Labour’s Jon Cruddas: I’m a conservative

Why does the right like Labour’s Jon Cruddas so much? Because he’s actually a conservative. He’s just admitted as much in a fringe meeting, hosted by my colleagues at the Centre for Social Justice. He was talking about his own politics: conservative, he said. But in a Labour way.

‘I don’t go in for the self-analysis that much,’ he said, but he liked the ‘romantic traditions’ of Labour and part of it was always about defence of family and traditions from ‘relentless commodification of our lives… and that’s the tradition I come from’. A tradition which had been crushed by the Fabian element in recent decades, he said, but one that’s making a comeback.

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He recommended a recently-public book, One Nation, essays by a group of new Labour MPs (including Rachel Reeves), which focuses on the ‘notion of families’.