A little over a decade ago, Jon Cruddas was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and found himself spending a lot of time on a neurology ward. “When you confront death you rethink what is important to you,” he says. “My personal sense of ambition dissolved straight away. I became massively preoccupied with what constitutes a life well lived, both personally and in terms of a society.”
As he convalesced, the Labour MP watched a short documentary by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Made in 1980, Talking Heads asks a cross-section of Poles of all ages two simple questions: “Who are you? What do you want?” Cruddas was entranced. “This was raw and about the lives that people lived and the lives they wished to live. The answers were deeply moving. They focused on all the elements of what I would call a common ethical life: the dignity of one’s work, family relationships, a sense of responsibility, freedom from fear. You would get similar answers in my constituency today. But our politics is failing to deliver what people want.”
Why this should be the case and, in particular, why his own party has come up so short, losing four elections in 11 years, is the subject of Cruddas’s new book, The Dignity of Labour. Surprisingly, given his status as one of parliament’s most cerebral and interesting MPs, it is his first. The modern Labour party is sometimes accused of lacking big personalities, but Cruddas has long been a compelling and slightly rakish presence. For 20 years, he has been equally at home fighting the far right on the streets of his Dagenham and Rainham constituency, enjoying the company of Tory colleagues on the golf course or lecturing on personal heroes such as George Lansbury, the 1930s Labour party leader. Educated at the same Portsmouth comprehensive as former homelessness tsar Louise Casey, the 58-year-old son of a seaman was attracted to politics while working on a construction site in Australia.
An inspiring trade unionist, who gets a mention in the book, told the teenage Cruddas to read Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. That gave him an early lesson, he says, in what the dignity of labour meant. After gaining a PhD in economic philosophy from Warwick University, he joined the Labour party research department in 1989 and by 1997 was working for Tony Blair’s office. He later ran for the deputy leadership of the party in 2007 and chaired Ed Miliband’s policy review. But Cruddas’s true passion is for Labour’s intellectual history, on which he is an authority. And it is the sense that this history is being betrayed that made him sit down and write during the past year. Cruddas is a convivial, clubbable soul. But The Dignity of Labour is an angry book: an exasperated cri de coeur from a politician who believes his party risks losing not only more elections, but also its grip on the historic mission he first encountered in the pages of Tressell’s work.
“Parties are not just machines to chase votes and demographic flows,” Cruddas says on Zoom, speaking from his study. “They are built out of ideas, traditions and memories and speak on behalf of certain communities. You cannot just jettison that. Well, you can actually, because that’s exactly what’s happening. But at the very least we have to have a row about it.”
The row that Cruddas wants to have concerns the fractured relationship between the Labour party and the working-class communities that founded it at the beginning of the last century. In the humiliating election of 2019, Labour suffered a net loss of 47 seats in England, many of them former strongholds in the post-industrial north and Midlands. By contrast, it stacked up votes in most of London and other major cities, a pattern likely to continue in May’s local elections. Early polls suggest that in a crucial byelection next month, Hartlepool, a Labour bastion for 55 years, is in danger of becoming another Conservative scalp.
Cruddas pulls down from the shelves a book by David Marquand (the academic and former Labour MP). “Marquand wrote about ‘the progressive dilemma’. How do the radical middle-class intellectuals bond with the small-c conservative working class within the left? This issue has been there from the beginning of the 20th century. You’ve had tensions over economic strategy, nuclear weapons, patriotism and so on.” Until about 25 years ago, Cruddas believes, there was a sincere desire to hold both sides of the old coalition together. But the collapse of the red wall seats in 2019 was a sign that a seismic shift may be taking place. Brexit and associated arguments to do with borders, nationhood and globalisation have turned Marquand’s manageable tension into a gaping chasm. On both sides of the divide, Cruddas fears, there seems to be little appetite for reconciliation.
“A fashionable orthodoxy,” he writes in the book, “through a certain reading of history, affirms Labour should ditch a sentimental attachment to a working class encased in ‘traditional’ heartlands. The meaning of ‘traditional’ has been altered. It now signifies a white demographic and nativist sentiment [instead of] a long-term or ‘traditional’ relation to the means of production.” Labour is in danger of becoming the party of a new, city-based coalition made up of liberal-minded ABC1s, the well-qualified, BAME voters and the young.
Less well-off provincial voters, once the party’s natural supporters, are meanwhile listening, in ever-larger numbers, to the siren calls of rightwing nationalism and populism. This is electorally disastrous, believes Cruddas, since it hands over most of England to the Conservatives. But more importantly, it is an abdication of Labour’s responsibility to articulate the interests and values of the poorer half of society. “The party is in danger of becoming unduly dominated by the winners, the meritocratic elite. That accounts for the lament and the anger within the book,” he says with a rueful smile. So how, according to Cruddas, did we get here?
