When asked to describe the EU referendum’s impact on national politics, Jon Cruddas doesn’t hold back. “The debate around Brexit and its outcome,” the MP says, “have led to trauma across the political class.” The case for remain relied on economic arguments; its failure, Cruddas argues, has exposed a crisis that runs through our entire political system.
Cruddas, one of Labour’s leading thinkers, believes the left has been hampered by putting GDP before its traditional values. “Social democracy is in freefall,” he tells me, “because it became a growth-obsessed approach to handing out bits of money. It has lost its deeper ethical history.” And if the left is to rediscover an ethical approach, he says, one “vital resource” is Catholic social teaching.
On the left as well as the right, Catholic social teaching (CST) has played a major part in recent political debates. But its future may lie especially with Labour. The turmoil within the party, and a likely change of leadership, will be an opportunity for a rethink of its principles; and many within the party are sympathetic to Catholic values.
The towering figure here is Maurice Glasman, Ed Miliband’s former guru, who is rooted in CST. Lord Glasman’s politics, which became known as “Blue Labour”, is sometimes crudely described as socially conservative and economically progressive.
But Blue Labour, which has attracted many Labour members, is more complex than that. It emphasises that love and relationships matter most, and so puts a high value on family, strong local communities, and patriotism. It is hostile to big government, which often treats people as the objects of handouts, and big business, which often treats them as commodities. Blue Labour aims to empower people – one proposal is to have more worker representation on company boards.
Cruddas mentions three Catholic themes which are especially important for the renewal of the left: the common good, “a renewed democracy”, and the dignity of labour.
Those three points suggest why CST has a role to play today. The idea of the common good, meaning the conditions which help all of us to flourish, might offer a way through the divided politics of today.
As for Cruddas’s second point, CST is democratic because it emphasises that everyone can (and should) contribute to the common good. Democracy is not just about elected representatives taking benevolent decisions; it is more like, say, the pressure for the living wage, carried out by local campaigners.
Which brings us to the dignity of labour. The Church’s teaching on the goodness of work has shone out in the lives and writings of St Thérèse, St Josemaría Escrivá and Dorothy Day. But even in the basic principle that employers should respect human dignity, CST offers an alternative to the insecure, badly paid work culture which many Britons endure.
Rowenna Davis, author of a book on Blue Labour and a former Labour candidate, says that the party can win support by embracing a Blue Labour position, including “a positive patriotism”. Policies are important – Davis mentions the need to control immigration and link welfare more closely to contributions – but above all, she says, it is about people. Labour needs to be more representative, in terms of its actual personnel, and in terms of how it listens to the electorate.
Blue Labour’s philosophy reflects the Catholic emphasis on bottom-up change – which is already happening in many places. Dr Anna Rowlands of Durham University points out that ever more Anglicans, Evangelicals and Pentecostals are turning to CST; its influence pervades many grassroots initiatives. One is Citizens UK, which helps local residents to come together and campaign for changes in their area. It has groups in London, Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Wales, Leeds, Manchester, and Tyne and Wear.
Dr Rowlands wouldn’t deny “the dire state of civil society”. But she observes that there are many examples of “real civic creativity”, including “new forms of food and housing cooperatives, and Christian debt services”.
CST is already leading the way at a local level. Can it make an impact on national politics? “The jury is out,” says Cruddas. But increasingly, the idealists of Blue Labour sound like pragmatists. If they can offer a programme to win elections, then the Catholic tradition could be at the centre of mainstream politics.
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