On Not Re-Joining The Labour Party

Despite being asked several times per week "when" I shall be doing so. Despite being regularly informed of someone who is going round stating as a fact, either that I shall very soon do so, or that I have already done so. Ah, the North East. Love it or leave it. I love it.

"We can only take it back from the inside" has turned not to have been the case. "We can only keep it from the inside" is equally fallacious. I shall be campaigning for the re-election of my Labour MP, Pat Glass, not because she will be the official Labour candidate, but because she is all of a Catholic moral traditionalist, a campaigner for the farmers against corporate power, and a fairly regular contributor to the Morning Star who marched under the Burnhope banner at the Durham Miners' Gala.

Both of my Lanchester, and therefore Burnhope, County Councillors marched with her, as did I. I shall be voting for both of them and urging others to do so, although it will not be possible to campaign for them, since one is Labour and the other is Independent, and since Labour and the Independents will each presumably field two candidates for the two seats.

Up another hill, Consett's opportunity to elect both the trade union and pro-life activist Clive Robson, and one of my own and so many other people's political godfathers, Alderman Alex Watson OBE, is one that it would be mad not to take; if I am out leafleting for anyone next April, then it is far and away most likely to be for Alex, since Clive will have the Labour Party machine behind him. But, again, two seats to fill.

I should be in favour of the re-election of any of my Labour, Independent, and farming Tory Parish Council colleagues who wanted it. Although a bit of new blood would also be welcome, perhaps from Maureen Bennett who came so close to election last year as an Independent, along with those who proposed her, all people very much of my own cast of mind. There are bound to be retirements, so that ought not to be a problem.

If I said these things as a Labour Party member, then I should be expelled again. I mean that "should" in both senses of the word. It is not as if I am a metropolitan media type campaigning for Boris Johnson from that privileged position, so privileged that the Constitution and Rules of the Labour Party apparently do not apply.

An ordinary Labour Party member certainly cannot urge people to vote for something else at the European Elections, as I fully intend to do. Stephen Hughes and I have mutual friends within and beyond politics. He was on the platform at the Big Meeting. He is a practising Catholic, with a not half bad voting record on the push-button issues in that department. He went to the same secondary school as I did, though not at the same time.

But I could never vote for him, and I do not know why the Labour Party, as such, continues to put up with him. For 20 years, I have been listening to him tell audiences that he wanted national institutions to disappear completely, leaving only European and regional ones. That bears absolutely no resemblance to Labour Party policy, nor has it ever done so.

Through gritted teeth, I have instead voted for the SLP (it and I were both that young), for Respect, and then for No2EU - Yes to Democracy, a bit more happily in the last case, but it too has since become TUSC, just another competitor for the tiny sectarian Leftist vote. I have never failed to vote for anything from the European Parliament to the Parish Council. But I do not know for whom I am going to vote the next time that the former is up.

I also intend to go on calling for Labour to stand aside where it is in third place or below, and in those Scottish and Welsh constituencies where its second placed vote is smaller than that of two other parties combined, in favour of strong local Independents and in return for their not uncritical support during the next Parliament and thereafter, as well as for Labour to put up either such candidates or its own in those Northern Irish constituencies where the SDLP stands no chance because the majority is of "the Other Side".

Labour Party members cannot really say that sort of thing in public unless and until they are immensely senior figures who know for a fact that it is going to happen and who are therefore saying it by way of an announcement rather than as a contribution to debate.

My personal favourite is the occasional taunt from certain of my old enemies, and I realise that you might find it difficult to believe that I have ever had any, to the effect that, "Labour would never take [me] back at the level at which [I] left." I was a Parish Councillor then, and I am a Parish Councillor now, with more votes than I ever secured as a Labour candidate. One of the schools of which I was a local authority governor has since become an Academy, with no such Governing Body representation, anyway. They (well, let's be frank, he) had already removed me as a Branch Chairman and as a District Secretary, and the District in question has in any case been abolished since.

At most, I have lost one school governorship, which I might in any case have given up while my illness was at its most serious. If anything, I am in all sorts of ways at a higher political level than I ever was as a Labour Party member. At the very least, I am certainly not at a lower one. Why go back?