Crud Cruddas

In a speech published on Liberal Conspiracy, John Cruddas attributes Labour's decline to "a loss of [English] identity". He paints a depressing picture:

We have been here before.

In the 1960s, Enoch Powell built an English nationalism that drove a wedge between the liberal elite and the people.

Powell sought to make despair convincing.

He said, ‘There is a deep and dangerous gulf in the nation’.

The liberal intelligentsia is the ‘enemy within’ , destroying the moral fabric of the English nation with its promotion of multiculturalism.

A permissive elite that renders the majority of English people passive and helpless, and abandons England to those who hate her.

Are we witnessing a new cultural struggle in civil society?

A growing gulf between the political classes and the people.

Yes, I'm afraid that we are witnessing a growing gulf between the political classes and the people, and it's a gulf that is exemplified by this speech from Cruddas, which doesn't bother to address, or even mention, England's democratic deficit.

Cruddas' solution to the rise in English nationalism (which, for him, is demonstrated by the English Defence League) is for Labour to build a 'Good Society' instead of Cameron's 'Big Society', and to create a Labour Party that is a moral force; that is for the common good; that is for reciprocity, and; is for liberty and joy.

More like the Trite-Soundbite Society than the Good Society.

"Labour’s Good Society lies deep in the English struggle for popular democracy", says Cruddas. Great, so let's have some specifics, why not English sovereignty and an English referendum, John; surely England too should be governed in accordance with her wishes?

Blair’s Project makes it likely that England will return on the street corner, rather than via a maternity room with appropriate care and facilities. Croaking tabloids, saloon-bar resentment and back-bench populism are likely to attend the birth and to have their say. Democracy is constitutional or nothing. Without a systematic form, its ugly cousins will be tempted to move in and demand their rights – their nation, the one always sat upon and then at last betrayed by an elite of faint hearts, half-breeds and alien interests. - Tom Nairn, After Britain (2000)

Yes, there is an emerging Englishness which is still thought to be slightly incorrect. Something is bursting to come out. But sadly, the English intelligentsia, or the liberal English middle class, which ought to be leading political developments, ought to be taking over this emerging feeling; saying yes, let's make a democratic, tolerant, forward-looking nation; is just sitting back and saying: "English nationalism, awful, horrible, leave it to the yobs. — Neil Ascherson, Britain Rediscovered, Prospect Magazine, April 2005