One of the many weird things about the Labour leadership election has been, as a member for nearly 30\u00a0years, getting lectured about Labour values by people who \u2013 to my certain knowledge \u2013 have never been members of the Labour Party, are not members of the Labour Party, have spent a great deal of time attacking the Labour Party, but who now feel that they have some god-given right to instruct me on my \u201cduty\u201d in this election.<\/p>\n
At the start of the campaign most of this pontification was coming from the right and it was in support of Liz Kendall. As the campaign has gone on, increasing amounts of it has come from the left and is in support of Jeremy Corbyn. As the weeks have passed the debate on both sides has become foam-flecked and ranting. Anyone who dares to disagree is a \u201cred tory\u201d, a \u201ccrypto-communist\u201d or a \u201ctraitor\u201d \u2013 a selection of the more friendly epithets thrown at me lately by both sides.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never voted for the winner of a Labour leadership election. I didn\u2019t vote for Smith or Blair \u2013 I could afford to be contrary in these elections, to be sure, since their victories were assured but in both cases my vote went to the candidates I thought represented Labour\u2019s left-of-centre (Gould and Prescott). I didn\u2019t vote for Ed Miliband as my first choice either. So I don\u2019t suppose Kendall or Corbyn\u2019s campaigns will be particularly fussed that I\u2019m not voting for them.<\/p>\n
My main reasons for not supporting Corbyn are historical \u2013 his attempts to claim that his support of Sinn Fein in the 1980s was a contribution to the peace process turns my stomach and is an insult to those (Catholic and Protestant, Irish and British) whose lives were taken or destroyed by the IRA\u00a0in those times. Kendall? Well I can\u2019t understand how anyone can look at how deeply unequal our society has become and decide that the problem with our last manifesto was that we weren\u2019t doing enough for those who already have the most.<\/p>\n
But I want to address one thing about this campaign that has particularly annoyed me \u2013 and that\u2019s the notion that \u201cideological purity\u201d (either Blairite or neo-Bennite) and a refusal to compromise is somehow reflective of the real history of the Labour Party and that anyone who believes otherwise is somehow exercising cynicism or is just plain traitorous.<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s be clear. The Labour Party is the party of Ramsay MacDonald, Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown \u2013 for good and bad, compromisers all \u2013 every bit as much as it is the party of Nye Bevin, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone and as much as it is the party of Hugh Gaitskell, Charles Clarke and John Mann. I might not agree with (or much like) many of the people in the Labour Party but it has done things that transformed ordinary people\u2019s lives for the better \u2013 even the very worst Labour governments. For all its flaws and shortcomings (of which I am very much and very painfully aware) I am also, frequently, immensely proud of the party to which I have belonged all my adult life.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of parties in Britain that have put purity of ideology ahead of getting elected. There\u2019s still several different shades of Communist Party, there\u2019s Left Unity, there\u2019s the SWP (god help them) and TUSC and The Socialist Party and The Scottish Socialist Party. If you long for a life of comfortable obscurity surrounded by a small clique of likeminded people who will never make you think too hard about your assumptions or\u00a0force you\u00a0to sully your hands with compromise, I commend these havens of impotence to you.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not what the Labour Party is for. That is not what it has stood for the last hundred-odd years. And that is not what the people of Britain who are being hammered by this Conservative government in the here-and-now need it to be over the next five years.<\/p>\n
The job of The Labour Party is to get elected and to do what it can, when it can. Sometimes those are small steps, sometimes there are big leaps \u2013 sometimes we go in the wrong direction entirely. But we do what we can, and if we can\u2019t do everything, we do something.<\/p>\n
Does that sound too modest? Well it is modest. But it has also been rather effective \u2013 because moderate, dull, compromising Labour has done infinitely more in its own half-arsed, sometimes infuriating, frequently faltering way to improve the practical conditions of ordinary British people than the firebrands and ideologues and pure-at-hearts on the rest of the British left combined.<\/p>\n
Recognising this is not the same as giving up on the Labour Party\u2019s ability to be radical but it is understanding that it is a party that works in a democracy where hope of getting elected and delivering a programme of change requires building a coalition of people who have very different interests. To paraphrase the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, the purpose of our democratic institutions (of which The Labour Party is one) is to find ways in which we can rub along together in our disagreements without those differences of opinion turning into antagonisms that tear us apart. The result is that no one is really happy, but the purpose of democratic institutions isn\u2019t to make individuals happy \u2013 voting isn\u2019t a mechanism for self-actualisation \u2013 it\u2019s about developing a community that can encompass all of our different demands and desires as much as possible. Even, apparently paradoxically, if that makes most of us miserable, most of the time.<\/p>\n
The idea that a party of hundreds of thousands of people seeking the votes of tens of millions of people \u2013 all of whom have individual experiences leading to specific sets of interests and demands \u2013 could or should somehow deliver exactly what every (or any) individual within those millions wants (except by pure chance) has always seemed to me slightly bonkers. I also find it disturbing that so many people so easily assume that their (or their acquaintances) individual demands somehow reflect the desires of \u201ceveryone\u201d \u2013 it belies a childish narcissism.<\/p>\n
Of course there are plenty of organizations (from Greenpeace to Shell, from Class War to the CBI) that campaign to change what people want, to mould their desires and to direct them into the political process. I\u2019m a member or supporter of plenty of those groups myself \u2013 CND, Greenpeace, Compass a couple of unions, a bunch of other stuff \u2013 and I consider the work they do important. These groups can afford to be exclusionary. Their job is to bring together relatively small groups of very like-minded people to campaign for specific things. This is good. This is vital for democracy. But it\u2019s not what the Labour Party or parliamentary democracy is for. Politics designed to put the interests of an organised minority, however well-intentioned, ahead of the many is elitist \u2013 and it will lead to disaster.<\/p>\n
In the democracy that we have, the Labour Party\u2019s job \u2013 whether people like it or not \u2013 is to bring together diverse threads of (broadly defined) progressive thought and to find a compromise that appeals to the most possible people. That means sometimes working with people you don\u2019t much like. It means trying to strike a balance between what you\u2019d like to do, what needs to be done and what you can realistically achieve. It means that the edges of our Party are fuzzy and often we don\u2019t share a lot in common with people we sit beside as allies. It\u2019s sometimes dirty, usually unsatisfying, and it\u2019s not something that most people regard as particularly noble but it\u2019s also absolutely essential in a nation as large and diverse as the UK.<\/p>\n
So by all means vote for Kendall or Corbyn, but don\u2019t tell me that the Labour Party\u2019s job is to magnify your personal ideology and impose it on everyone else. It isn\u2019t. And it never has been.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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