The Dignity of Labour. Jon Cruddas

Prologue

      For many of our fellow citizens modern capitalism has failed to deliver. Yet it is the left that lies in crisis. It lacks purpose and energy, expressed in defeat and decay, not least in the epic 2019 election loss. Politically, this reflects the collapse of a post-war social democracy built around growth, welfare capitalism and distributive justice, and the destruction of the telos – the absence of a noticeable conception of the good life.

      Progressive politics has sought solace in liberal abstraction, appearing remote and disconnected from the people it seeks to represent. We can account for this crisis historically as representing the long-term victory of economistic and technocratic thinking. Ethical traditions have lost out to utilitarian approaches to justice. Consequently, the left has lost its language and existence in the everyday lives of the people. The task is one of political reimagination achieved by a return to exiled political and philosophical traditions to help re-establish a public philosophy for the left.

In response to this crisis, irrespective of painful collisions with the electorate, many on the left today foresee a strange new utopia, one that will provide liberty through abundance and a workless future powered by automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). A few years ago, talk was of ‘capitalist realism’ and a dominant neo-liberal dystopia; now we anticipate a brave new world of ‘postcapitalism’, even ‘fully automated luxury communism’.¹ It is utopian thinking of a type unrecognizable to my East London constituents.

      Dagenham is a blue-collar community built to house the labour necessary to propel twentieth-century capitalism. We have relied on this labour at moments of national crisis, in wartime munitions and the production of Bren gun carriers. Most recently, when on 30 March 2020 a consortium of UK industrial, technology and engineering companies came together to produce medical ventilators as the globe was consumed by pandemic, Dagenham was the designated site to physically build the machines to safeguard the health of the nation. Work and Dagenham are synonymous.

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      Dagenham is proud of its working-class traditions. In the names of the streets and public buildings, the community respects East London Labour leaders such as George Lansbury and Clement Attlee and union agitators like Jack Jones and Ron Todd.

      Its foremost building, the Civic Centre, aka ‘the Kremlin’, is symbolic of earlier generations’ struggles for citizenship and access to justice through slum clearance. The mighty Becontree Estate upholds the virtue of mass public housing and the pre-war advance of working people. Dagenham’s Ford plant represents both the twentieth-century mode of production and epic industrial struggles of the past. Yet the more recent story is one of deindustrialization, extraordinary demographic change and struggles against the British National Party, which by 2010 held twelve of the fifty-one local council seats. This shifting history of class and work was dramatized in two recent films.

Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham was nominated for Outstanding British Film at the 2010 BAFTAs. It is a romantic tale of class solidarity and the fight for equal pay amongst a rehoused post-war generation. It centres on the 187 Ford seamstresses that went on strike in 1968 but received mixed support from within the Labour government. It had a stellar cast including Bob Hoskins as a dodgy union guy, John Sessions playing a lovable Harold Wilson, and Miranda Richardson as feisty minister Barbara Castle.

      Andrea Arnold’s 2009 Fish Tank won the 2009 Cannes Jury Prize. In it a dance-obsessed 15-year-old Mia is chased around her estate by social services. We see plenty of daytime special brew and the parading of weapon dogs – Mia’s is named ‘Tennents’. Work doesn’t feature; it is something only brought in by the lover/father figure outsider. In one scene Mia is bewildered by his payslips; they represent something she cannot comprehend. Family hardly exists. Where it does there is little communion or dialogue. Mother and daughter finally talk, not in words but through dance, as Nas raps ‘life’s a bitch and then you die’.

      The two films were shot within months of each other on the same estate – the Mardyke – in my Dagenham and Rainham constituency.² A simple contrast between the films suggests an economic and social transformation driven by changes in employment. It offers a historic arc whereby the hopes and solidarities of an era of mass production and consumption, of Dagenham Fordism, are replaced by the indignities of worklessness, relational disintegration and violence. In one film pride refracts through socialized housing, intergenerational advancement and material progress. In the other it descends into modern isolation, mental decay and nihilism.

One film is awash with dignified possibility, a visual slam dunk of Full Monty or Billy Elliot working-class nostalgia. Add in some cockney swag and sus and the viewer feels good. It reappeared as a successful West End musical. The other film is a tougher watch. It offers us a modern parable to globalization, economic liberalism and the destruction of family; a dystopia where a once noble class is barely recognizable.

      The films act as companion pieces, where political hope journeys towards despair and humiliation in a story refracted through the changing character of work. Their release occurred as the country changed. Both came out months after the 2008 economic crash. By then New Labour was destroyed. 2010 was to be the party’s worst defeat since 1918, although worse was to follow five years later. In the late 2000s, Blair was despised by many in his own party. Gordon Brown had shown early promise but was sunk even before Mrs Duffy blindsided him on a Rochdale street in 2010. On release, Arnold’s dose of social-realist commentary appeared to fit with David Cameron’s talk of ‘Broken Britain’. In Dagenham there was anger, best expressed in battles with the far right, but mostly a sense of resignation, loss and abandonment. At the 2010 General Election, BNP leader Nick Griffin believed he would triumph in the neighbouring Barking constituency and his party would take control of the council the same day.

      The political environment of the 1968 of Made in Dagenham was very different. Wilson’s vision of ‘White Heat’ was in retreat after 1966 but traditional Labourism was not. Alongside, in the slipstream of Crossland’s The Future of Socialism, Roy Jenkins was striving to legislate a rights-based equality. 1968 also saw the publication of The May Day Manifesto – co-authored by Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall – a radical socialist humanist counterstatement to Labour policies and practices.

      The contrast between the state of the left in 1968 and 2010 is stark. In the late 1960s it was alive and agile, reflected in this active contest between alternative models of justice – the utilitarianism of the economist Harold Wilson, the rights agenda of Labour revisionism, and the ethical concerns of the New Left, the first two battling it out within Cole’s 2010 take on retro Labour.

By the time Fish Tank hit the screens, the left was running on empty. The Berlin Wall had been down 20 years. European social democracy had surfed a nineties’ growth spurt built on debt. The left went all in on the ‘Third Way’ and the ‘end to boom and bust’. By 2008 when the music stopped, it looked little more than a vainglorious punt. Environmentalism was under siege through questionable statistics and the appearance of a manipulated science. The soaring Obama rhetoric had landed around moderate health reform and deepening material injustice. The 2015 election loss was one of the most significant defeats for the left since its organized inception in the 1890s. Then things deteriorated.