RH: Pepsi and Coke?

JC: Cross-dressing is a logical consequence … If Tony Blair was still Labour leader, Nick Clegg had become Liberal leader and Dave Cameron was leader of the Conservative Party it’s almost physiologically they’re all merging into one. But that doesn’t just drop out of the sky. That is the deductive product of the political system we have. I think the BNP in Dagenham or Respect 4/5 miles down the road are part of the same reaction to that that ever precise political positioning because it reflects the disenfranchisement of the people who are disenfranchised because they don’t have power in that system.

RH: They’re basically protest votes?

JC: I think there’s a bit of that but there’s also material forces. The policy framework is built around the focus groups rather than competing ideologies so to me that is why such issues as council housing haven’t been important for years because they have no core importance with that very selective part of the electoral landscape. The consequence of it is in a failure to deal with the material forces that go with appealing to extremism.

RH: And throughout this how many Labour votes have we lost?

JC: 4 million since 1997 and they are disproportionately of black and ethnic minorities and amongst groups of liberal middle class opinion - those two specifically on the war, and thirdly amongst public service workers but mostly the biggest demographic swing against Labour is amongst the more working class strata; the greatest the propensity to vote against Labour or move away from us. I mean the BNP is extremely right wing but the party is much more complex than that. They are a working class party in many ways.

RH: What do you say on the doorstep to the people who voted BNP in 06?

JC: They’d say “you can’t get a council house it’s because of all the people moving in”. It’s got nothing to do with that, it’s the long-term structural failure to provide low cost social housing and I share their frustration and that’s why I jumped into this deputy leadership election to raise some of these issues around housing, working poverty, class or you know because they don’t appear nationally as categories any more.

RH: You did set the agenda. I think they all nicked your agenda. There’s apparently a Facebook group called "I support Harriet Harman’s policies when she was running for deputy leader".

JC: I’ve got a lot of time for Harriet actually. I think she’s pushing an agenda to support the government but it’s interesting how everyone was supporting the fourth option for council housing, three out of six supported a regularisation for migrants who’d been here unregularised a long time you know they started to shift to the left but then they all stopped as soon as the election was over. That’s what people say to me: we only hear of you when there’s an election (laughs).

RH: I think it’s sad there wasn’t a proper leadership election. Presumably it would have been suicide to have nominated McDonnell?

JC: If I’d have thought John McDonnell’d have been the best leader I’d have voted for him.

RH: There should have been a proper contest with all wings of the party – a Charles Clarke or Alan Milburn or whoever as well.

JC: I agree, there should’ve been. The Labour party should be a pluralist democracy right where different groups, different geographical regions, different classes come together and see the Labour party as a vehicle to articulate their concerns and the representative structure of that part reflects that pluralism and debates are constructive within it – tolerance and humility to different traditions of thought. That’s what I liked about the Labour party: essential pluralism.

RH: I wish McDonnell had got on the ballot. I wouldn’t have voted for him but it would have looked more legitimate for Brown to have clunking fisted him.      

JC: Yes. I agree and he probably thinks that it hindsight bit it’s at odds with that essential top-down authoritarian streak which New Labour has got. That’s why I don’t think it’s essentially new really ’cause it’s not a fluid deliberative new thing is it?

RH: Do you think it’s just continuity with the Butskellite past?

JC: Stuart Hall used to describe it as a double shuffle where beneath the rhetoric it was very orthodox in its policy agenda.

RH: Even the Tories wouldn’t have introduced tuition fees… 

JC: Yeah I agree. That was the first time I voted against it because I thought they had an approach to higher education that was just extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. It was all about this is a rational economic investment ’cos you go and get more money out of it in the end ’cos you get a better paid job. Oh is that why you go to university? I didn’t. I was on the rebel benches on that vote, 2003. Dreadful. It had a very precise view of knowledge right and it was a very utilitarian approach to the world which actually I always thought was a hallmark of the right.

RH: Can you see parallels between the BNP and the same people that sign up to al Quaida or Hiz But Tahrir. People that feel disenfranchised.

JC: There is disenfranchisement, I suppose that’s consistent to both. Copeland was a BNP bomber but really that’s somewhat lazy. I mean these generalisations usually swerve around the sheer complexity of the world. I tend to look at it very differently. I think what is extraordinary about Dagenham is the way it’s dealing with extraordinary forces. There’s not violence, there’s no riots. It’s safe stable, quiet, honest so I think the BNP will go and what I think will be left with hindsight is the extraordinary ability of the community to accept and adapt to these changes. I don’t know demographically any community that’s changed as quickly as this. I’ve been the MP since 2001 and the demographic change in that time is absolutely extraordinary. Since 2003 on average you get 600,000 people in the country right. 300,000 leaving. Highest ever levels of emigration. That’s a million people churning around a year - this is unprecedented. The paradox of all of this is not about our inability to accept change but our ability to do it.