Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee

UNUSUALLY for a book by a soon-to-retire MP that isn’t full of salacious Westminster gossip, Jon Cruddas’s A Century of Labour garnered newspaper headlines (well, at least in The Observer) prior to its official launch.

Cruddas, perhaps emboldened by his imminent departure from Parliament, had issued a far-from-flattering assessment of Labour’s direction of travel under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

In the book’s concluding chapter, Cruddas writes, “at present the Labour Party appears intent on sacrificing its historic concerns of liberty and human freedom in pursuit of a stylised version of the working class”.

The phrase echoes comments in his preface where Cruddas refrains from personal attacks on Starmer, but says of the former human rights lawyer that he now “appears disinterested in questions of liberty and freedom” with de facto acquiescence in the Tories’ “Spycops” legislation and restrictions on protest.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir’s “approach to economics does not appear to be grounded in any theor­etical understanding of inequality, material justice and welfare distribution”.

In short, Cruddas perceives the current leadership’s ruthless pursuit of power – or at least governmental office – as the sole end rather than the means to affecting radical social and economic change.

The outgoing MP for Dagenham & Rainham has gained a reputation both as something of a maverick, who flirted with “Blue Labour” during Ed Miliband’s leadership, and one of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s few serious thinkers.

He is an undeniably keen student of aspects of Labour’s history and was also an active participant in several events he considers from the mid-1990s onwards.

Prior to his 23 years in the Commons, Cruddas’ roles had included a stint as Tony Blair’s emissary to the trade unions during New Labour’s first term.

So, he has an explicit link to the New Labour project at the same time as he has moved away from it, not least through his association with the “soft left” grouping Compass.

Cruddas also argues that Blair himself has effectively abandoned the liberal spirit that animated his own supposed project.

Harold Wilson and Michael Foot [Marcel Antonisse / Anefo]

More recently Cruddas joined with 55 other Labour MPs in defying the parliamentary whip and voting for the Scottish National Party’s motion backing a Gaza ceasefire.

In his assessment of the “Starmer project,” he sees some parallels with the New Labour experience, not least in terms of ever-tightening centralised control, but rejects the notion that we are witnessing a New Labour “restoration project”.

Indeed, he sees both a significant retreat from the social liberalism of the 1997-2001 period and in the person of Rachel Reeves as shadow chancellor a reversion to Harold Wilson’s first term in an obsession with economic growth as a panacea.

Inevitably, in the context of an election year and with a Labour landslide a plausible prospect, readers will focus on the book’s closing chapters.

The commentary on Starmer consequently distracts from Cruddas’s attempt to construct an intellectual history of the Labour Party on the centenary of Ramsay MacDonald’s first short-lived minority government. There is a theoretical thread running loosely through A Century of Labour with Cruddas arguing that three competing, though not necessarily counterposed, concepts of “justice” have characterised Labour thought in varying degrees of tension from the party’s inception.

In Cruddas’s view previous accounts of Labour’s factional divisions between left and right fail to give adequate recognition to the frequently overlapping philosophical roots of conflicting factions. In essence, his “three visions of justice” prioritise respectively social welfare, civil liberties and democratic reform, and the far less tangible concept of “human virtue” with its origins in pre-Marxian socialism.

Tony Blair and Sir Keir Starmer

Cruddas clearly holds in high esteem what he characterises as an “ethical socialist” tradition, which he sees as a common denominator between figures as disparate as Nye Bevan, Tony Benn and Michael Foot on the party’s left, and John Smith as well as the younger Tony Blair on its right.

For Labour to maintain sufficient internal unity and be effective in government the party leadership must, in Cruddas’s view, achieve a synthesis between the “three visions of justice.” Not surprisingly, Clement Attlee had the greatest success on this score, while Cruddas assigns some credit to Harold Wilson, Blair (pre-2003) and John Smith during a leadership cut short by a fatal heart attack.

Leaving aside the adequacy of his theoretical framework, Cruddas’s approach suffers from crucial omissions. There is a dearth of discussion around the frequently fraught relationship between the “industrial” and “political” wings of the labour movement, implying that the trade unions have functioned as a “utilitarian” brake on the pursuit of loftier ambitions for society.

While much about Labour’s development is specifically British, the virtual absence of any discussion of parallels with broadly similar ideological debates in European social democratic parties was disappointing. More fundamentally, the silence about the relationship between “ethical socialism” and Britain’s empire – and its fall – was a glaring omission.

Surprisingly, the rare, arguably lone, example of Labour as a whole dissenting from British military engagement around the Suez crisis of 1956 warrants barely a mention.

Despite its weaknesses, A Century of Labour is an accessibly written, useful primer for those who are uninitiated in the party’s history, but politically curious. More significantly, especially given the author’s background, are the unmistakable warnings to “a party of labour [that] could be destroyed by victory.”

• A Century of Labour. By Jon Cruddas, Polity Press, £25
• George Binette is former secretary of Camden Unison