‘Labour, to me, has always been a bit of a life sentence,” Jon Cruddas says. “I don’t get a lot of fun out of it.” The Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham is sitting in the atrium in Portcullis House opposite the Houses of Parliament, under one of the monitors that call MPs to vote. Periodically, it clangs loudly and we fall silent and wait for the pointless noise to pass. It’s a metaphor for late-capitalist democracy. Sorry, his disaffection is contagious. He seems cheerful on it, though.
The life sentence began in 1978 when he joined the party at 16. Participating in local politics in Portsmouth wasn’t the formative experience; more important was when he went to Australia, before university, and got involved with a construction union. His dad was a sailor from West Yorkshire and met his mum in Derry. “Classic, extraordinarily socially mobile generation,” he says of himself and his four siblings. “We had free education, free health, access to housing, access to work. How much of that is still available? We were very fortunate.”
That word “fortunate” is loaded: the Anglo-Irish Cruddases were lucky in the sense that those were good times, but, really, what is the point of a country that can’t deliver such benefits to its citizens? “Why shouldn’t the next generation have a right to those things?” he asks. “Why shouldn’t they have the right to a sustainable planet?”
Cruddas, 62, got a ton of that free education – BA, MA, PhD, all from the University of Warwick – and went to the US to teach for two years at the end of the 80s. Then, long before standing for parliament, he went to work for the Labour party.
It was 1989; Neil Kinnock was the leader. People tend to talk as though big thinking arrived with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which is fine – history is written by the victors – but wrong. “For all the talk that New Labour was about rupture and breaks with the past, there were continuities from Kinnock and [John] Smith to Blair that Blair didn’t want to acknowledge,” Cruddas says. A lot of the flagship policies had been in the works for years, notably the national minimum wage (NMW), of which Cruddas was one of the architects. He came out of the “pluralist labour law tradition” (which had its academic foothold in Warwick and at Nuffield College in Oxford, where he is now a visiting fellow) and liaised between the unions and Blair after Blair became leader in 1994.
He says with some pride: “The Resolution Foundation said in March that the minimum wage was the most successful industrial policy for the past 25 years.” It was also bitterly opposed by the Conservatives and the right-leaning media, all of whom said it was going to cost 2m jobs. It took Labour’s landslide to pass the National Minimum Wage Act, in 1998, but the times the party won big don’t seem to feature vividly in Cruddas’s memory. We talk about 1992 and how we were convinced Kinnock would beat John Major. “I thought we would win,” he says ruefully. “I perpetually think we’re going to win, but then we always lose.” That is understandable after the past decade and some, but “always” is a strong word.
That pride in the minimum wage is complicated: “We put it in at £3.60 an hour. It’s received some pretty significant rises and now it’s around 11 quid. And that’s informing some of the local authority funding crises, because of the NMW in the care sector.”
He often sounds more like an academic than a politician: more animated by losing than winning, more interested in unforeseen effects than unalloyed triumph. I’m not sure you would want him as a cheerleader, which is fortunate, as he has never been one of those for any Labour leader. And time is running out: he has announced he will be leaving parliament at the next election.
In 2001, he stood in what used to be called Dagenham, in east London, before boundary changes. This is the bit that doesn’t stack up in his narrative: “I never wanted to stand for parliament,” he says. So, erm, why?
“Do you remember when BMW pulled the plug on Rover in the West Midlands?” he begins. I don’t much, but I’ll tell you who do: people in the West Midlands. Anytime I have interviewed there, that moment in 1999 always comes up. Deindustrialisation changes an area – and everyone in it. The Ford plant in Dagenham “was the next one on the runway” and Cruddas was liaising between unions, the community and the employer to find a rescue plan. (In the end, Dagenham lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs.) The sitting MP announced her retirement, “then the music stopped and I was left standing there”.
He says he would “never trash New Labour”; any criticism he has “is always tempered by the Good Friday agreement. Blair could have walked away, but he didn’t – he gripped it.” Nevertheless, Cruddas was not part of a New Labour gang; he was disenchanted with the project before he even had a seat, feeling that its vision had narrowed on industrial policy.
“We weren’t doing enough to rebuild working-class communities and the economic and political power of working-class people,” he says. He gives a lot of wonky detail, but those are the broad strokes. There wasn’t a plan for low wages; there was a plan for child poverty. There wasn’t a plan for rebuilding the union movement after Thatcher; there was a plan for patching up declining job security with tax credits. (In fact, there was a plan for unionisation, but it didn’t work: “I don’t know why not. Statutory recognition procedures have never really worked.”)
He had been hoping Blair’s government would get more radical in its second term, as Thatcher’s did, but the opposite happened. He blames the electoral system – “they were preoccupied with swing voters and marginal seats and that had a corrosive effect” – and the Iraq war, although he didn’t oppose it at the time. “I had a sense of foreboding, but I had a loyalty to Blair. I had loads of family on all the marches. Every single one of them was against it. And I regret it. It was tragic. It detonated the government; it never recovered. Even though it won in 2005, its ethical quality had gone.”
