the irrepressible dignity of every human.
When I was young, I was taught about the dignity of labour. For my devout mother it was part of our Catholic teaching. As a teenage union member, I heard talk of it from the same guy who told me to read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It is an unfashionable term that suggests all jobs have worth and status, that no occupation should be considered superior.
Until recently if we discussed dignity, we were likely to be contemplating how we die rather than how we live. The pandemic changed this. In the face of death, we reconsider how we live and what we value in the contribution of others. Personally, I know I did years ago when I had to confront the possibility of my own death.
The pandemic interrupted our work or stopped it altogether and affected how we consider the work of others. We applauded care home workers, nurses, porters, orderlies and doctors. We were moved by the sacrifice of tube, bus and lorry drivers, cleaners, teachers, the police and fire service, front-line council workers – welfare and housing officers, maintenance and refuse operatives – as well as delivery drivers, supermarket employees and many others. These jobs are now more visible and have acquired renewed standing. We recognize the dignity of the labour.
Until recently we were told that many of these jobs would soon be automated and few cared. This work is often poorly rewarded, performed by those considered part of the ‘left-behind’. Yet we clapped in appreciation of this labour; these vocations gathered esteem. Yet dignity is not just about status. Something else was going on.
Dignity is elusive, difficult to define, not just about worthiness in a job hierarchy. It is also about something we acknowledge when lost, the negation of dignity, and suggests the violation of an essential humanity. Something that implies intrinsic human worth and acceptable moral standards in terms of rights, freedoms and obligations in the ways people live together.
These are questions of justice. They suggest ethical duties in how we order society to remedy the violation of dignity. When such indignities are recognized and remedied, we confer a certain dignity on ourselves and society. In turn, our inability to confront them – in tolerating forms of death, punishment, slavery, abuse and exploitation – compromises our personal and collective dignity.
In pandemic and death, we recognized the brave selfless contribution of others and challenge ourselves. How we resolve these questions of human dignity will help define how we live together and who we become.
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped with this book. I would like to thank all those that took part in a series of six seminars throughout 2017 at Churchill College, Cambridge, sponsored by the Common Good Foundation: Sam Boyd, Lewis Coyne, Ruth Davis, Stephen Davison, Maurice Glasman, Gwen Griffith-Dickson, Scott Langdon, Lisa Nandy, Adrian Pabst, F.H. Pitts, Jonathan Rutherford, the late Roger Scruton and Ed Wallis. Some of the papers I presented in these seminars inform chapters that follow, and I want to record my appreciation for the invaluable comments and feedback I received.
I am also grateful to the Humanism and Identity Group convened by Jonathan Rutherford that met throughout 2018–19 including Jade Azim, Daniel Chandler, Richard Grayson, Jack Hutchison, Hannah O’Rourke, Adrian Pabst, Tobias Phibbs, Matthew Sowemimo and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite.
I particularly want to thank Peter Nolan and Harry Pitts for supplying detailed comments on the draft of the book and for their encouragement and help in improving the overall argument with their suggestions and criticisms. I must also acknowledge Peter’s long-term friendship, guidance and supervision, especially concerning questions of value, productivity and work futures. I am also indebted to Stuart White for sharing materials on Universal Basic Income, to Michael Sandel for conversations over several years on key themes in the book and to Kenneth O. Morgan and John Shepherd for helping me to navigate labour history. I also wish to thank Liam Baker, Torsten Bell, Florence Gildea, Nick Lowles and Carys Roberts for support with some of the empirical data.
I would also like to record my appreciation to the staff and associates of Nuffield College, Oxford, especially for insights into the history of the ‘Oxford School’, including the participants at a conference entitled ‘50 Years after the Donovan Commission’ organized by the History and Policy Trade Union Forum. I would like to thank Peter Ackers and John Kelly for subsequent conversations and support from the Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures at the University of Leicester.
My editor George Owers has been quite brilliant throughout this project and I genuinely cannot thank him enough as well as everyone at Polity.
I wish to thank my staff and local party for being patient while I worked on this project.
Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my constituents in Dagenham and Rainham. Above anything, their knowledge, wisdom and extraordinary resilience inform the pages that follow.
About the Author
Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham. He joined the party as a teenager and was active in the Australian Builders Labourers Federation. He studied for an MA and PhD within the Industrial Relations Research Unit at Warwick University.
In 1989 he joined the Labour Party Research Department with responsibility for labour market policy. In 1994 he was transferred into the office of the General Secretary. In 1997 he was appointed the Deputy Political Secretary to Prime Minister Tony Blair working on labour market policy and relations with the unions and TUC. In that period, Labour introduced the National Minimum Wage and a series of initiatives to support union recognition and fairness at work.
In 2001 he was elected as the Labour MP for Dagenham in East London, redesignated Dagenham and Rainham following boundary changes in 2010.
In 2007 he was a candidate for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Between 2012 and 2015 he was Policy Coordinator within the Shadow Cabinet of Ed Miliband. He is a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures at the University of Leicester.
The joy and moral stimulation of work must no longer be forgotten in the mad chase for evanescent profits.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, 20 January 1937)
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
