Twitter can be an entertaining place. You can, by and large, control what you see, but it’s never a good idea, if you are easily upset, to get into any kind of debate with extremes of left and right because that’s when you experience what some call a ‘pile on’. That’s where a bunch of similarly minded folk effectively gang-up to harangue and even gaslight you. When I joined twitter, I must admit some of the more negative stuff surprised and occasionally upset me. Now, they’re little more than an irritation, a fly which has been walking in, and eating, shit, hanging round your dinner.
I find myself getting into pointless scuffles with mainly hard left comrades who worship the very ground walked on by the wretched Jeremy Corbyn, pointing out to little effect that he led Labour to a catastrophic defeat in the 2019 election. They have no real arguments. It’s just pathetic name-calling. Here are a few examples:
The likes of me are “vile people.”
“You are a comrade to nobody.”
“I think you’ll find it was Sir Keir and his PLP friends that gave you a Tory govt.”
“Typical hypocrisy from a centrist red tory.!”
“I hope he gets the help he needs.”
“No, really. I do hope you receive the attention you require. I don’t expect you to believe that. But I wish you well even as you cry and rage and spit and lie.”
“Yeah, Rick with the silent P.”
And so on and so on.
I wonder what it’s like to carry around such hate and how much courage it takes to come up with stuff like that, without actually revealing your actual name in public. The classic keyboard warriors.
The hard left represents a sizeable minority in Britain today. Many exist in extreme fringe parties like the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, others dwell on the fringes of Labour. Their vision of socialism is, in their own minds, pure. No one else can call themselves a socialist unless their views conform with the comrades. I am not interested in debating with these idiots whether I am regarded as a socialist or not, although I’d certainly question whether, in the purest sense, they are at all.
I am, and have always been, left of centre. I’d call it mainstream Labour. Anyone who believes in the NHS has a bit of socialism in them, whether they like it or not. But here’s the thing: as well as believing in strong public services, I also believe in aspiration and ambition, of encouraging people to get on. If people get on, earn a few bob, get a nice car and a nice house, I see that as A Good Thing. Work hard, play by the rules.
My political education in the 1970s developed after seeing my MP Tony Benn in action. Even as a teenager, I found his aggressive yet simplistic politics hard to swallow. Here was a man who had the most privileged upbringing imaginable seemingly kicking the ladder away beneath him. I became something like the original Blairite, favouring a third way where we could have it all: excellent well funded public services and opportunity for all, a real meritocracy. The ruling clique in Benn’s constituency, a combination of the hard left controlled by Militant and a minority of traditional Labour men and women (but mostly men) who, I felt, were starstruck by the charismatic Benn, who by the way never lived in Bristol.
I concluded in 1983, when Michael Foot led Labour to disaster against Margaret Thatcher’s Tory party, on the back of a manifesto described by Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history. Labour would not and could not win without embracing the centre ground, that mass of people not permanently committed to one party of another. But despite modernising, it took until 1997 when Tony Blair’s New Labour won by a landslide. And for a decade, things got better, a lot better.
After Labour lost the 2010 election, it did what it often does; lurching to the hard left and in 2015 members elected a hard left career backbencher, Jeremy Corbyn, to lead the party. The rest, as they say, is history. Reluctantly, I voted for Corbyn’s Labour in 2017 and 2019 but the public hated his guts and in the latter election handed Boris Johnson’s Tories a landslide win. Corbyn had campaigned on a hard left manifesto and, inevitably, Labour crashed and burned. But that was okay for the comrades: it was all about purity. The result didn’t matter too much. They were, they said, building a movement. It turned out to be a bowel movement.
Keir Starmer succeeded Corbyn and has been steering the party back to where voters are. Not all voters, true, but the ones you need to win elections. But that is anathema to the comrades. Only purity will do. Pure socialism or nothing.
When Tony Blair gave us New Labour he believed in it. It wasn’t some kind of sales pitch for something he didn’t believe in: this was his vision for Britain and it was successful at the ballot box. For a decade, it delivered. One can argue that New Labour didn’t embed the changes more deeply, but it is, frankly, delusional and plain wrong to suggest that Labour didn’t improve our country. If Labour is to win, Starmer has concluded, rightly, it needs to meet the voters.
I am not unduly concerned about the insults being thrown by often anonymous trolls. It’s all they have left. But are they really the true socialists they say they are? Blair’s Labour was infinitely better than anything the Tories have ever come up with. Here are some facts:
Many comrades will not support a Labour Party that did stuff like that, things that made the lot of working people much better. I would argue that if you cannot bring yourself to support New Labour, then you’re the one who is a Red Tory, whatever that means.
Right and left usually end up meeting on the fringes. It’s known as the horseshoe effect. The comrades would no more support the achievements of New Labour than would Nigel Farage. No amount of name-calling and mud-slinging can change that simple reality. Two cheeks of the same arse.
Call Labour’s achievements not socialist, call them anything you like, I don’t care. All that mattered is Britain got better. What did Jeremy Corbyn do to make Britain better? That’s a rhetorical question by the way. The answer’s nothing.
