Heed Not The Rolling Wave

Allegiance

Many years ago, I spent an inordinate amount of my time engaged in what now may seem foolish and lamentable pursuit: the electoral interests of the Labour Party. The years 2015-2020 saw evenings, weekends and lunch breaks disappear into the endless pit of meetings, leafletting, doorknocking. Things peaked in the absolute stress-nightmare of 2019, the Year of the Three Elections (and for me, three breakdowns), still one of the worst years of my life (as much for reasons outside of all that, granted, but it really didn't help). And then we were given the worst Christmas present of all time, the 2019 election result. The fight went out of almost all of us and we slowly drifted away, disengaging or leaving the party because of its rightward drift or transphobia or whatever else.

Look: I was never really going to like the Kier Gang, but I—and, I suspect, most people who joined the party or substantially re-engaged in the Corbyn era, wanted them to succeed! We really did believe that the worst day under a Labour government would be better than the best under a Conservative one. I was born in the 90s; I benefited from all those properly-funded public services. They weren't going to do all the stuff we wanted them to but at least they might do some of it. But I guess we were wrong.

It has taken me a long time come around to talking about this kind of thing, for several reasons. One reason is that for ~4 years I was involved in a local news project and wanted to avoid commenting on such issues as a matter of journalistic neutrality. Another is that I have friends and comrades in the Labour Party who I believe are legitimately committed to making the country better.

But, even though I'm not paying the closest attention to the news at the moment, every time I look it seems like the government has slid further into unnecessary austerity, incompetent authoritarianism, or more recently jumping two-footed into overt Powellite bigotry. Theresa May's "citizens of nowhere" stuff was pretty mild compared to whatever it is Kier's been on. The other week, a friend sent me this picture with the caption "is this good":

Being underwater with your own party's supporters is one thing, but if they were doing the racist stuff to appeal to Reform voters they seem to have done a pretty bad job given the halving (from 4% to 2%) we can see in the support there. It's appalling either way, but it does seem particularly egregious that it fails on its own terms; it's just more pointless cruelty and evil.

A few years back I remember the FT's Stephen Bush saying on a podcast that the Labour Party's supporters aren't like other parties'; they have a weird belief in the party's nobility and goodness. I definitely remember that feeling. Fortunately, I think whatever residual sense of that I had been clinging to is now entirely gone.