Why I’m sitting out this election

Why I’m sitting out this election

It’s an exciting time to be a socialist in the UK. Despite the combined efforts of the Tory-owned media and the state funded BBC there is real belief building that Labour can beat the Tories and we could have a socialist Government as an early Christmas present.

So, as the joke about the horse in a pub goes: why the long face? Why do I feel that I am caught between a rock and a hard place? We are perhaps weeks away from a paradigm shifting electoral victory and yet….

I have voiced my fear on a couple of forums. Put simply it is this. I live in a constituency with a sitting Labour MP. This is a marginal seat. It went Labour in 2017, helped by the Corbyn bump and Momentum sending canvassers to flood the place.

Our MP was not chosen by members, but imposed by the Welsh NEC. Our MP has not had to face a trigger ballot because Welsh Labour ducked and dived in order to ensure that there was no time for them to take place.

Our MP is a long way from being a Corbyn supporter. She has made herself a prominent anti-democrat by promoting, by all means, her personal preference for a ‘People’s Vote’ and latterly by imitating the Lib Dem’s demand to revoke Article 50.

Our MP has never lifted a finger to help dissipate the anti-Semitism smears aimed at the leadership and members. Indeed, she joined the ‘Enough is Enough’ protests organised by the Jewish Labour Movement. She was also a signatory to the letter organised by Tom Watson to have Chris Williamson labelled a racist and demanded he should have the whip removed. When the Jewish Labour Movement gleefully tweeted that Chris would not be a Labour candidate she liked the tweet.

Our MP does not like the whiff of democracy and regards any attempt by ordinary members to sanction a sitting MP as “bullying”. At the same time she has nothing but contempt for long-time activists such as Pete Willsman, who she labelled a racist. When Luciana Berger, Chuka Ummana etc left the party with the express intention of destroying our chances of electing a Labour government she lamented their loss.

Our MP acts as if Jeremy Corbyn either does not exist at all or is an embarrassment to be avoided at all costs. During the 2017 election she refused to put his name on her literature or to recognise him as the elected leader of the party. In 2019 she goes further. Her campaign boards do not even reference Welsh Labour but only an invocation to vote for her.

Her twitter feed whilst picking up on the perceived bullying of female members such as Jess Phillips contains no mention or solidarity with the most abused MP, Diane Abbott. 

Whilst she supports everything that Tom Watson says and does, she had nothing to say in support of Jennie Formby, who Watson attacked publicly whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy.  Indeed, it is a long time since she tweeted anything at all from the UK Labour Party or Jeremy Corbyn.

The only time our MP has any interest in ordinary members is when they are telling her how wonderful she is or, at present, when she expects them to assist her in maintaining her position and her, three times the average wage, salary.

There are no doubt worse MP’s. There are no doubt MP’s whose self-centred careerism is more obvious. But, this is my dilemma. I want a Labour Government led by Jeremy Corbyn. Others desperately need what he stands for. I understand what the stakes are, and that they are high. But, I do not want to see that government undermined from within its own ranks.

I cannot, in all honesty, endorse a candidate who I partly blame for the Brexit impasse, who has fanned the flames of a witch-hunt by allowing the false allegations of anti-Semitism to go unanswered, and who holds ordinary people in obvious contempt.

I am told by others on the left that the only goal in the run up to December 12^th is to elect Labour MP’s. That to do anything other than support whatever candidate the NEC select for us is tantamount to giving the Tories a free pass into Number 10.

Yet, as I write this the media’s focus is entirely on one man – Ian Austin. Let me remind you. Austin has been an elected Labour MP since 2005. Many left activists in Dudley North would have freely given up their time to campaign for Mr. Austin. On four separate occasions.

Ian Austin found few foreign wars he could not support and whilst not a member during the Iraq War, together with other Blairites, consistently voted against an enquiry into that disaster. His voting record is certainly not awful. On many social and economic issues he would have been alongside the majority of his Labour colleagues, including Jeremy Corbyn toward whom he has developed a pathological hatred.