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In The Dignity of Labour, Cruddas revisits a time that, he argues, has been badly caricatured and misunderstood. The industrial conflicts that characterised Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s are generally remembered as a bitter struggle over pay and other material benefits. They were certainly that, says Cruddas. But he uses the example of the once-mighty Ford factory in Dagenham, once the biggest in Europe, to tell a more profound story. “We always see these struggles as material, but they are also much deeper contests about dignity and a sense of control over your own lives. Only a few Labour figures really got this dimension – Nye Bevan sometimes, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock a bit. In the 60s and 70s, Dagenham had the strongest working-class movement in the country. Local union pamphlets were selling 50,000 copies a week. It was a culture that generated pride and a sense of fraternity. And it was to disintegrate in the space of 30 years.”
Cruddas’s book argues that catastrophic damage to working-class dignity took place during those later decades. Elected in the wake of the winter of discontent in 1978-79, Margaret Thatcher’s governments set about destroying the power of unions and deindustrialising Britain at breakneck speed. “National decline was said to be the fault of the trade union movement, the industrial working class. This focus on labour was to become the historic gateway to embed an entire liberal philosophy and programme of government.” Politics became a game of persuading people that your party had the policies to suit people’s narrow self-interest. An age of liberal individualism had arrived.
Scarred by the experience of four successive defeats in the 1980s and early 90s, this new settlement was accepted by Labour when it came to power in 1997. New Labour distanced itself from the unions and workplace politics, subsidised low wages through tax credits and concentrated on educating individuals to compete in a new “knowledge economy”. It embraced the consequences of rapid globalisation as inevitable and lost its empathy for the left’s old collectivist ethos. Ford stopped making cars altogether in Dagenham in 2002. Three years later, in a speech Cruddas highlights as an example of “brutal liberalism”, Tony Blair warned the Labour party conference that the new global economy was “indifferent to tradition [and] unforgiving of frailty. It has no custom and practice.” Success would go to those who were “swift to adapt” and “open, willing and able to change”.
Cruddas draws upon two films, both set in his constituency, to illustrate the cultural consequences of this revolution. Made in Dagenham, directed by Nigel Cole in 2010, was a nostalgic celebration of a famous strike for equal pay by 187 Ford seamstresses in 1968. A warm portrait of feminist awakening combined with union militancy, it was nominated for best British film at the Baftas. Fish Tank (2009), directed by Andrea Arnold, follows the anomic existence of Mia, a 15-year-old girl attempting to navigate a 21st-century world in which stable work has disappeared, social ties have frayed and relationships are dysfunctional. “In one film, you have pride through socialised housing, generational advancement and material progress,” says Cruddas, “In the other, you have isolation and loneliness, mental decay and nihilism.”
Fish Tank, he suggests, captures an essential truth about post-industrial Britain. Formerly proud communities have lost their coherence and the social fabric has frayed, while the idea of a well-paid berth in the knowledge economy turned out to be a chimera for most. Although almost half of school-leavers now go on to higher education, an “hourglass” economy has developed. Vast swaths of the population do work that is insecure, badly paid and undervalued, while a lucky minority reaps the rewards available at the cutting edge of the digital economy.
Employees in low-skill, low-paid occupations constitute 45% of Britain’s labour market and for many years their income has flatlined. “The working class never went away,” says Cruddas. “This is the paradox. Their interests and concerns were just ignored. Listen. I am not interested in hitting some sort of rewind button back to 1953, when 40,000 worked on the Ford estate. That’s never coming back. My argument is that unfulfilling and precarious forms of work have been allowed to develop and fester because of political choices.”
For an influential part of the modern left, Cruddas says, the wrongheaded solution to this crisis is to summon up a tech-driven false dawn. Writers such as the former TV journalist Paul Mason talk up the possibility of a post-work future, in which a universal basic income redistributes the profits generated by artificial intelligence and algorithms. “I love Paul Mason,” says Cruddas. “I think he is brilliantly articulate and very important writer. But I profoundly disagree with him. I think this tech utopianism is functioning as a kind of get-out-of-jail card for the left, absolving it from doing politics.”
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Record pre-pandemic employment levels, he points out, suggest the robots are not taking over just yet. “The old dispossessions and exploitations of capitalism are rampant. Dagenham was bang at the centre of London’s ‘Covid triangle’, with the highest level of infections in London during the second wave. That’s because of the work people were doing in construction, services and the gig economy, all without recourse to collective forms of resistance and power. Working-class pride and power has to be rebuilt at the workplace. Some say that’s nostalgic. I say it’s very contemporary.”
