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.