But he sees a deeper failure here, “long before the red wall was invented”, to take seriously what postindustrialisation means for the human condition. Without power, leverage or security at work, where do you get your sense of self? There was a lot of rhetoric at the time about Living on Thin Air (a book by Labour’s resident thinker, Charlie Leadbetter), which held that making stuff was over and the industries of the future would be all films and finance and consultancy. That was true for some people, but it wasn’t true in Dagenham.
“I don’t want to be too deterministic about this, but what we’re dealing with today does not fall out of the sky,” he says. He is talking about the “Liz Truss roadshow”, the populist right that now dominates so many democracies including our own, and Brexit, of course, plus the performative cruelty that has become mainstream. “These are long-term effects of that failure: we’ve had flatlining wages for 15 years. We could have rebuilt the power of labour when we first got elected 30 years ago.”
The borough of Barking and Dagenham was the canary in the coalmine for the rise of the hard right. In 2004, the British National party won 52% of the vote in one ward in Barking. “Labour got 20-odd,” he says. “So it had the first BNP councillor in London for 12 years and then, in the 2006 local elections, the BNP got 12 councillors in Barking and Dagenham. We had this massive fight for years to kick them out. That became the preoccupation.”
One of his neighbouring MPs was Margaret Hodge, part of the same fight, but with a different sensibility. She came in for a large amount of antisemitic and misogynistic abuse during this period.
These were Cruddas’s Blue Labour years – the fashioning of a socially conservative, economically radical Labour identity. The movement sought to reclaim nationalism as a source of pride and motivation, rather than embarrassment and division, amid talk of rebuilding communities with a common purpose. I wasn’t wild about it, to be honest. It seemed always to hold an unspoken hierarchy of political legitimacy – based not on the nation you were born into, but on how much that nationality meant to you and how thrilled you were by it.
Plus, social conservatism and a sense of community always seem to have two bookends, only one of which is spoken – that men need dignity at work. The unspoken bit is that the idyll needs women to endure their bum-wiping responsibilities. Maybe I’m hearing things that aren’t there. It’s like a marriage, the Labour party, and sometimes not a very good one.
Cruddas is calm and trenchant. “Social democracy is so underpowered. It’s got a language of fairness and rights, whereas populism is driving forward around questions of humiliation, worth, esteem, dignity, disrespect. It just outpowers it. That problem of social democracy is being disguised by the collapse of Conservatism, but it’s not going to be disguised for ever.”
In 2006, persuaded by the unions, Cruddas stood for the deputy leadership, “partly as a way to make the arguments around this stuff. The job held no interest for me.” This time, I believe him: he was telling all his supporters to make Harriet Harman their second choice, which, combined with her own support, would make her victorious – and she was. (His wife, Anna, voted for Harman, although not because he told her to; she ended up working for Harman, having previously worked for Mo Mowlam. She is now a Labour peer. They have one son, “who’s 30-odd”. That sounds like a thing you should know, I say. “I do know!”)
He liked Ed Miliband: “He was challenging, gently, some of the orthodoxies, asking the right questions.” Cruddas did some policy work for him, which was all going fine until the Tories started to look shaky in the polls in 2012. “Then Ed said: ‘I don’t need to have any of those difficult conversations any more, because we’re going to win. I just need to keep the party together and win.’” So that went well.
In 2015, he was one of the MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership, because the other candidates– Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper – were on the same side. “The soft left tradition, all the traditions I’d been brought up in, had been destroyed. How could you have a debate? Corbyn had to be in it, to blow up the conversation.” Thousands of people joined Labour to vote for Corbyn, including Cruddas’s mother and two of his sisters. “My son was an active Corbynista. All my family were really enthused with him.”
Did that not piss you off? “It did! Totally! Because I’d seen a lot of the hard left of the early 80s, you could see that this was going to end in tears.”
Cruddas has mixed feelings about Keir Starmer’s leadership. He would situate Labour First, the group in ascendance around Starmer, squarely on the right of the party: a closed, unreceptive, incurious faction. He is uncharacteristically positive, though, about Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture, in which he saw the seeds of a government that would be an active force in Britain’s industrial future. “I can see a discernible economic strategy, which has huge possibilities around some of the things we failed to do in the New Labour years,” he says.
Cruddas has two books on the go, one of which is a social and political history told through the prism of Dagenham. He also wants to spend more time in Ireland. Most of all, he “can’t wait to get away from all this – I only got into it by accident”. But if he can sound skittish about Westminster, he is deadly serious about real politics, the stuff we live. “You have councils going under, the productivity malaise, the housing crisis, the environmental catastrophe, the regional inequalities, adult social care, the collapse of public services, the cost of living crisis, and you think: this country’s on tilt. I think democracy itself is jeopardised. The general feeling I have is of a country quietly disintegrating. I think it’s tragic.”
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