The campaign for the election of the next leader of the Labour Party increasingly resembles the grisly days of the 1980s when the hard left, in the form of Tony Benn and the Militant tendency, ran the Labour Party. Many of the supporters of the hard left candidate Jeremy Corbyn have adopted the language of the era: if you’re not with us, you’re against us.
One of Ed Miliband’s less than helpful legacies was to bequeath a voting system whereby any old Tom, Dick and Harriet, who was not merely a non member of the party but also an active opponent of it, could pay £3 to install whichever candidate stood the least chance of winning a general election for Labour. There is clear evidence that this really is happening, with the likes of PCS leader Mark Serwotka, never a friend of Labour, rejoining in order to support Corbyn.
At first, I fell for some of the abuse directed at Liz Kendall. We didn’t know why she was even in the Labour Party, was the line. She’s a Tory, after all. And when she acknowledged the lie that Labour crashed the economy and supported Gove’s Free Schools experiment, it appeared that view was vindicated. But as the campaign has worn on, I have found the abuse and insults repeated in the direction of pretty well anyone who does not follow the hard left agenda. It is so reminiscent of how the civil service union, the CPSA (latterly PCS), was so heavily infiltrated at all levels by Militant tendency. In its current form, PCS is completely, irreversibly in the hands of Militant, although the leader, Mark Serwotka, is light years to the left of them It’s also in ruins, as the union morphs into an ersatz Trotskyist protest group, shedding members at a rapid rate of knots, irrelevant to their needs. It was not pleasant being in opposition to the Trotskyists who are far more than a secretive sect, often acting like a quasi gangster outfit. You are not allowed to hold a post in PCS these days unless you support the ruling cabal.
Labour was like that in the 1980s. You were either a supporter of Tony Benn or you were a member of Militant (they were called supporters in those days but we all knew). Labour was a bitter and divided party. If you did not support those on the far left, you were a Tory, a traitor or you were far to the right. The campaign for Corbyn is a throwback to those ugly days and I suspect it will get worse.
As a lifelong Labour member (latterly a supporter, following the Iraq invasion of 2003), I have been told I am so far to the right I will soon fall off. I, a working class man who came from a very poor one parent background, went to a Comprehensive School and never earned so much as the average wage in my whole working life have been told that as I do not support Corbyn, I am a supporter of the establishment, presumably like an Old Etonian. And others say that if you do not support a left winger like Corbyn, there is no place for you in Labour. Worse still, some of the insults are from those who have either no knowledge of what it is like to be poor in Britain or worse still have forgotten. I spent much of my life working with the very poorest in society and see few benefits for them living under perpetual Tory rule but I do feel that this is what the argument is all about.
Setting aside Corbyn’s long record of parliamentary disloyalty, and his highly dubious relationships with, and opinions of, foreign dictators and despots, like his “friends” in right wing islamic fascist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, it is true that many of his policy announcements have resonated with those on the left. Most people on the left support a return to public ownership of the railways, not least so that ordinary people can afford to use trains. No one on the left, surely, argues for the privatisation of the NHS. He has been saying some things that many people, including me, agree with, although I draw the line at unilateral nuclear disarmament. But that is not the point. Politics is also about the art of the possible. It is about persuading large swathes of the population, including the affluent middle classes, to support the greater good of society. That is the complete reverse of Thatcherism and one major failing of the Blair years is that, for all the positives that came about, burying the memory of Thatcher was not one of them.
Corbyn’s supporters – I exclude the man himself from criticism – are now displaying the same crass intolerance that turned people off from Labour in the 1980s. If someone like me, of genuine working class stock, with a lifelong commitment to the Labour party and labour movement, is attacked as being “of the right” and “supporting the establishment”, then how will those of greater means be treated? If you argue that someone who does not conform to a hard left agenda should not be in the Labour Party, then how can you persuade ordinary voters who do not conform to a hard left agenda to vote for it? The answer is that you can’t.
First, Labour needs to win. Call it what you like – pragmatism, realism, compromise, but without all three you have the impotence of opposition. And if you accept opposition in exchange for political purity, that’s not very socialist at all.
The fantasists of the left and the sneering chattering classes can throw whatever insults they like towards me. I’ve been there before in the basket case trade union that was PCS and Labour from the 1970s, but you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror if you think that attacking fellow socialists by calling them Tories or whatever looks particularly edifying to ordinary voters. They will end up being repelled by it, as many voters did from the 1980s onwards, handing the country to the real enemy.
