It will probably not surprise my loyal reader that I have always voted Labour in every election I was able to vote in. It started in 1979 and went right through to 2019. I was not raised to support any kind of political ideology. Mine was an apolitical family who simply never spoke about politics. My ‘journey’ to Labour just happened and with three exceptions, putting my cross in the box marked Labour was very easy. The exceptions are kind of what this blog is all about.
I joined Labour in the late 1970s and while I did not become particularly active, I went to a lot of public meetings in the Bristol South East constituency where the MP was Tony Benn. There was a very good reason why you could not become active in those days. Bristol South East was ruthlessly controlled by the hard left in general and the Trotskyist group Militant in particular. You could only ‘get on’ in local Labour if you subscribed to the hard left and, preferably joined Militant, which at the time laughably claimed it wasn’t a party within a party.
Benn, who lived in Holland Park in London and never in Bristol, was someone I couldn’t warm to. I found him to be aloof, distant and caught up in a dreamworld of slogans, rhetoric and above all simplistic solutions for complex matters. Worse, he had this weird fixation, a romantic view of what he saw as the working class struggle, as if there was something wonderful about the need to put bread on the table. Yet sometimes the bread never appeared. He couldn’t think that far ahead.
I knew very early on that Benn was of the hard left and, as the years went by, he moved further and further to the left. I, meanwhile, was a Blairite decades before New Labour was even a thing. I worked out very quickly that Labour could do nothing in opposition. The Conservatives won most of the time and in order to defeat them, they needed to assemble a grand coalition of voters, not all of whom considered themselves to be of the left. That meant compromise in terms of Labour’s offer to the electorate. The hard left never compromised.
In 1979, Labour was tired and out of ideas after a fraught six years in office and Downing Street belonged to the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, who set up her tanks in Labour heartlands and won. Labour’s reaction, as so often at times like these, was to make a swerve to the left, electing Michael Foot to the leadership. When Thatcher went to the country to renew her mandate in 1983, she won by a landslide majority. Labour’s manifesto was described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history”. It was packed with hardline policies like leaving NATO, scrapping our nuclear deterrent, leaving the EU (the hard left always shared that desire with the hard right, as we rediscovered in the 2016 EU referendum), renationalisation of all privatised companies including British Aerospace and so much more. And I voted Labour. Why?
The manifesto was absolutely mad and, I’m afraid, got what it deserved from the electorate but it was still better than what Thatcher was offering, which was the continued destruction of the NHS, the end of Britain as a manufacturing nation, widening inequality and an unremitting attack on working people. Benn was behind the manifesto, a dreamer dreaming of a world that would never be, desiring purity for purity’s sake, never able to compromise, seemingly not bothered if Labour lost as long as it lost with a hardline manifesto. Benn could afford endless Tory governments. The British working class less so.
My own politics didn’t require compromise. I had worked it out myself. I believed in strong public services, especially in terms of health and education and I believed in the equality of opportunity. That was my socialism. But I also liked the choice the private sector could offer me, if properly regulated. And I always believed such a government was possible. It took until 1997 when Tony Blair swept to power to make it happen.
The hard left hated Blair but the reason he was successful was, in large part, because he actually believed in New Labour and voters could see that. His was no marriage of convenience with Britain. We could have both strong public services and a thriving economy and from 1997, we did. I know the very mention of Tony Blair turns some folk apoplectic these days, but I don’t know why. He promised that “things could only get better” with him as PM in a Labour government and they did. Much better. If you don’t believe that, you weren’t there. In many ways, the Labour government, particularly from 1997 to 2005 was the best government of my lifetime. Britain was a far happier, more united and stronger country than it was before and has been since.
In 2010, Labour lost the general election. Gordon Brown was a great chancellor but in an era where looks and image seemed to matter more, the public walked away from Brown the PM, installing instead an austerity heavy Tory government, in which some unprincipled Liberal Democrats took jobs, led by David Cameron. By 2015, the country was crumbling but the public preferred smooth-talking Cameron to Labour’s new leader Ed Miliband, who was regarded by some as being too ‘geeky’ to lead the country. Obviously, I still voted Labour. I liked Miliband, although I had voted for his brother David to be the next leader in 2010. Next, Labour lost its collective mind.