A recent supreme court judgment, entitling Uber drivers to better workers’ rights, shone a spotlight on the type of issue that used to be meat and drink for the Labour party. “But on parts of the left there is the illusion that in the future we don’t need to worry too much. The radical left today, just like the Blairites in the past, are writing the working class out of history. It has to be contested because if it isn’t, they will be successful. They are making an enormous, risky bet on the future.”
The Dignity of Labour proposes instead a democratic transformation of the lives of those who live at the wrong end of the hourglass economy. A new “good work covenant” would start from the assumption that all labour, not just “knowledge work”, should be both fulfilling and a source of self-esteem. New national colleges for skilled work could help turn social care, for example, into the respected and well-rewarded vocation it should be. Works councils and worker directors, following the example of countries such as Germany and Denmark, would help rebalance the employer-employee relationship and give workforces a meaningful say over the forces that govern their everyday lives.
A special covenant for key workers, the heroes of the pandemic, could offer new entitlements to housing, travel and public services. Transforming work, rather than hoping to leave it behind, believes Cruddas, can become the foundation for a renewed sense of communal ties and a common ethical life. Just as his own serious illness led him to assess anew what was truly important to him, he believes the collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic can trigger a fundamental rethink of what and who 21st-century Britain values most.
“I come back to that Kieslowski film and the discrepancy between the lives people live and the ones they want to live,” says Cruddas. “If you ask those questions to people today they won’t simply want to get on Love Island or have a big car. I think there would be a focus on the dignity of one’s work, on solidarity, fraternity and family. On community. All that desire is still out there today, but the left’s preoccupations have narrowed over the years to a preoccupation with individual rights and equalities.
“That’s allowed this sense of rage and humiliation in the traditional working class to develop and along with it the rise of rightwing nationalism and authoritarian populism. Social democratic parties should have been the vehicle to address the grievances, but they have lost their way.”
Is Keir Starmer the right man to make the working class fall back in love with Labour? Cruddas has not been impressed with the recent furore over the prominence of the union flag on Labour platforms. “All this stumbling around questions of nationhood and patriotism has not been great,” he says. “You know, you get a memo saying you need to stand in front of a flag. That’s not it. It’s a deeper sentiment you need to establish about the character of the party and the virtues it wants to nurture, the new sense of citizenship it wants to create as we come out of this pandemic.”
Brexit and dealing with its aftermath continue to cause problems for the party. Having led the campaign for a second referendum – a deeply unpopular idea in the red wall constituencies – Starmer has been criticised for going quiet on the damaging consequences of Brexit now it has happened. Cruddas was always a “soft Brexiter”. “I have fewer misgivings about how Starmer is dealing with the issue now,” he says, “than I did before. He prioritised Remain Labour voters over Leave Labour voters when you need a story that transcends that divide. The task in the present is to pressure for as soft a Brexit as possible and let this issue divide the Tories. And they will divide, as their fantasy of autonomy hits reality. Starmer is right to try to move on from that binary divide. My hope is that his rights background as a lawyer lets him tap into the idea of human dignity as something that can transcend our divides, whether urban/rural, old/young, educated/less educated.”
If Starmer and Labour fail to get beyond the binaries, he says, the party may find itself trailing behind another Tory revolution : “Following Brexit and the last election, the Tories are already peeling back and moving beyond Thatcherism and liberal individualism. They are shameless in their ability to shape-shift to retain power and deadly serious about retaining the red wall seats. They are moving on from the Thatcher legacy faster than Labour. That’s an extraordinary situation. Labour can do this stuff much better, but it has to get on the pitch.”
As it seeks to restore its standing in lost heartlands, the Labour party should make the most of one of its most engaging intellectual assets while it can. Following his illness, Cruddas recuperated by buying a small piece of land off the west coast of Ireland and building a house. Cruddas’s mother, whose devout Catholicism was a major ethical influence, was from Donegal and his wife, Anna, is from Mayo. More than once during our conversation, he hints at an intention to make the move west before too long. Is The Dignity of Labour intended as a kind of final warning to his party on its own direction of travel? “It’s a bit of an intervention and perhaps a footnote!” he jokes. “There will be a couple more and then that’s it! I’m off to my island.” Well before that though, there is another project he definitely plans to get off the ground. “I want to make a Kieslowski-style documentary in the constituency. A Talking Heads for Dagenham. I would love to direct that.”
• The Dignity of Labour is published by Polity Press on 16 April (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
