One thing I have always resented is the apparent luxury of opposition. And the sheer folly, the absolute hopelessness of it all. Little can be changed in opposition, lives can rarely be improved. Being in opposition is easy, it’s the cop out, it’s the unprincipled pretence of principles. Opposition is howling at the moon, it is condemning the have nots to their world of nothing, offering them not even hope.
Opposition is, for some, a happy place where they can say whatever they like with few real world consequences. My introduction to politics, in the mid to late 1970s, was under a Labour government, but one that was being battered from pillar to post by crises it could not control, like the oil price shock, and the growth of trade union power.
My MP, Tony Benn, was a member of that government, and for the large part in the 1970s, adhered to collective responsibility. Later, as Labour was swept out of office, for, as it turned out, 18 long years as Margaret Thatcher tore apart the ties that bound the country together, he became a self-made rebel with a cause, to drive labour far to the left and ultimately into a ditch. Where we needed unity, we had division. I was certain that most people’s instincts were somewhere around the centre ground, roughly between centre left and centre right.
Labour has been good at that, turning into a talking shop of middle class idealists, all of whom dreamed of political purity. In their minds, Labour could only be supported if it became a hard left socialist organisation, dumping its middle-of-the-road baggage, as the comrades saw it. This was the basis of Bennism, which helped bring about Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister and indeed directly caused Thatcher’s landslide election win in 1983. When the hard left were resurrected under Labour’s worst ever leader, Jeremy Corbyn, voters gave their answer. They elected Boris Johnson, again with a landslide majority. But to the comrades, this was all well and good. It was better to have fought as ‘real Labour’, as they saw it, than never had fought at all.
This is what the comrades are like. And today’s comrades are no different. The Guardian newspaper’s editorial is centre left but many of its columnists are of the hard left. Owen Jones, Aditya Chakrabortty and Andy Beckett, to name but three, are as critical, if not more critical, of Labour than they are of the Tories. The hard left are intolerant, inflexible and, they believe, pure as the driven snow. No other form of socialism, or social democracy, can be incorporated into their philosophy. New Labour, which changed the lives of millions, was no better than the Tories to them, despite its many achievements, which would never have happened under the Tories.
In 2024, British voters ended 14 years of Conservative misrule and suddenly, we became an outlier in the world. Keir Starmer’s left of centre Labour Party came to office just as the rest of the world appeared to be lurching to the right, including in many places – Italy, the Netherlands, France, Hungary to name but a few – the far right. And this week, a political earthquake occurred in the USA. An actual fascist became president and leader of the free world.
It is not that Britain is without its far right. The Fagash Fuhrer Nigel Farage, a thoroughly modern Mosley, has steered Britain away from its allies in Europe and moved our politics to the far right in so many ways. The Conservative party has tacked rightwards in order to compete. Fortunately, the Tories were obliterated in the July election and Farage’s private company Reform UK Ltd, which masquerades are a political party, picked up only a few seats. Effectively, the two main right wing parties fucked each other up and Labour’s brilliant strategic campaign handed them a big election win. Starmer has five years to make this country better and more prosperous. And here’s the thing. If Labour fails and is voted out, who is to say Farage won’t be our next PM, going down the Trump road here in Old Blighty?
Labour has a big job to do, not least in convincing voters it has the answers to the questions people are asking. The luxury of opposition if Labour fails will be catastrophic to millions of working and middle class people. Yet the hard left are still at it, still attacking Labour, still demanding full fat Marxism, when what people actually want, I would suggest, is higher living standards, good secure well paid jobs, dignity in old age, a functioning NHS and the chance for everyone, no matter where they come from in society, to get on.
It is now that I ask the question of the hard left: who’s side are you on? Because that’s what it all comes down to. Are you with Labour or against it? If you are saying, “Well, Starmer isn’t left wing enough so I can’t support him” then what you are really saying is “Go ahead and vote Conservative and Reform and take your chances with Kemi Bad Enoch and Farage.” “I want Jeremy Corbyn, or some other hard left nonentity to be PM” is not something that is on the table. It never was.
My view has always been that the hard left are more about building a “movement” and not forming a government. We must have what we see as the right policies, regardless of whether people vote for them. That simply has to change.
Farage and the rest of the hard right love the red on red attacks. The more division on the left, the better. Division is how Labour loses. For all the current chaos and carnage in the Tory party, it remains the single most successful political party in history. The Tory party, and indeed Reform, is the establishment (and don’t let them dare say otherwise). The media is overwhelmingly supportive of them and that is another obstacle in Labour’s way. For the left, the reality is this: unite or die.
If you are coming from the left to attack Labour, you are no better than the Tories and Farage. You might not like everything Labour is doing but the big picture is clear. The forces lined up against Labour are huge. I happen to think the NHS is worth saving, that schools need to be improved, that public services in general should be upgraded, that the glass ceiling that stands in the way of people reaching their potential needs to be shattered, that the old should live with dignity and all the other things a centre left party stands for. If you are attacking Labour, you are also attacking the people whose lives depend on Labour getting it right.
The luxury of opposition is only luxury for those who can afford it. The hacks and grifters like Owen Jones, the Novara luvvies and the middle class revolutionaries who called themselves Corbynistas don’t understand or even care about the lives you lead, anymore than the Faragistas and the Rees-Moggs of the illiberal elite. They illustrate what we call the horseshoe effect, where the extremes of left and right eventually meet up and show themselves to be much closer than even they realised. My old MP, Tony Benn, was a huge admirer or Enoch ‘Rivers of Blood’ Powell and campaigned with him in the 1970s in opposition to the UK joining the EU, or the Common Market as it was then known.
Labour is somewhere near the middle, on the centre ground, of politics but its instincts are of the centre left. And centre left, in terms of making Britain better is the only available option for anyone of the left. I’ll end with this.
If you put political purity ahead of making the lives of working people better, I’d question your credentials as a socialist. You may claim to be more left wing than me but I see politics in more practical terms, doing what works, not clinging to old Marxist text books. And if you would be content to see this Labour government fail, with all the damaging consequences that would deliver, I’d say that you and Farage are two cheeks of the same arse
It’s us or them. Simple as that.
