A Century of Labour should be welcomed by every historian of the Labour Party. That is because it is very unusual for a Labour politician to reflect seriously and at length on the party’s past. For the most part, when such figures refer to Labour history it is to appropriate—usually dubiously—some of its few great moments to their own factional cause. Most egregiously, leaders as diverse as Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn have each attempted to do this with the 1945 government. For a party often supposed to take its own history seriously, Labour has nonetheless generally treated it in a cavalier and instrumental fashion.

Jon Cruddas is, however, a very unusual Labour politician. He stood down as an MP at the 2024 general election, having served in the House of Commons since 2001; before that he worked in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s private office with special responsibility for maintaining good relations with the trade unions. As a Labour MP he was, however, a vocal critic of New Labour’s neglect of the party’s accustomed working-class supporters and later became part of the Ed Miliband leadership, acting as Policy Coordinator. And while no fan of Jeremy Corbyn, Cruddas has nonetheless been highly critical of Keir Starmer’s authoritarian party management.

Cruddas the Labour politician is then hard to classify and A Century of Labour—a century that is since the party first formed a government under Ramsay MacDonald—is similarly hard to define. It is not a memoir, so Cruddas does not directly refer to himself, although the chapters on New Labour and after are clearly shaped by his own experience. In some ways it is a straightforward narrative history, of the sort a conventional academic historian might write, but Cruddas wants to reshape our appreciation of that history with reference to a competing set of three ideas, although these are not applied as systematically to Labour’s story as they might have been. As a result, A Century of Labour falls between a few stools, and it left this reviewer wishing Cruddas had written a more obviously personal and resolutely thematic work and so made his an even more compelling book for the student of the party.

According to Cruddas, beneath the everyday politics of an often-fissiparous party there are deep-set traditions of thought which have ultimately shaped its character and “operate behind the backs of the personalities, factions and movements within the political drama and offer an alternative understanding of Labour over the last century” (11). To that end he identifies three contrasting theories of justice and claims the party’s history proves Labour only succeeds when it draws inspiration from them all. These different theories relate to human welfare, human freedom, and human virtue, which, respectively, address material well-being, individual rights, and the nurturing of an ethical citizenship. Each tradition can be traced back to ideas that long pre-date Labour’s formation and their importance—within what Cruddas usefully characterizes as an ideologically shape-shifting party—has varied over time, although a focus on materially improving working class lives has often been overwhelmingly dominant. Cruddas’s central claim is that only under Clement Attlee and Tony Blair were these competing traditions of justice in an appropriate alignment, and it is that which helps explain their governments’ achievements. Unfortunately, the chronological format of the book prevents Cruddas spending too much space justifying that intriguing assertion and showing exactly why and how these traditions came into balance at these rare moments of success.

If the central thesis of A Century of Labour is relatively undeveloped, Cruddas the Labour historian still has some intriguing things to say especially about the period in which he played a significant role as a Labour politician. He notably emphasizes the “paradoxical quality” (173) of New Labour and takes seriously Blair’s assertion that he was reclaiming rather than rejecting the party’s history by promoting its ethical and liberal traditions to balance its usually predominant utilitarian heritage. Some might be surprised by the extent to which Cruddas takes Blair at his own words here given how cynically he is usually viewed, and they may question, for example, how far the government’s supposedly ethical foreign policy was especially ethical. Cruddas considers the Iraq invasion to have helped unravel the New Labour project, which he sees as a hopeful but lost opportunity for the party to truly transform Britain. Also, somewhat against the grain, and contra those who figure the party picked the wrong Miliband in 2010, Cruddas is also positive about Ed’s attempt to reintroduce ethics into economic policy making and to emphasize a communitarian approach to politics. But he cannot hide his disappointment that mid-way through his leadership Miliband—like his mentor Gordon Brown when he became leader in 2007—“returned to Labour’s safe space of distributional justice” (210), one he considers his successor as leader Jeremy Corbyn also inhabited.

A Century of Labour ends with an assessment of Keir Starmer’s leadership, one Cruddas wrote at a time when the party was riding high in the polls and generally expected to win office after nearly one and half decades in Opposition. Cruddas is clearly uneasy about how easily Starmer shifted from appearing almost Corbynite when seeking members’ support to become leader in 2020 to kicking out figures on the left after winning power. But he gives Starmer credit for trying to rebuild the party’s relationship with the working class, one Brexit and Boris Johnson had seemingly shattered for good, even though this has seen the Labour leader marginalize the party’s liberal tradition. A Century of Labour therefore concludes on an inevitably uncertain note with Cruddas considering that while an election victory is almost inevitable, a Starmer government will likely fail to emulate the achievements of its Attlee and Blair predecessors.