George Osborne appears to be more in tune with the north than Jeremy Corbyn’s party, which has become stuck rehearsing “unpopular, outdated politics”, according to a senior MP who coordinated Labour’s 2015 election manifesto.
Jon Cruddas MP – who on Sunday launches a new grouping of MPs, party members and council leaders called Labour Together – said the party needed to wake up to the existential challenge that Osborne and his vision of devolution presented.
The chancellor recently took Labour council leaders to China to attract investment for his concept of a northern powerhouse.
He has also openly appealed to Labour voters who feel left adrift by the election of Corbyn as Labour leader to consider the Conservatives as a viable alternative “workers’ party”.
Cruddas said he did not believe that Osborne was sincere, and that the outcome would be cuts to public services rather than the reform needed to make them work better for the people who use them.
The MP also applauded Corbyn for challenging the party to rethink “the way in which it does politics” in an article published on the Guardian’s website.
But in a withering attack, Cruddas argued that the party’s response to Osborne’s manoeuverings had as yet been wholly inadequate.
The MP for Dagenham and Rainham, who was a member of Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, wrote: “In 2010, during Labour’s leadership election, we surrendered the argument on the deficit and the economy. We never recovered.
“In the 2015 leadership election we surrendered the argument on devolution. Labour is stuck in an unpopular, outdated politics of taxing and spending and using state control.
“It has got us into a situation in which a Tory chancellor looks more in tune with our Labour councils in the north than the Labour party itself.”
Cruddas announces that, along with the shadow energy secretary, Lisa Nandy, the Labour MP for Croydon North, Steve Reed, and council leaders Judith Blake, in Leeds, and Nick Forbes, of Newcastle, he was setting up a group in which the party could debate Labour’s response to Osborne’s vision.
Cruddas, who will chair the group and insists that supporters of all four of the Labour leadership candidates will be welcome to contribute, wrote: “Labour lost everywhere to everybody. We were wiped out in Scotland because we were the party of Westminster.
“We lost in England and Wales because voters didn’t trust us with the country’s finances. On a range of electorally significant issues we were out of touch with the views of the electorate.
“Labour Together will learn the lessons of defeat so that we can win again...Labour lost in 2010 and again in 2015 and now we face political irrelevance unless we can transform ourselves.”
Cruddas further lays bare his anger at the failure of Labour under Miliband to make the most of ideas around devolution that he had proposed during the policy review. By the May general election, Miliband rarely mentioned devolution when out campaigning.
Cruddas wrote: “At the heart of Labour’s policy review was the devolution of power and resources to our English cities, counties and communities. But our leadership couldn’t let go of our desire to control from the centre.
“Labour was too arrogant to listen and to timid to act. We vacillated about our New Deal for England and so George Osborne grabbed it and claimed it as his own northern powerhouse.”
