May 3rd 1979. I’ll never forget that day for all sorts of reasons. The first was that it was the first general election in which I could vote. I was already active in my local Labour Party for whom the MP was Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or Tony Benn as he later became. Even at a tender-ish age, I had managed to work out that Labour, at least in my local party, was dominated and controlled by the hard left. But I was a Labour man not by birth, by from experience and by choice.
Labour, which had been in government since 1974, had completely run out of energy. Inflation was rising, the country had been crippled by strikes in the so called ‘winter of discontent’ and change was coming. And what change it was. The election of our first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
It is painful to recall the Thatcher years without grimacing. She hated the working classes and so much of what she did in office was designed to put them in their place. Thatcher changed the country and not in a good way. She believed there was no such thing as society, that people with no legs should stand on their own two feet and if they couldn’t it was just too bad. Greed is good.
I stuck with Labour as it turned inward and leftward. My local MP Tony Benn, who came from a privileged world of wealth and the best education money could buy, became hugely influential, taking the party on a journey that would confine it to opposition for 18 years. The far left 1983 manifesto was described as “the longest suicide note in history” by the late Gerald Kaufman. He was right. Labour was obliterated at the ballot box.
Gradually, Labour came back from the dead. I had always said – and still believe today – that Labour can only win if it embraces people from a variety of different backgrounds, including and especially the aspirational middle classes. Subsequent Labour leaders, starting with Neil Kinnock, through John Smith and eventually Tony Blair recognised this. In 1997, Blair led Labour to a landslide victory. It was the first of three elections he won, the only Labour governments since I was first able to vote 40 years ago.
The far left never quite went away, meeting up at various marches and rallies, forming numbers hard left organisations like Stop the War. After Ed Miliband led Labour to defeat in the 2015 general election, he opened up the Labour Party to people who weren’t members but could pay £3 to help elect a new leader. In order to have a ‘genuine debate’, a number of mainstream Labour MPs voted against their beliefs to give a little known backbencher Jeremy Corbyn a voice to express the hard left alternative. We know what happened next.
Labour today is in the grip of the hard left. It’s national executive is in the hands of the comrades, it’s large membership comprises of vast numbers of Corbyn fans, its trade union fixers like Len McCluskey have more power and influence than ever. Corbyn’s top team of officials are literally Stalinists, appointments are made on the basis of nepotism, not ability. Labour today is institutionally anti-Semitic and pro Brexit, it is a plaything of elite ex University ‘intellectuals’ who quite fancy a Labour government but it doesn’t much matter to them whoever wins. That the poor and disenfranchised actually need a Labour government, like the one they had in 1997, is of no consequence to the Corbyn cult. Which leads me to May 2nd 2019.
I am off to the ballot box soon to cast, or rather spoil, my vote in the local council elections. I would never, under any circumstances, vote Conservative, I cannot vote for the Lib Dems because of their role in propping up David Cameron’s austerity heavy government and lying about wanting to slap university tuition fees. And for the first time ever, I cannot and will not vote Labour.
No one represents me anymore, certainly not today and even the brand new shiny Change UK has stalled badly, its leaders and spokespeople looking nothing like anyone I know.
Democracy is in ruins in our country. With local councils starved of funding from national government, it doesn’t matter who you vote for because whoever wins won’t be able to change much. I had thought of holding my nose and voting Lib Dem but my journey, wherever it’s going, hasn’t reached Vince Cable and his tainted pals just yet.
So shortly I am heading off to the polling station to draw a large penis on the ballot paper. It would surely do a better job than anyone else on the ballot paper.
