Jon Cruddas’s speech to the Resolution Foundation last night on “earning and belonging” was, in common with all of his addresses, thoughtful, intellectually rich and imbued with a rare sense of history. But anyone hoping for specifics from the head of Labour’s policy review would have left disappointed. Cruddas described the review as being in its “first phase” and promised that over the next 12 months major pieces of work would be completed on “childhood, the Condition of Britain [Cruddas will deliver an IPPR lecture on this subject next Thursday], a British Investment Bank, infrastructure and voctional education”. After the 2013 conference, he added, the review would enter a “second phase” before the policies “distil into a manifesto and pledge cards” after the 2014 conference.
There were, however, several important hints of Labour’s priorities. In one of the most memorable passages, Cruddas lamented that while the government spends £1.2bn on housebuilding, it spends twenty times that amount on “rental payments to landlords”. Not only was this a good example of how Labour is seeking to reframe the debate around welfare policy (Cruddas referred to “rent payments”, rather than housing benefit), it also suggested that one of the party’s key pledges will be a mass programme of housebuilding.
In another intriguing section of the speech, Cruddas spoke of how Labour was exploring new ways of holding “our public institutions” to account and generating “a sense of ownership and responsibility”. He cited the BBC, the police, Parliament and the City of London. Tessa Jowell’s recent piece for the Telegraph calling for the BBC to be turned into “the country’s biggest mutual, with 26.8 million licence-fee payers as its shareholders”, is a good example of the form this could take in practice.
The line that has attracted the most attention is Cruddas’s warning that “simply opposing the cuts without an alternative is no good.” (He added: “It fails to offer reasonable hope. The stakes are high because when hope is not reasonable despair becomes real.”)
On one level this is a statement of the obvious. But it also points to a significant divide in Labour between those who believe there is nothing wrong with the economy that a bit of Keynesian stimulus won’t fix and those who believe that capitalism needs to be fundamentally remade (Raf has neatly characterised this as a battle between Brown Labour and Blue). Cruddas’s words made it clear that he intends to position Labour on the latter half of this divide.
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