Jon Cruddas

NB: This was reviewed alongside The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance and The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark.

In 1924 MacDonald wrote: ‘The difficulties of the Party are within more than without.’ In Jon Cruddas’ thoughtful retrospective A Century of Labour, the party remains dogged by the difficulties of sustaining – much less reconciling – its volatile mixture of factions, tendencies and sectional interests. Cruddas, longstanding MP for Dagenham & Rainham, gives succinct mappings of Labour’s origins and history that bookend a detailed thematic exploration of its fortunes from 1900 to today, a journey in which landmark victories under Clement Attlee in 1945, Harold Wilson in 1966 and Tony Blair in 1997 arise from an otherwise unpromising morass of ‘waste’, ‘strife’ and ‘wilderness’.

Rather than the strains of social democracy versus socialism, Cruddas frames Labour’s intellectual history around competing theories of justice. These ideas stem variously from traditions of utilitarianism, radical democracy and ethical socialism, drawn from progressive movements both predating and beyond Labour as well as asserted to varying degrees within the party. This approach allows A Century of Labour to productively transcend more familiar analyses of the party’s defining conflicts. Nonetheless, its narrative also sees the pressures that Clark and Torrance pinpoint in 1924 continue, with cautious, pragmatic gradualism in government – even when based on a belief in socialism’s inevitability – too often becoming conservatism or paralysis, while many of its members and supporters view anything short of instant revolution as a disappointing anticlimax if not active betrayal.

What Cruddas terms ‘the death question’, on the party’s capacity to ‘adapt or die’ in the face of socioeconomic changes impacting its traditional voting blocs, has been a recurrent one. He recounts how the industrial working class which had thrown its weight behind Labour’s forward march in the early 20th century then underwent its own changes in status and identity – due, partly, to the social mobility enabled by Labour’s own achievements in office, including rising wages, job security and the settlement of the welfare state. After the party’s defeat to Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in 1951, this debate fed into more libertarian forms of socialism and the emergence of the New Left, and was renewed under Neil Kinnock’s battles with wider liberation movements and the party’s left as Thatcherism enacted its own targeted assault on both working-class identity and its industrial base. New Labour’s ‘modernisation’ of the party – in fact a partial return to early 20th-century LibLabism – took place as ‘end of history’ triumphalism after the end of the Cold War suggested that a socialist alternative to the status quo was no longer either valid or necessary. As the ensuing decades of crisis, unrest and instability have gone on to thoroughly debunk this suggestion, so the persistent question of Labour’s purpose – as a vehicle for ameliorated capitalism or for a wholesale transformation of it – has again become a site of struggle.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Rhian E. Jones writes on history and politics. Her latest book, with Matthew Brown, is Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater, 2021).… (mehr)