Labour members decided to elect Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader, someone most of us regarded as little more than an elderly far left crank, rightly in my view. Wholly unsuited to leadership, Corbyn took the party to the hard left and it was no surprise when, in 2017, the new Tory leader Theresa May called a general election after her predecessor had taken the country off a cliff by holding and then losing a referendum on EU membership.
May ran a disastrous campaign, so bad that even a Labour Party led by the hard left managed to prevent her winning an outright majority. On election day, I voted Labour, albeit with a twinge of guilt given the awful bloke I considered Corbyn to be. The decision to vote Labour at the next election was harder still.
By 2019, the Tories were led by all round liar, shyster and serially incompetent Boris Johnson. I was never going to vote for Johnson, especially after he led the campaign to leave Europe despite not believing in it at all, but mainly because he was a Tory and I never vote for Tories. But how could I vote for Corbyn, the friend of the IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah, the man who wouldn’t initially condemn Putin after the Salisbury poisonings, the antisemite, the anti-nuclear all-round crank who had never before held a seat of power, other than a period in the 1970s when he was chair of Haringey’s housing department? Yet I did.
I was persuaded by wise friends that however bad Corbyn was, then Johnson would be worse. I should vote Labour if only to help reduce Johnson’s overall majority. Holding my nose, I voted Labour. Corbyn, having crashed and burned, faded away into the background and Keir Starmer began the long job to try to make Labour credible and electable. Incredibly, in a little more than four years he has done it. Not everyone likes the change.
The hard left are furious. Led by the likes of Owen Jones, they spend much of their time attacking Starmer and Labour. They call Labour “Tory light” and complain that a Labour government under Starmer would be no different than the Tories. They can’t vote Labour anymore. But hang on. That’s exactly what the same people said about Blair and Brown. Yet for 13 years, Britain got a whole lot better. There were no more NHS waiting lists, barely any food banks, there was peace in Northern Ireland – oh just see the head of this blog. For the comrades, a Labour government that bears any resemblance to New Labour will be impure.
I genuinely believe that Keir Starmer would lead a great, reforming government. It would decade a decade to fully recover from the carnage he would inherit if he won the election, but what’s the alternative? We now hear there are circa 10 million people on NHS waiting lists. We now have record levels of food poverty. The armed services have been pared to the bone. Millions more pensioners are being dragged into paying income tax because Rishi Sunak as chancellor froze personal allowances. Christ, even pot holes are becoming sinkholes in Britain today. We can do better than this. And it’s time to give the comrades a simple message.
Our only way out of this, a country that is broken, where nothing works, is a Labour government. It’s our only way out of the mess Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and now the wretched Sunak have visited upon us. Don’t shit all over our only chance.
In 1983, I voted Labour despite the worst efforts of Benn. In 2017 and 2019, I voted Labour despite the fact that I loathed Labour’s worst ever leader. And why, because the alternatives were worse. Yet despite knowing that, the comrades campaign against Labour. I put it to you that they are actually campaigning against everyone who needs a government that will fix Broken Britain and, yes, give us our future back.
So called purity may feel good to the middle class luvvies of the hard left and doubtless they are well-off enough to withstand the suffocating austerity of the Conservatives. They don’t rely so much on the NHS and don’t use food banks. Theirs is a cloistered existence, an echo chamber of like-minded comrades who believe that winning elections doesn’t matter, if you can only stay pure.
I want Britain to be better, I want to see my kids do better in life than I did, I want to see seniors treated with dignity, I want to see the end of NHS waiting lists and more than anything I want to see the return of hope and optimism, instead of the endless Tory culture wars.
Things can only get better, but only if we want them to, only if we make them happen. The Tories and, perversely, their allies on the hard left stand in our way. Always the way in politics that the hard right and the hard left meet in the middle of the horseshoe. From Benn to Corbyn and now the hard left from the chattering classes. The comrades have nothing to offer, beyond the philosophies of long dead Marxists and Trotskyists. And the Tories have failed. It’s up to us now.
