Jonathan Cruddas (born 7 April 1962) is a British Labour Party politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Dagenham and Rainham, formerly Dagenham, between 2001 and 2024.
A critic of the Blair government, Cruddas unsuccessfully stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 2007. He has been a leader in Maurice Glasman's Blue Labour project, launched in 2009. In 2012, he was appointed to Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet, replacing Liam Byrne as Policy Coordinator.
Cruddas was born in Helston, Cornwall, to John, a sailor in the Royal Navy, and Pat (a native of County Donegal, Ireland). He was educated at the Oaklands Roman Catholic Comprehensive School in Waterlooville near Portsmouth. He then moved to Australia before enrolling at the University of Warwick. He graduated from its Department of Industrial Relations with an MA thesis on Labour market structure in the construction industry: a case study of Milton Keynes in 1985. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1987 to 1989. He received a PhD from the University of Warwick's School of Industrial and Business Studies in 1991 for a thesis entitled An analysis of value theory, the sphere of production and contemporary approaches to the reorganisation of workplace relations and supervised by Peter John Nolan.
In 1989, he became a policy officer for the Labour Party before being appointed Senior Assistant to Labour Party General Secretary Larry Whitty in 1994, remaining in that position when Tom Sawyer became General Secretary that same year. After the 1997 general election, he was employed as Deputy Political Secretary to newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair. His main role was to be a liaison between the Prime Minister and the trade unions, with whom Blair had often had a difficult relationship. In this role, he also worked heavily on the introduction of the minimum wage.
Cruddas was selected to be the prospective parliamentary candidate for the safe Labour seat of Dagenham in 2000, after the sitting MP Judith Church announced that she would be retiring. He was elected as the MP for Dagenham the following year at the 2001 general election, with a majority of 8,693 votes.
From the backbenches, Cruddas quickly became a vocal critic of the government for what he saw as their ignoring of their traditional, working-class support in a bid to be more appealing to middle-class voters. He rebelled against the government on a number of occasions; including on the introduction of university top-up fees, the legislation on asylum seekers, the introduction of trust schools, proposals to renew the UK Trident nuclear weapons system, and foundation trusts. He supported both the Fourth Option for direct investment in council housing and the Trade Union Freedom Bill.
Cruddas was re-elected at the 2005 general election, but his Dagenham constituency was abolished in boundary changes for the 2010 general election. Cruddas chose to contest the newly created constituency of Dagenham and Rainham, which was notionally marginal. He won the seat by 2,630 votes in a close-run election campaign, which was a seat that the British National Party had heavily targeted. This resulted in a large number of anti-fascist organisations not affiliated to the Labour Party, such as Hope not Hate, campaigning for Cruddas to resist the BNP. After being elected, he took up a part-time position teaching Labour history at University College, Oxford, from 2010 to 2012.
On 27 September 2006, Cruddas announced his intention to stand to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party once the incumbent, John Prescott, stood down. He said he did not want to be Deputy Prime Minister, but instead wished to act as a "transmission belt" with the grassroots of the party. In interviews, Cruddas also said that he did not want the "trappings or baubles" that would potentially come with the job of Deputy Prime Minister, such as use of the Dorneywood weekend country residence.
Cruddas accrued nominations from 49 MPs and received strong union backing, including Amicus and the Transport and General Workers' Union. He received backing from former Deputy Leader Roy Hattersley, then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, NUS President Gemma Tumelty, and former National Executive Committee member, actor and presenter Tony Robinson. The left-wing magazine Tribune endorsed him as "the change that is required".
On 24 June 2007, it was announced that Harriet Harman had won the election, although Cruddas gained the highest proportion of votes in the first round. He was ultimately eliminated in the fourth round of voting, coming third behind Harman and Alan Johnson. He had secured the highest number of votes from members of affiliated organisation in every round before his elimination.
In 2007, Cruddas featured in the Immigrants: The Inconvenient Truth episode of the Channel 4 documentary programme Dispatches, which was based on the conclusions of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
Associated with bottom-up renewal initiatives for the Labour Party, Cruddas became a central figure and a leading thinker in Maurice Glasman's Blue Labour project, launched in 2009.
Touted by some media sources as a potential candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party, he ruled himself out of the 2010 leadership election and said he did not want the job; but instead wanted to influence policy. In 2012, he was appointed to Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet, replacing Liam Byrne as Labour Party Policy Coordinator.
On 15 May 2012, Labour Leader Ed Miliband offered Cruddas a position in his Shadow Cabinet as Labour's Policy Coordinator, with a view to crafting Labour's manifesto for the 2015 general election. Cruddas accepted the offer, saying that it had always been his wish to influence policy. He continued to work with Maurice Glasman in this role and was described in 2013 as "one of the most influential people in the Labour Party". He was accused of failing to disclose sponsorship by the IPPR during this period.
Labour Together and opposition to Jeremy Corbyn
Jon Cruddas was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015. In October 2015, he launched the Labour Together group, which went on to conduct a black propaganda campaign against Corbyn's leadership of the party. Together with Maurice Glasman, Cruddas persuaded Trevor Chinn and Martin Taylor to provide the initial £75,000 of funding for Labour Together before 2017. In the 2016 Labour leadership election, he supported Owen Smith in the failed attempt to replace Corbyn.
In April 2017, Cruddas was among more than 75 MPs who re-launched the centre-left Tribune Group. Although the participants denied that the initiative posed a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, it was interpreted as offering resistance to radical left leadership of the party in the long term. He subsequently became a member of Tribune's steering group.
The Future of Work Commission was announced at the 2016 Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool. The goal of the commission is to make a set of achievable policy recommendations, which will be delivered in a report in September 2017 at Labour Annual Conference in Brighton. Cruddas was one of the Commissioners working on the project.