Why I’m labouring over the end of old school politics
WOKE UP with the realisation I’m ready for school and there’s no one there I can trust to hold my hand. I’m a political orphan, the schoolboy in the Alexander Brothers’ song Nobody’s Child, holding out a tiny hand of confusion while craving the soft, safe palm of reassurance.
Growing up, there was an implicit understanding the mothering mitt which was the Labour Party would make sure I was all right. In 1964, Harold Wilson offered, it seemed, more than pipe dreams. Labour cared. It fought the good fight for the women of Singer Sewing Machines in Clydebank, and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. Labour represented union rights and giants such as Jimmy Reid represented humanity.
The teenage years saw the hand of Labour clasped even firmer, the belief in an egalitarian world solidified after reading of John Mclean and government tanks in George Square, of “angry young men” authors such as Osbourne and Waterhouse and Sillitoe. It was impossible not to join the Johnstone Labour Party and studying politics a few years later made complete sense.
Even though the clever David Coates in The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism underlined the argument that the Party, long divided by factionalism (the Judean People’s Front debate), was only an occasional gate-crasher past the gates of power, hope still sprung eternal – summers spent in kibbutzim, where one could imagine, like John Lennon, the world would one day share.
Now, you may assume 11 years of Thatcherism would have sent most young Labour supporters into the political orphanage, but instead we held on tighter, craving respite from monetarism and misery. However, along the way, Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock underlined the dilemma; how to create a single, forceful entity when you are plagued by divisions?
To be sure, it was cautious fingers which touched the hand of Tony Blair; he achieved unity – but only by having the Left purged. And the grasp weakened the more he focussed on Bush-backing, asset stripping and nest-lining.
However, you hang on in there, don’t you? Even when the wrong Miliband becomes Leader?
At first, we held out an open, if woolly-gloved hand to Corbyn. But as Brexit went into extra time, Corbyn has shown he can’t control his school. As a result, eight of his team have walked out the door in disgust. And that’s before we consider his support for Modura in Venezuela.
The problem with Labour is we don’t know what it means anymore. Class lines are blurred.
Who would a young Albert
Finney play these days in a Saturday Night/sunday Morning remake? A bloke with a Deliveroo box on their back or someone who works in a call centre on a zero hours contract? Does Labour speak from central office into the ears of Uber drivers? Are Instagram influencers or hairdressers working class?
David Coates wrote: “To win, Labour has to move Centre Left. Parties must use their years out of power to make a fundamental break with the practices of their party when last in power. Off with the old, in with the new, while mining the past for lessons for the future.” However, Labour seems to have learned diddly, if we look to the reinstatement of Derek Hatton, the former Militant who nearbankrupted Liverpool, now a millionaire property entrepreneur with the £1m villa in Cyprus.
Will the new Independent Group of Umunna and co work out? No. They just confirm the problem. They’re the sixth form teenagers who go on strike on a Friday during maths because they want a radio in the common room, but don’t know what to do after the headmaster says he’ll look into it.
The TIGS, with far less intellectual rigour than the SDP had in 1981, will suffer the same fate. Only faster.
Labour is over. Some will say that Auntie Nicola will take us to school. But will she? The Institute for Economic Reform suggests she will lead us up a blind alley.
Yet, although the experience of Brexit has split families and crushed our spirit and party loyalty, paradoxically we’re more fascinated in party politics than ever. Or rather, we need answers more than ever. Sadly, the best we can hope for is newspapers and television, Kuenssberg, Peston and Neil and co, to frame the questions we hope will provide answers.
To try and remain optimistic, politics will move to single issue debates, that we will vote on with smart phones. And we won’t need the Labour Party.
Britain has woken up to the Rousseau philosophy, as soon as we offer our elected leaders the gig they enslave us. (Sometimes, enslavement by inaction). Even Hatton admits we won’t need parties in the accepted form. “Now there’s no difference between the parties,” he writes. “Politics is an administrative job.”
For the moment, that’s little comfort. We’re facing a General Election, being led into battle by a private school failure of whom his wife claimed she had never seen read a book. The lonely little hand feels cold knowing it’s 50-odd years of being held by Labour are over.
Labour seems to have learned diddly, if we look to the reinstatement of Derek Hatton