’ve reportedly just turned down a series of offers of promotion
within the parliamentary party…
I don’t want anything – I’m very happy doing what I do. And I
don’t see any point in trading up now, because it’s to trade up
what? For me, the question is: What are we? That interests me – not
in an abstract way, either, but in a very concrete way.
What lies ahead is fairly dark, and that’s what gets me
going.
1 Published by the University of Buckingham Press on
November 5.
2 The director of the think tank ResPublica, who
advocates ‘red Toryism’.
3 The ‘father of blue Labour’, now Lord Glasman of
Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill, is senior lecturer in political
theory at London Metropolitan University and director of its faith
and citizenship programme. He advocates ‘a deeply conservative
socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new
politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity’.