Labour MP urges party to embrace faith and families

BY ED WEST
LABOUR MUST develop policies around “flag, family and faith”, one of its leading Catholic MPs has said in a speech warning that the party had lost the white working class.
Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, east London, called for a greater focus on national identity to stop it being hijacked by extremists such as the English Defence League, or the Tea Party in the United States.
Mr Cruddas made his speech at a fringe event of the Labour party conference held at Manchester this week. The Cornish-born MP is on the Labour Left but remains one of the strongest Catholic voices in a party which many feel is increasingly alienated from its Christian roots.
In a 2007 interview with the Christian Socialist Movement he said that “in our family the political heroes weren’t Gaitskell or Bevan. They were the Kennedys because they were Irish, there was Oscar Romero because liberation theology was quite a big thing, and Pope John (XXIII). So I joined the Labour Party, my brother joined the Carmelites.” Mr Cruddas, whose constituency has one of the largest BNP support bases in England, has repeatedly warned that the party is alienating white working-class voters, with its obsession with metropolitan liberal issues.
His comments came just days after Ed Miliband became the first party political leader in British history to not be married to the mother of his child after he defeated his elder brother David in a closely fought Labour leadership contest.
Mr Miliband already has a son, Daniel, with environmental lawyer Justine Thornton, who is due to give birth to their second child in November. He does not even appear on the boy’s birth certificate, claiming he was ‘“too busy” at the time.
Of his relationship Mr Miliband said: “We were planning to do it [get married] but the Copenhagen environmental summit got in the way. Then there was a general election, and now the leadership election.” On top of this, in an article for Pink News in August Mr Miliband said that free speech laws that allow people to express their opinions about homosexuality should be scrapped, and that “incitement to homophobic hatred” should be made a crime. Many fear this could lead to even more Christian preachers being arrested.
However Stephen Beer, a spokesman for the Christian Socialist Movement, said the group “very much welcomes” Mr Miliband’s election.