Labour Pains

I first joined the Labour Party in 1983, and remained a member until 1987 when I let my membership lapse. Note: I did not announce to the World that I was leaving, I just did not renew my membership.

My reasons for leaving were manifold. Primarily I was disgusted that following the defeat of the miners strike in which the Labour leadership were, at best, equivocal in their support, and then Kinnock’s purge of socialists in Liverpool, I just felt the party was not the best place to build socialism.

Reasons for leaving part 1

I was also, however, frustrated with the internal focus of the Party. This is a true story. I was in a car with a couple of close comrades driving to a branch meeting. As we went round a roundabout there were a number of teenage girls standing around it. I asked what they were doing and was told, by a feminist friend, that they were schoolgirl prostitutes looking for trade. I was horrified, the girls were 13 or 14 years old! When the meeting began, we had the usual business items but I wanted to discuss what we were doing about these young people forced to prostitute themselves. I was told that we could not discuss it and that I could propose a motion to the next meeting, and that we had important business to discuss. That important business was the jumble sale we were organising to help raise funds for the local council election.

I was pretty much done with the party at that moment and although I continued to vote Labour, I set myself to organising outside of the party to take direct action against unemployment, homelessness and poverty.

I returned to the party in 2016 for the second leadership election. I had toyed with joining for the first contest but thought that having walked out of the party the decision on who should lead should be left to those who had stayed. I had not expected Corbyn to emerge victorious, but when he did and faced with the treachery of the PLP I decided to get off the fence.

Jeremy Corbyn gave hope

To be perfectly honest I had not really known much about Jeremy Corbyn until the leadership contest. I was vaguely aware of his name as a member of the Campaign Group of MPs but I expected little from the Labour Party, especially after the Blair years, so was busy doing trade union and community politics. So for anybody to suggest that those who support Corbyn are involved in a personality cult is off the mark. It was a set of policies that were to the left of the centrist (for which read right wing) mainstream. I rejoined to support an end to austerity, a rebalancing of the tax regime, to save our public services (particularly the NHS and education) and to pursue a foreign policy that was diplomacy first rather than just do whatever the Americans demanded.

I want a Party that is not ashamed to be left-wing, that favours ordinary people, that wants to end food banks rather than increase them and that genuinely believes in measures to encourage greater equality. What I’ve got currently is a party that is eating itself from the inside.

Within the Labour Party there is still an adherence to procedures and policies and less emphasis on actual politics. So much of Labour life is still dominated by left vs right contests. We stand for positions so that they won’t win them. We spend an inordinate amount of time trudging round doorsteps to ‘get the vote out’. And, the Labour Party remains characterised by cliques. Cliques who control, and cliques who oppose, but cliques nonetheless who can be very unwelcoming to new members.

The right wing press don't like socialists

In my opinion, the Labour Party is at a major crossroads. Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, there has been a massive increase in members, a huge boost in member-led democracy and a hysterical growth in paranoid and malicious undermining emanating from the right wing of the PLP (that is, most of them) which the media have repeated ad nauseum. 

The cheerleader for this anti-democratic assault has undoubtedly been Margaret Hodge, but don’t underestimate the impact of those such as Chris Bryant or the support offered by Yvette Cooper or Jess Phillips.

The right have thrown everything at Corbyn including walking out of the Shadow Cabinet (ironically allowing the talents of people such as Dawn Butler, Angela Rayner, Richard Burgon and Rebecca Long-Bailey to shine), Corbyn was too nice to be effectual, Corbyn was too nasty to be effectual, Corbyn should support a 2nd Brexit referendum (when he did it’s failure to gain a parliamentary majority was evidence that he was ineffectual), attacks on his closest aides, but by far the most pernicious has been the anti-Semitic smear campaign lead by Hodge (who, interestingly enough never described herself as “the Jewish MP for..” until Corbyn was leader), and the Blair’s friend Luciana Berger (a typical Blairite MP parachuted into a safe Labour seat against the wishes of the local CLP).

Having been around the Labour Party and the Labour left since 1983 I have yet to meet anybody on the left who condones anti-Semitism. Indeed, most Labour activists probably do not think of Jewish people very much at all given that they make up only 0.5% of the population. But when they/we do it is usually with one eye on the Holocaust and the other on the oppression of the Palestinians. Until recently most people on the left avoided the issue not sure how to weigh in on behalf of the Palestinians against a people whose historic oppression gives them a moral weight that makes their treatment of the Palestinians seem even worse somehow, and certainly paradoxical.

Anti-semitism has become a proxy left-right issue

The problem is that allegations of anti-semitism have become conflated with a historic left-right conflict. Hodge, Berger and their friends are spraying accusations of anti-semetism like confetti. Genuine cases of anti-semitism (by which I mean hatred of Jewish people for being Jewish) are treated on the same basis as people who question the right of Israel to oppress the Palestinians.  It is preposterous.

Where does this leave us? The suspension, readmission and then resuspension of the Derby MP Chris Williamson for saying that the Labour Party has been too defensive is a testing ground. Margaret Hodge is not a nice individual, she has a historic animosity to Jeremy Corbyn, and is undoubtedly determined to remove him from the leadership. She knows she cannot do that by democratic means. Any attempt to stand an alternative candidate would be as successful as Owen Smith’s ill-fated leadership bid. But, by attacking Corbyn’s closest allies Hodge et al hope to weaken Jeremy’s grip on the leadership and use their majority in the PLP to undermine

him.

Whilst I would like to see Corbyn being more robust in dealing with these characters, as many members would, now is not the time to leave. Now is the time for ordinary members to show resolve and dig our heels in. This is a crossroads. One way points to a genuinely reformist Democratic Party gaining power. The other leads to a purge, by stealth, of the members and a return to the “good old days” of Blairite centre ground policies which whilst successful for three general elections were geared toward gaining the favour of Murdoch rather than working class voters who deserted the party in droves (Labour lost over 3 million votes from 1997 to 2010) and provided the conditions for SNP dominance in Scotland.

Make no mistake the likes of Hodge, Watson, Phillips etc are relying on Labour losing to regain control of the party. They hate the left far more than the Tories. And, by extension, the signatories to the various letters undermining Labour policy are a direct attack on the socialist values I, and many others, joined to support. The policies advocated by the Blairite PLP members will leave millions living in poverty, lead to the privatisation of the NHS, and leave Labour in opposition as the Tories continue to carve up the UK for themselves. Leaving the party in protest is an option, but at the moment it would be the wrong one. It is precisely what the anti democratic right wing of the party want.