Why I Joined Is Why I Left - Part I

I joined the Labour Party to fight for the universal and comprehensive Welfare State. For the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment. For fair taxation. For full employment. For the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. For co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies and similar bodies. And for every household to enjoy a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

I left the party of the government that has done most since the War to destroy those things. Blair and Brown have made Thatcher and Tebbit look like Attlee and Bevan.

I joined the party of the trade unionists and activists who dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. Of the delivery of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services. A movement which proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour. They had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.

The party of Peter Shore’s denunciation of the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and his support for Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State. And of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party, founded out of the trade union movement specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers.

I left the party that felt it necessary to promise in its manifesto that it had “no plans” to abolish the monarchy. That scorned pageantry and despised local government. That wanted a monarchy on the cheap, leading to no monarchy at all. That had betrayed Gibraltar. And that had carried on the anti-Commonwealth fanaticism of the 1980s Radical Right, the people who would govern under Cameron.

I joined the party concerned that power should not be transferred from elected parliamentarians to unelected judges. That any elected second chamber should not subvert the authority of the House of Commons. That electoral reform should not mean voting for parties rather than people, should not destroy direct local representation, should not give power to anti-constitutional or anti-democratic forces, and should not prevent necessary radical action on behalf of the poor or otherwise disadvantaged. The party of total opposition to the constraint of any future Parliament by any written Constitution. And of total opposition to any State funding of political parties that detaches them even further from wider civil society.

I left the party that had massively transferred power to a politicised judiciary both here and on the Continent. That had no idea what to do, either about the second chamber, or about electoral reform. That was planning a written Constitution first sketched out on the back of a Rizla or in the margins of some Trotskyist rag some time in the Seventies. And that had become heavily dependent on gigantic subventions from the State, as well as from the super-rich.

I joined the party of the Attlee Government’s refusal to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was “the blueprint for a federal state”. Of Gaitskell’s rejection of European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth. Of the votes of most Labour MPs against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. Of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s unanimous opposition to Thatcher’s Single European Act. Of the 66 Labour MPs who voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. And of the votes of every Labour MP, without exception, against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997.

I left the party of the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon Treaties, and of no change whatever to agricultural or fishing arrangements.

I joined the party of Bevan’s ridicule of the first parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that “Welsh coal is the same as English coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep”. Of those Labour MPs who in the 1970s successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its ruinous effects on the North of England. And of those Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, who accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution.

I left the party that had arbitrarily declared very drastic Scottish devolution to be “John Smith’s legacy” when in fact his signature policy, scandalously still unimplemented, had been that employment rights should begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked. That pushed it through after a referendum in which the combined votes against and abstentions outnumbered the votes in favour. That is seriously considering taking it even further. That devolved Wales even though the Yes vote was a mere twenty-six per cent of those eligible. That is seriously considering extending that, too. And that had presided over exactly the predicted damage, both to the North, and to the “peripheral” parts of Scotland and Wales.

I joined the party of the Attlee Government’s first ever acceptance of the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. Of the Wilson Government’s deployment of British troops to protect Northern Ireland’s grateful Catholics precisely as British subjects. Of the Callaghan Government’s administration of Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom. Of the two Ulster Unionist MPs who voted to save the Callaghan Government (both the fact that they did so and the reason why) when both Irish Nationalists abstained. And of the last integrationist MP to date elected specifically as such, the Labour-minded Robert McCartney.

I left the party that had introduced in Northern Ireland a system whereby all the parties were in government all the time so that no one was asking any questions, and had welcomed into government a fully armed terrorist organisation which believed its own Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland.