Two excellent tweets from someone called Douglas:
‘I can’t get over the effrontery of the hard left trying to guilt-trip social democrats into voting for Corbynistas. You made it clear you hated us. You told us to fuck off and join the Tories. You smashed our red lines on racism, defending fellow democracies and democratic norms.‘
Then:
‘And now, faced with a hard right government (which suits you fine because extremes feed off each other), you tell us we have to back you anyway. Well, get stuffed. My priority is to elect MPs who won’t bow to the extremes and who might keep you and your mirror images in check.‘
Anyone who supports Labour but isn’t on the hard left fringes will recognise the reality of what Douglas says. It’s not a new thing, either. In fact, it is exactly what those of us who were around the Labour Party in the late 1970s and 1980s had to put up with. We were impure, we were not pure believers, we were centrists or, even worse, of the political right. “You do not belong in the Labour Party. Fuck off and join the Tories.” It happened when Tony Benn was the poster boy of the affluent middle class ‘socialists’ and it happens today when a pound shop version of Benn, Jeremy Bernard Corbyn actually leads the Labour Party.
Now the comrades have the party they always wanted. Few of us who regard ourselves as Labour through and through have taken the route of “fuck off and join the Tories” but plenty of us have taken the very difficult decision to stop voting Labour, in my case for the first time since 1979.
The problem for the comrades is that if their power base comes solely from the hard left, there probably aren’t enough people to vote to put them in office. Having told us that we were not needed in Labour, the penny has dropped and hey’ve come back grovelling with, as Douglas astutely put it, “the guilt trip”.
Generally speaking, this goes as follows. Politics in Britain, as in much of the rest of the world, has now split into two with a clearly defined hard right and a clearly defined hard left. The centre ground has, they say, evaporated. Voting Liberal Democrat, they say, is a wasted vote because they won’t win, voting Liberal Democrat will keep Boris Johnson in office (so it will all be your fault if and when he wins the next election) and anyway, just look at the Liberal Democrat MPs voting records. This is cynicism on steroids.
The logic, such as it is, goes as follows. Jeremy Corbyn might be (no, he is) wholly out of his depth as leader of the opposition and totally unqualified to be prime minister. He has always been the friend of tyrants and terrorists, he could not possibly be trusted to keep Britain safe, he is a prisoner of trade union baron Len McCluskey, he is guided by Stalinists and Communists who have an enormous influence in his office. He has enabled anti-Semitism to contaminate Labour and offered only platitudes in response. He is a Brexiter who has played fast and loose with Labour’s position. He’s utterly useless but look, social democrats or mainstream Labour members, just think how bad things will be under Boris Johnson?
This is how it works. Paint a distorted picture of politics and confine the choices to hard right and hard left and condemn you for what follows because you will be to blame. Just because the hard left is trying to deselect non hard left Labour MPs. Just because Corbyn only appoints true believers to his shadow cabinet, regardless of their talent, or lack of it. Just because the NEC is almost totally controlled by the comrades. Ignore all that. Labour remains, says John McDonnell, “a broad church”. As they say in pantomime, “Oh no it isn’t.”
Labour, I gave you the best years of my life, at least in terms of voting (always) and campaigning (sometimes). I did that because I believed in what Labour stood for (under Callaghan, Kinnock, Smith, Blair, Brown, Miliband) and once because they seemed to represent the best way of opposing Brexit (under Corbyn, except that many of us forgot the reality that Corbyn, like his hero Tony Benn, always opposed EU membership).
It will not be my fault when Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson wins a big majority at the next election, having put Nigel Farage’s pop-up party back in his box. The comrades told me – literally, on occasions – that the likes of me were not welcome in Labour, although you did not have the bottle to tell me to “fuck off” to my face. And when I take the advice literally (actually I haven’t: I made the decision to abandon Labour entirely of my own volition), you go off in a huff.
I do want to see the likes of Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper and Rachel Reeves on Labour’s front bench, preferably led by David Miliband, rather than Diane Abbott, Barry Gardiner, Dawn Butler, Rebecca Long Bailey and Richard Burgon led by, well anyone really. It’s not going to happen, though. The Labour Party I know and love no longer exists.
The university educated affluent middle classes who quite fancy a hard left Labour government will not suffer under a Johnson government. In fact, many will probably be better off. But where they quite fancy a Labour government, millions actually need one that can be elected and can, like the Labour government from 1997 to 2010, make the country much fairer and more equal. The latter is not available anymore so pardon me if I don’t dump my principles and cast a vote for the reheated Bennism on offer from the old folk who now control Labour.
I am a great believer in the political horseshoe theory, where far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble one another, much like the ends of a horseshoe. That theory is at play in Britain today and it is not just the centre ground that has been ignored and put to once side. The mainstreams of both left and right have been sidelined too.
I am not falling for the the guilt trip. The Labour Party I believe in no longer exists and to suggest I hold my nose and vote for it in its current form would be an act of stupefying hypocrisy. I repeat: the hard left now has the Labour Party it always wanted. It’s their party. Just don’t expect me to vote for it or accept the blame when it loses and sets the Tories free.
