Jon Cruddas: an opportunity wasted - 16 comments

Warning: this post contains criticism of Jon Cruddas. One of the difficulties that arises when spreading the writing of a post across a day two days is finding public opinion shifting against you, making it seem all the more churlish to appear to pick upon a decent bloke. This awareness does motivate me, what with my being a human being, your sufferance of my occasional rants on these pages, and the target being a Labour MP who has impressed many. Nonetheless, I try to criticise when I think it's due, and I'm happy to publish and be damned. So, onward.

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Having read Liam Byrne and Bill Rammell's earlier article ("An utterly false choice"), I can see why Jon Cruddas might have been riled, but I found his response [via Stuart] equally gloomy reading.

The earlier article seemed content for electoral politics to be pitched at the voters most likely to tilt a General Election Labour's way, with little criticism of the legitimacy of the ambitions and priorities of a few (lucky) slices of that society being made the priorities for a future government, ignoring such trifling concerns as freedom, equality, justice, or the democratic aspirations of the rest of the electorate.

Unfortunately, rather than savaging the original piece for these obvious omissions, or finding some way to engage the entire Labour movement in a plausible crusade against poverty and injustice worldwide (two priorities for any Labour Party, surely), just about all Jon could conjure up with was a vapid appeal to "traditional" values. At no point did we learn what these traditional values are, how they equip us to reduce poverty and meet future challenges, who these "traditional" voters are, or what their needs are, let alone whether those needs are best met by those traditional policies. Does "traditional" really boil down to the following?

Everything anyone remotely likely to vote Labour don't like about politics today, and any favoured policy from the past that is no longer in current use, for whatever reason.

Sorry, but anyone who insists upon using terms like "core" voters (no less silly a term than "swing" voters), and "Labour values" is being abstruse, whether deliberately, or otherwise. It denies potential voters the opportunity to judge candidates and parties on the basis of the policies they might actually carry out, and the chance to judge the accuracy, applicability, plausibility, and likelihood of success of those policies. Sure, there's no General Election in the offing, but there's no harm in a politician who wants to be remembered for their policies to act like there is.

References to "core" and "traditional" remind me of the futility of searching for ideological purity - in our case, the mythical "Real Labour". It's a label more often adopted than bestowed. It's not hard to suggest groups in society - the poorest, for starters - who should expect the most attention from a Labour programme. To what extent their concerns tally with traditional Labour voters (who I'm not yet convinced aren't, in fact, substantially more middle class than is believed), I don't know, but the policies Labour should be pursuing are what work particularly well for the disadvantaged, whether the policies are old or new.

Perhaps this is unfair - there is a little politics in Jon's piece:

Too often the second-term Labour government ... [arrived] at policies such as differential top-up fees that not only owed more to free-market dogma than our traditional values but were also deeply unpopular among swing voters.

This is unhelpful in several ways. The need to address higher-education funding dates back to substantially before 2001, with several different funding/fees options on the table, and this need was felt within the Labour Party just as much as elsewhere, so it's hardly accurate to claim the current policy just materialised. And, hang on, why would a government overly concerned with swing voters stick to a policy that, so it is claimed, fails to deliver those middle class votes? Could it be that there was an impulse behind the policy that Jon's analysis fails to spot?

Appending "dogma" to "free-market" is (I regret to say) a fairly common rhetorical trick on our side, used either to restrict discussion to comfortable or agreeable arguments, or to signal one's statist credentials to supporters, masking off huge areas of policy exploration - for example, road pricing that simply asks drivers to pay the social cost of their driving, then let's them alone - at a stroke. Funnily enough, support for university fees is one of the few policies I've held consistently over the past decade or so, even back to the days when I might have used similar language, but one problem with traditionalists is their tendency to cherry-pick those "traditions" that suit them. For example, I can't help feeling "If you have the means, you're going to have to make a pretty good case before we subsidise you with taxpayer's money, but we'll give the most help to those who most need it" is a better established expression of Labour values than "All potential students have a right to free higher education, whatever the cost, whatever their means; and taxpayers have the corresponding responsibility to pay, whatever their means." You might not agree with my choice, but at least you didn't slap "dogma" on the one you didn't like.

The idea that we need lectures from Rammell, the minister for top-up fees, on winning back aspirant voters frankly beggars belief.

We could, of course, turn that around and say:

The idea that we need lectures from Cruddas, the Member of Parliament for Dagenham, on winning back "traditional" voters frankly beggars belief.

In fact, that's pretty generous: Rammell, after all, was tarred with "minister for top-up fees"; he no more "lectures" than Jon does (though I've already stated that I strongly dislike the inferences of Rammell and Byrne's piece); and besides, Rammell didn't - to my knowledge - make any claims about the popularity of the introduction of (deferred) higher education fees, nor should that be a priority for any Education Minister.

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I don't have a problem at all with Jon's housing suggestions, but if he can make a difference in that area, wouldn't it be more sensible for him to position himself to take on a future housing portfolio, rather than gun for a Deputy Leadership job that would deny him a direct input?

Likewise - and I'm tailing off a little, here, so bear with me - I don't have a problem with the suggestions about political activity...

They think this is modern, but actually today's voters are more likely to respond to active, campaigning parties that are properly rooted in their local communities.

... insofar as anyone disagrees with that. The statement isn't wrong, or harmful, it's just lost its value through overuse. Saying it might meet our fairly low expectations, but showing that you have a unique solution, or a unique ability to achieve an existing solution, is what will restore value to the fine sentiments.

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I don't think I'm simply being pedantic here: having the opportunity to write for a popular and influential publication should be an opportunity to appear sensible, thoughtful, accurate, interested in the truth - and what works. Coming across as close-minded, and with a preference for warm, woolly, catch-all terms, doesn't seem to me to adequately reward the reader for their time.