In its despair, Labour is reverting to the Old Religion. Or, at least, some of its more serious thinkers are trying to stage an evangelical revival. Last week the Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who turned down a job in Gordon Brown's Government, made a speech which was awesome in its intellectual ambition: nothing less than an attempt to create a Marxism for our times. He called for a return to the fundamental moral mission of the Labour movement, for the restoration of what he sees as the working-class values of "fraternity" and "community". What he presented was a tour de force of sentimental longing.
I am not being sarcastic here. I understand and respect the grief which those on the Left feel about what Mr Cruddas calls the "loss of identity" of their party, and particularly the sense that what has been lost was grounded in shared fellowship. It is impossible not to be struck, too, by the force of his comment that Labour no longer knows what it stands for, and not to see a stunning similarity with criticisms of the current Conservative leadership, which is so often accused of being unclear about what it stands for. The latter, I suggest, is not unconnected to the former: they are both about the collapse of the idea of class at the centre of British political life and the confused vacuum which is left in its wake.
So I genuinely sympathise with the Labour revivalists – which does not stop me believing that they are utterly, and dangerously, wrong. But it does mean that I am not inclined to dismiss them as making a silly mistake: simply to snigger, as one might, and murmur "you sweet, old-fashioned thing". No, Mr Cruddas and his comrades are making a serious mistake and it is one which reverberates through all of our politics, infecting, in a quite direct way, the policies and arguments of the Conservatives as well as of Labour.
What is being summoned up by the Left revivalists is a vision of working-class life that, if it existed at all, was almost exclusively rural: a peasant idyll of co-operative, mutually supporting communities in which self-betterment was a collective rather than an individual goal. But this will not wash. Urban working-class life – which is what modern political reality must come to terms with – has been, for a long time now, an emotionally brutalising, self-defeating, oppressively conformist road to nowhere.
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