Jon Cruddas is an anachronism: a Labour intellectual. While the party’s leading minds these days are consumed by picking out “hero voters” on polling tables, conversation with the man who topped the first ballot to replace John Prescott as deputy leader back in 2007 can still be relied on to arrive at the writings of RH Tawney or the nature of the good life.
He always had a relaxed air, but beaming away in his sweatshirt on Zoom Cruddas now looks positively zen. Leaving parliament after 23 years surely helps, as does his new commitment to spending four months a year on an island off Ireland’s west coast, where he spent a decade building a now-completed home from scratch. One thing that doesn’t explain Cruddas’s mood is easing up on work. When I ask him what he’s up to, in his earthy tones he reels off that he’s “writing two books—a history of Dagenham [his old constituency] and its communities”, and another on “Catholic Labour, a political force historians have ignored. He lists multiple projects with academics in Oxford, and one on the future of the left with the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange. This has included seminars in Downing Street, although he says the work is neither partisan nor beholden to Number 10. Using “an old new left” phrase, he says he has “one foot in and one foot out” of Labour.
The thread running through his writing and seminars nowadays is religion. Cruddas himself has been surprised by this, a generation on from when the atheist spokesman (Alastair Campbell) of a pious prime minister (Tony Blair) insisted “we don’t do God”. Raised and still practising as Catholic—“I attended mass in Portugal just last week”—Cruddas has found himself “doing God” in a political context in two very different steps. The first was about the progressive potential of faith communities: he forged missing links with forgotten Dagenham streets through churches and mosques. In his early years in parliament he was battling with the racist British National Party, which at one point had 12 councillors on Barking and Dagenham council. Local congregations of various faiths became the frontline troops that eventually routed them.
More recently, though, Cruddas has found himself thinking—and worrying—more about rising religious sectarianism, some of it scarcely religious at all. Enthusiasm for a clash of civilisations inspires hard-right polemicist Douglas Murray to describe himself as a “Christian atheist”. Even Richard Dawkins, who once denounced all religion as a mental virus, now calls himself a “cultural Christian”. What disturbs Cruddas more are the icons of faith—“crosses, religious posters, even pastors”—newly evident on Tommy Robinson marches. Church footfall continues to plummet, but a new right-wing discourse promises to rally to “the defence of the sacred” and stresses a Christian identity, however notional it may be. Some of this is blowing in across the Atlantic from Trumpland, but Cruddas discerns a worldwide trend: the BJP’s Hindu nationalism in India, religious chauvinism in Israel, analogous movements in the Muslim world. It’s scary because the mindset brooks no compromise, worlds apart from—say—Catholic Labour, which knew it had to find its way as a minority within a broad Labour tent originally dominated by jostling Protestant chapels.
After denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as a Trotskyite tribute act, Cruddas has damned Keir Starmer’s purging sectarianism as Labour Leninism. He offers circumscribed praise for Starmer’s all-powerful right-hand man, Morgan McSweeney, an ally from his street-fighting Barking days—“as an election winner, as good as you could get”. But he decries the operation’s failure to think through what governing is for after polling day. If the world of 2025 is all about beliefs, it might be a good idea to have some.
