Dad, what is the point of being in the Labour party?
Next week will be a celebration of success as impressive in its way as an old Red Army May Day parade. About 10,000 people will descend on the seaside town of Brighton to be cordoned off by miles of reinforced steel fence and guarded by armed men in flak jackets, for the Labour party annual conference. The old People’s Party has come up in the world. If you believe the man who said that the Labour party is a crusade or it’s nothing, you can only conclude that it’s a very successful crusade. And yet I dread the day when a teenager asks me, ‘Dad, why should I join the Labour party?’ Well, my child, when your mother and I were young there was a monster called Margaret Thatcher rampaging across the land wiping out old industries and throwing millions out of work. She would sniff out enemies at home, trample on civil rights, treat trade unions with contempt, suck up to an ultra-right-wing American president, suck up to Rupert Murdoch and denigrate the BBC — not a bit like Tony Blair.
Joining the Labour party was how your mother and I declared that we were active citizens who were not going to retreat into the comforts of the middle class. We wanted to do our bit to beard the monster. It was a time when the Labour party was going through a very bad patch. It needed people like us. It was exciting too. At my first Labour party annual conference, a lawyer posing as a Daily Express photographer slipped past security to serve a writ on Arthur Scargill, on the conference floor, right under Neil Kinnock’s nose. You should have heard the cheers when they punished the editor of the Express by rescinding his press pass.
The next year, Neil Kinnock made some disparaging remarks about Liverpool’s Labour council, and had the council’s deputy leader on his feet, shaking his fists, while Eric Heffer stormed off the platform. There were no journalists working for Murdoch to witness this excitement, because they were all shut out of the conference centre in sympathy with the sacked princes of Fleet Street. It took nerve to be in the thick of the Labour party then, because arguments could flare up into abuse or threats or even fights — but it all mattered. It was a battle for the soul and future of a political party, and by implica tion for the future of the country. And eventually there came success.
‘But success has sucked the life out of the party, Dad! Will anything happen in Brighton? Will there be another of those defining moments that leave their lasting imprint on the party and the body politic?’ Oh no — of course not. Conference is a ritual, a display. But the unions will try to interrupt the event by dragging in political controversy through their ‘contemporary resolutions’. Unison wants to end the practice of sending NHS patients to private clinics and diagnostic centres. The GMB wants employees who lose their pensions when firms go bust to be compensated in full by the state. The TGWU wants to tinker with Thatcherite employment law, so that a union in dispute with a contractor like Gate Gourmet, that is working directly for a bigger concern like BA, can legally exhort employees of the larger firm to take ‘sympathetic’ action. The old dream of the Bennite Left was to have the big unions all run by leftists who would not be afraid to use their block votes to prevent party policy from drifting to the Right. In a funny sort of way that Bennite dream has come true. Even with the block vote cut down to half its old size, the combined voting strength of the big four — Unison, Amicus, the TGWU and the GMB — is enough to secure the passage of almost any resolution they put forward and they will co-operate to use their combined strength. The catch is that it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.
The late Conor Cruise O’Brien is reputed to have spent his final years embarrassed that he should have come from an insignificant little country like Ireland. Our Prime Minister shows similar signs of men tal distress at the smallness of the country he governs, with its ‘hateful’ public service broadcasting and its army that can’t be used to overrun anywhere bigger then Sierra Leone. He will soon be able to shake its dust from his feet and make permanent his ascent into the international circuit of billionaires and retired statesmen where he feels at home. In the interim he’s not going to alter his government’s policy one jot on account of resolutions passed by trade unions in Brighton. Nor is his presumed successor, Gordon Brown, going to give the unions much satisfaction, though he may do something to make them feel less overlooked.
Meanwhile party members from the constituencies will try to use the Brighton conference to honour the memory of Robin Cook with the resolution invoking an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. But will that make Jack ‘Ethical’ Straw any ethicaller? Probably not.
‘If that’s how its leaders treat their annual conference, what is the point of being in the Labour party?’ The Labour party, my child, is a success. Other parties have weak leaders and unruly members because other parties are failing. Labour had those problems; now they have all been solved. The Labour party is a career path for anyone aspiring to be a politician, civic leader, political adviser, PR consultant or lobbyist. Along with its annual conference, it offers a rich menu of policy forums where the career hungry can network and talk policy. Those party members who do not hanker after a political career can pay their subscriptions by banker’s order, receive publications through the post, be given notice of meetings they seldom attend, and occasionally vote by postal ballot.
At the beginning of the last century, Vladimir Lenin quarrelled furiously with his fellow Russian revolutionaries over the composition of a political party. He maintained that it should consist only of professional revolutionaries, and that parttimers, with day jobs, should be excluded from all decision-making. The Labour party is at last approaching that Leninist ideal in which only the professionals wield power. This is a pointer to the society of the future — active leaders, passive citizens. Why join the Labour party rather than the church choir? I need to come back to you on that....
Previous page
