Cruddas: Miliband’s team listen to Glasman ‘a lot’

In fresh extracts from “Tangled up in Blue” – the first extensive look at Blue Labour – Jon Cruddas tells Rowenna Davis that Ed Miliband’s office listen to Maurice Glasman “a lot” and that Labour is “in a worse position empirically than we were in 1983 and 1931.” Read the full extract below:

How deeply Blue Labour can embed itself within the party will depend on whether Glasman can build a broader set of alliances within it. This in turn will depend on whether there is a genuine appetite for change amongst in﬒uential Labour players and the parliamentary party. Those who subscribe to Blue Labour tend to be frustrated and angry with the party’s status quo. This is what leads them to call for genuine root and branch reform within the party, from culture and policy to organisation and language. But it is an open question how many other MPs believe that this is necessary or desirable. The MP who has been most heavily involved in advocating Blue Labour ideas, Jon Cruddas, certainly does feel the need for radical change, but he does not occupy a formal position of in﬒uence in the party, and he is the ï¬rst to acknowledge that his ideas are far from representative of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In fact according to Cruddas, some of his colleagues have already tried to shut down the debate:

Did members of the parliamentary party raise objections about Blue Labour?

Yes, yes, pretty much everywhere I think, you see it all depends how you treat the situation Labour has faced in the last couple of years, I would say it hasn’t got any intellectual vitality around it, people don’t know what it means either to be Labour so you know when people say it’s not like the early 80’s when Labour was at each others’ throats, I would say yes, but, that seems to me to be a sign of torpor rather than vitality, so say there is no discussion and that is a virtue does not necessarily help Labour get out of the hole it is in which is arguably one of the greatest crises it has ever had as a political party. So the key is to create discussion and create a bit of controversy and try to import a bit of vitality intellectually to deï¬ne what it is, if I don’t know what it [Blue Labour] is as a Labour MP I tentatively suppose a lot of people out in the country don’t know what it stands for but that’s not, so to me the way it was deï¬ned as something which was whatever people wanted it to be was a sign of people’s lack of intellectual conï¬dence in that they were just denying discussion, that was something that was an attempt to stimulate discussion, nothing more than that actually, it wasn’t prescrip- tive, it wasn’t programmatic, it wasn’t, and that’s why I don’t think you can deï¬ne it, I know that works against the project in one sense, but you know.

Do you think the rest of the party was deliberately shutting down the debate?

It was subject to continuous caricature functionally by the people who didn’t want to get out from under their own liber- alism and identity politics more often.

Would you be willing to be publicly involved in Blue Labour now?

Yes… hmmm, yes… Arguably we’re in a worse position empirically than we were in 1983 and 1931, so we have to put some jump leads on it, you have to stimulate a bit of discussion, and since the election, the ï¬rst parliamentary Labour election I went to the basic tenor from everyone who spoke was well if we just clamp down a bit on welfare cheats then get a bit harsher around our immigration story then we could be back in, in a bit and I was like fuck that, you know? It doesn’t really work for me. So if the alternative option is to support a bit of a discussion that creates a bit of heat and opposition around the parliamentary Labour party that’s a price worth paying.

Is there a critical mass of MPs who think there is a crisis of identity at the moment?

I don’t see a lot of evidence of that no. I think the general consensus seems to be that we are doing well. In the parliamentary party.

Does Blue Labour need to pin down its programme?

Yes. Well, maybe it’s performed its task, and maybe what you don’t want it to be is prescriptive, programmatic, because that is when you get into trouble because the troubles come when policies, because the danger for Labour is not policy, it’s that you know, like setting up twenty nine policy review groups is not the solution for Labour’s crisis I would suggest, so you know the remedies are not policy ones, they are much more fundamental ones with character.

How much does Ed Miliband’s office listen to Glasman?

Well, they listen to him a lot and Maurice likes that entire power gig. So it works well, look.

Do you think Ed Miliband’s office would do well to listen more to Blue Labour?

Yes. I guess, I mean, the danger is, you do a speech on respon- sibility one month and you then do one on education, it’s, there is a danger of seeing these as discrete things, what you need to do is get a kernel, a philosophy together and then use it when you talk about everything as your fundamental political project and story, narrative, whatever you want to call it and that’s where the speech on responsibility ï¬rst time I thought he [Ed Miliband] began to do that. The question is whether that is something he just does relentlessly for three years, or whether he thinks he has done it when he writes a speech on it.

Where does Blue Labour go from here?

So, you know, will it be seen as a sort of bodged up series of discussions or will it have a longer lifespan I don’t know really, it all depends on how he [Glasman] wants to play it I think. If he just wants to go around shouting look at me, I can do blah, blah, blah he will get gunned down again but if it becomes more rigorous and less you know press driven, that’s where its virtues will lie.

* Rowenna Davis will be speaking at our fringe event (organised jointly with Liberal Conspiracy) tomorrow at 1pm in Liverpool Town Hall. We’ll be discussing whether or not Blue Labour can replace New Labour *