#jon cruddas

[zmkccommonplace]

It's difficult to identify the purpose of a future Starmer government - what he seeks to accomplish beyond achieving office. Labour seems content for the election to be a referendum on the Tories rather than a choice between competing visions of politics & justice

Jon Cruddas, A Century of Labour

[incorrigibleone]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3pA1Fkjy28)

Ed Miliband's policy coordinator says he's worried about Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.

Cruddas initially nominated Corbyn and said that Jeremy has attracted many new members to the Labour party - including his mother and his son - but was worried that it "might turn into an early 80s tribute act... a Trotsky's tribute act."

Jon said "I haven't voted yet. What I decided to do is wait until the very last minute to consume everything that everyone is trying to say and then make sense of it."

He added the Labour party "have not had much to say since Blair."

Today Programme (BBC Radio 4 - 10 September 2015)

[babyace]

Cut benefits if parents fail to give children MMR jab, says Labour policy chief Jon Cruddas

By Tamara Cohen and Matt Chorley

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Families will have to prove their child¿s vaccination records…

View Post

[neilstockley]

Warning: Labour's new policy czar gets it

The appointment of the Dagenham and Rainham MP, Jon Cruddas, to head up Labour’s policy review has caused some excitement across the commentariat. [click here, and here.]

Mr Cruddas used to be pigeon-holed, inaccurately, as a tribune of Labour’s “old left”.  More recently, he’s attracted interest as an architect of “Blue Labour” and a champion of the white working class, too long forgotten, the story goes, by the north London elites.  Otherwise, Cruddas is best known for his tough local battles with the BNP.

What I find really interesting about Jon Cruddas is that he may get what political narratives – the basis of successful political communications- are all about.

Just before taking up his new role, Cruddas spoke at the UEA on “The Good Society”.  Here’s one of the more acute observations about his own approach to politics:

What interests me is not policy as such; rather the search for political sentiment, voice and language; of general definition within a national story. Less The Spirit Level, more What is England.

The point was taken up last week by Nicholas Watt in The Guardian:

Shadow ministers will soon learn by heart a key Cruddas mantra: that policy is not about lists. "Policy is about illustrations of a deeper story, the establishment of a deeper sentiment which Labour had and it lost," is how one figure describes the Cruddas approach . . .

. . . Neal Lawson, who has worked closely with Cruddas in the left-of-centre Compass group, says: "Jon has a grasp of an emotive, some would say romantic, human sense of politics – not a dry, arid, mechanical approach. His speeches are poetic and beautifully constructed with stories.

"So why give him a dry policy thing? Because he will make it come alive. He will give some kind of narrative and framework on which we can eventually hang dusty policy. It will be within the context of a sweeping history. He will take us from Aristotle through to Ruskin, William Morris up to early Blair, and tell us a story about all of that in a way very few politicians can."

On Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph’s Mary Riddell was even more effusive:

. . . Mr Cruddas is one of the few politicians who can read the country’s mood. Voters hold self-serving politicians in contempt, and so does he. As he said recently: “Politics is more about emotion than programme.” . .  .

. . .  Mr Cruddas’s purview goes beyond specific policies.  A conservative who despises neo-liberalism, he has challenged the idea that this is a Tory nation presided over by a Tory government and a Tory God. Labour, in his view, is the rightful curator of Britain’s countryside, its heritage, its institutions and its hopes . . .

Dan Hodges, the self-described “Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest” has warned that all this may be a little premature: Cruddas is no policy geek and has an instinctive political caution, he says.

Fair enough, and, it must be said, party policy reviews can go awry  They can get bogged down in details, unjoined-up enthusiasms and missed deadlines.  They can trigger internal rows and bust-ups.  They can be meat and drink for your opponents.  One or two shonky brushstrokes can spoil the whole picture.  It’s all very well to offer a big picture, but it may be the wrong big picture.

And yet, policy reviews can also deliver, once all the shouting, posturing and finger painting for adults are over.  The overhaul of Labour policy that Tony Blair initiated in the mid 1990s, part of a much larger “modernisation” of the party’s messaging and narrative, is a good example.

With that in mind, we should look past the policies to the narrative, and how Cruddas might construct it.

Fewer lists . . . fewer programmes . . . more romance . . .  more emotion . . . engaging with the nation’s history, heritage and symbols . . . and above all, telling stories that create a sense of country and the vision of a new nation for the future.

No other politician, no other party is doing much of that. 

What, their opponents should be asking themselves, if this intriguing mix works out for Labour and provides the party with a compelling narrative?  What if enough of Cruddas’s political poetry finally seeps into the public’s consciousness, and helps make Labour more popular?

Jon Cruddas is another political storyteller to watch.

[wearehomegrown]

[toryreformgroup]

Miliband and Cruddas' English nationalism could be a stroke of genius

Nik Darlington 11.58am

The Telegraph's chief Labour party cheerleader, Mary Riddell, heralded his appointment as one to make David Cameron feel very nervous. The Indy's political editor, Andrew Grice, wrote that it was the act of an "emboldened" Ed Miliband. Gaby Hinsliff, former political editor of the Observer, asked if his radical thinking could be the key to getting his party re-elected.

Jon Cruddas, the enigmatic MP for Dagenham & Rainham, assumed his new role as Labour's policy chief burdened with heavy expectations and high praise from left, right and centre.

Cruddas' intellect is undoubted, though his ideology is hard to pin down. Very much a man of the 'Left' and of the union movement, and a regular rebel against New Labour, he still managed to maintain a close relationship with the Blair camp and was a prominent supporter of David Miliband's leadership bid. Though his own thinking is typically more restrained than Lord Glasman's, he is seen as a torch bearer for 'Blue Labour'. He has advocated a referendum on EU membership.

He is also frustrated, passionately so, by the emasculation of Labour's traditional working-class vote, above all in England. And this theme is writ large across Ed Miliband's speech today on the subject of Scottish independence and the Union.

"We in the Labour Party have been too reluctant to talk about England in recent years. We've concentrated on shaping a new politics for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

"But some people in England felt Labour's attention had turned away. That something was holding us back from celebrating England too. That we were too nervous to talk of English pride and English character. Connecting it to the kind of nationalism that left us ill at ease...

"Now more than ever, as we make the case for the United Kingdom throughout the United Kingdom, we must talk about England."

It might at first glance seem a peculiar strategy, to try to win over the Scots by championing English nationalism. Yet though the independence referendum will take place in Scotland, the most profound battle could be fought south of the border, in English hearts and minds. Polling regularly suggests the English are more open to Scottish separation than the Scots themselves.

It is saying to people in England that the Union is worth campaigning for. That all corners of the United Kingdom have something to gain from being together, rather than apart.

I have always been one of those people, as Mr Miliband describes today, who has found English nationalism a touch unsavoury. On any questionnaire, in particular on immigration cards, I stubbornly insist on being 'British', rather than 'English' or even from the 'UK'. As someone with something of a mongrel heritage (aren't we all?), of English, Scottish, Irish (even Czech) descent, the catch-all convenience of being British has always felt more natural and proud.

But I also believe in the local, the small, and the distinctive. The United Kingdom is nothing if it is not able to celebrate unique histories, cultures, flags and faiths. That includes the English.

Ed Miliband's speech today is smart on two levels. First, it starts a debate about what it means to be in the Union from an English perspective, for if the English can't be bothered with it, why should the Scots? Second, it is an attempt by Labour to re-connect with its soul.

And it has Jon Cruddas' fingerprints all over it. The man isn't hanging about.

Follow Nik on Twitter @NikDarlington

[sharpened--edges]

Richard Seymour, New Left Project