Labour’s attempt at being hip with the kids deserves to fail
‘Labour Live has a line-up that sounds like all the worst bits of a village fete’
Iwent to a festival once. Glastonbury. I hated it. It was a year of biblical rainfall, and I spent the whole time traipsing around in the mud trying to find the Portaloos and worrying I was going to get trench foot.
I’ve managed fairly successfully to avoid festivals ever since, even though everyone tries to persuade me I’m missing out in much the same way as my most middle-class friends continue to insist skiing holidays are fun (they’re not: they’re expensive and cold and bring out the worst in people and I don’t want to have to get up at 7am to “make the most of the slopes”, thanks).
Anyway, the point is, I’m probably not the most objective judge when it comes to assessing the relative merits of music festivals, but even I can tell that Labour Live is going to be completely awful.
I talk, of course, of what has been informally dubbed as “Jezfest”, the Labour Party’s hideously ill-conceived politics and music jamboree.
It is rumoured to have cost £1million and was meant to capitalise on the much-vaunted Corbyn “youth surge” at the last election, which saw the Labour leader reimagined as the Taylor Swift of Left-wing politics, shaking off the haters and standing on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury having his name chanted by thousands who were presumably off their faces on illicit substances.
And yet – mystifyingly – sales of Labour Live tickets are said to be stuck around the 3,000 mark. The venue, White Hart Lane Recreation Ground in London, has a not inconsiderable 15,000 capacity and the event takes place this Saturday. So they’ll have to sell 5,000 tickets a day to fill the arena. Good luck with that, guys.
On Monday, we learned that grime artist Stormzy had asked for a rumoured £100,000 to headline and that the organisers had “balked” at the fee. Were they expecting Stormzy to perform for free in the service of some greater socialist good? I certainly hope not, given Labour’s stated disapproval of unpaid internships and zero-hours contracts.
So now Labour Live has a line-up that sounds like all the worst bits of a village fete, if a village fete were organised by a steering committee consisting of some Seventies student politicians, a group of vegan real-ale enthusiasts and Chairman Mao. Cutesy folk combo The Magic Numbers are performing and the website lists some other red-hot attractions such as “a socialist pint from Workers Beer” and a “Solidarity Tent”.
There’s also a silent disco, just in case you want to get away from Owen Jones or the educational discussion group “talk socialism”.
With festivals like these, who needs gulags? The whole thing has been an embarrassing farrago, a conceit borne from the narcissism of the unelected.
After gaining more votes than expected at the last election (but not enough, let’s remember, to actually be in office), Jeremy Corbyn has let it all go to his head in quite magnificent style. He’s been carried away by all the name-chanting, the “Jez We Can” T-shirts and the success of Grime4corbyn and has started to believe his own hype.
Now he thinks he’s down with the kids, like one of those unmarried uncles at family gatherings who talks loudly about “the Snapchat” and Love
Island. In fact, the most recent research has shown that there was no surge in younger voters in the 2017 election. The age-turnout relationship barely changed between 2015 and 2017.
But Corbyn has been determined to reinvent himself as the saviour of the Left-wing. As a result, the Labour Party has become less about collective enterprise and more about Corbyn as rock star, capable of drawing large crowds at the drop of a hat (a hat that might or might not have been Photoshopped by the BBC to look more Russian).
It’s just that no one’s buying it and this delusional folly of selfaggrandisement has reached its nadir with Labour Live. No wonder they’re struggling to shift tickets. What Corbyn has forgotten is that we don’t want our politicians to be rock stars.
At a time when our country is facing the historic challenge of Brexit, voters are not impressed with grandstanding but with the MPS who work hard, come up with a plan and just get on with it.
Unlike Americans, as a nation, we tend to mistrust the cult of individuality. There’s a feeling that personality politicians are all well and good for entertainment value, but that’s where it stops.
When the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock struck a triumphalist tone at a Sheffield rally in 1992, shouting “We’re all right” like a demented televangelist, Labour lost the general election a week later despite having been ahead in the polls.
We Britons don’t like it when someone gets too big for their boots or puts personal privilege ahead of party politics. We’re a modest bunch, really. It’s why Theresa May, with her almost total absence of anything approaching charisma, will always be perceived as more electable than Corbyn.
Voters are more likely to trust someone boring to run the country than someone who wants to prance about on stage with Stormzy.
And we’re more likely to elect an MP who knuckles down to the unglamorous business of getting things done than a politician who, quite frankly, can’t organise a p----up in a socialist brewery.
I’m with Stormzy. I think I’ll sit Labour Live out.