Austin is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and was forced to issue a rebuttal for falsely claiming that a Palestinian human rights group, Friends of Al-Aqsa, had denied the Holocaust happened in an article he wrote on the Labour Uncut website in 2011. 

As an MP Austin was heavily implicated in the expenses scandal, but this did not prevent activists from campaigning for him to retain his seat in 2015 and 2017 on the basis that any individual in a red rosette is better than one with a blue rosette.

He was/is an individual who has been frequently rebuked in the House of Commons for inappropriate behaviour. This included In July 2016, being reprimanded by the Speaker of the House of Commons for heckling Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by shouting "sit down and shut up" and "you're a disgrace", as Corbyn criticised the 2003 invasion of Iraq in his response to the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry.

In February 2019 he resigned from the Labour Party to become an Independent. He stood down as an MP this week and immediately called on Labour supporters to vote Conservative. He was joined in this by both John Woodcock and John Mann. Strangely enough, all three are now being paid by the Conservative Party, or the government which amounts to the same thing.

My point is simply this. The idea that the election of any Labour MP is a good thing has been thrown into sharp relief lately. Austin, Woodcock and Mann were all elected as Labour MP’s on the back of the hard work of the activists in their respective constituencies.

As were Angela Smith, Luciana Berger and, of course, Chuka Umunna all of whom are now standing against Labour as Liberal Democrat’s. We can add to that list Joan Ryan, Chris Leslie, Ann Coffey and Mike Gapes who deserted Labour to become the laughably titled Change UK. And, lest we forget Frank Field, Gavin Shuker, and Louise Ellman have abandoned Labour to become Independents.

I’m not sure if my current MP would ever jeopardise her access to the gravy train and actually leave the party. But I do know she is a member of the Welsh Labour establishment who have blocked every attempt to democratise the party and are, at times openly at other more guarded, critics of the leftward shift in the UK Party.

But, I hear you say, if you don’t vote for the Labour candidate, who will you vote for? Obviously whilst I am a member of the Party I would not vote for another party. But, this is not just a question of voting, but of being able to campaign for somebody I believe in. In all honesty, I have no more faith in my current MP than I do the local Tory or Lib Dem.

I could become a transient canvasser travelling to a nearby constituency to support a more left-wing candidate. But, I’m not sure I want to spend the next few weeks travelling miles to canvass. There is something about campaigning in your own locality that has always appealed to me. And, this time, despite my enthusiasm for the manifesto I feel unable to do so. The whiff of a sell out is just too strong.

The problem is not just my MP either. But, the idea that Welsh Labour is somehow distinct from the party in the UK. They seem to believe that in Wales ordinary voters vote for this entity called Welsh Labour and are totally unaffected by the media obsession with Jeremy Corbyn. During the last campaign I knocked on a lot of doors and, yes, Jeremy came up, both as a plus and a minus, but the only time I recall Welsh Labour being explicitly mentioned was to tell me that they would never vote for Carwyn Jones, then Leader of the Welsh Government, who I explained was not actually standing.

I am, to use football parlance genuinely gutted. I can see from watching Twitter and Facebook how much excitement there is out there. I sense that this election is make or break for the Corbyn project. I have not been this enthused about a manifesto since 1983, and I sense that the Tories are repeating all the errors they made in 2017. But, at the risk of alienating myself from those who are kind enough to follow me on Twitter and to read this blog, my contribution is going to consist of commenting from the sidelines.

When I say I’m sitting this election out, it does not mean I will not be involved. This blog will be supporting Jeremy Corbyn and the UK Labour Party. My Twitter feed will be aimed at supporting Labour and doing what I can to undermine the Tories and Lib Dem’s. Or to put that another way I’ll be trying to undermine the Tories regardless of which party banner they are under.

If I had a candidate I believed in, or even one who had been selected by an open and democratic decision of the members I would gladly leave the warmth of my home to trudge the streets knocking on doors. But, I cannot take part in an election in which I feel so disenfranchised by the Labour right wing who continue to run the party as if it is their private club. I hope Jeremy Corbyn gets into Number 10, but I will be shedding no tears on election night if some current Labour MPs, including mine, lose their seats.