The Rising Generation

Samuel Fletcher writes:

I have recently decided to become a member of the Labour Party. This is not a decision I have taken casually, but one I am taking boldly.

I have - finally - come to realise that Labour is the party that will, broadly, always give the best home, and provide the most advantageous platform, to my kind of politics, my kind of ideology, and my kind of values. I have come to realise that the people who most closely share my aims in politics, and my reasons for wanting to go into politics, are Labour.

Although, like I say, I have no complacency about this. Indeed, I recognise that some political friends and acquaintances of mine and other people that know me will be very surprised, even shocked, to learn of my news. I did in fact used to be a member of non other than the Conservative Party, up until this January, when I decided to resign my membership, due to some heart-felt and quite profound ideological differences that had developed between myself and Cameron's Toryism. I had been an activist for the Party's youth wing, Conservative Future (CF), for 17 months. Frankly, if I was a young politico who just had Alan B'Stard-esque ambitions of just going into politics for the sake of politics, so I could wear the expensive pinstriped suit and sit in a big, plush office, I would never have left my former party.

I have little doubt, due to the tribal nature of party politics, that people who I struck up friendships with through CF and as a by-product of being a member, may feel cheated or duped my decision, or even view it as an act of treachery. But I would say this to them: It's nothing personal. True politics is about a battle of principles and ideology, and being a true and sincere political activist for any party involves following one's heart.

My brief membership of the Conservatives was not a totally abhorrent blip in my life though, and I do not possess the audacity to pretend otherwise. I will not dismiss it as a period during which I must have been wearing a political blind-fold and ear-defenders. I joined for a reason, and left when I sincerely felt, beyond the usual margin of disagreement and the give-and-take nature of party politics, that the party was blowing off-course, as it were, the things that I fundamentally stood up for as a political activist. I left because I now felt that I was having my political beliefs and values - largely, if I had to describe them, social democratic (and I actually once believed that David Cameron was a new sort of social democratic Conservative!) - misrepresented.

Someone from an older generation, or someone with old-fashioned views about alignments between one's social class and one's political party in British politics, might argue that it is a 'natural' decision for one from an ordinary background interested in going into politics, such as myself, to take, to join the Labour Party. On a separate point, I might add that I am glad that political party identification purely on the basis of one's social class, together with the phenomenon of a very narrow range of categories on the socio-economic scale from which a given party draws its vote, are now largely a thing of the past, and anyone who thought in such terms today would be terribly anachronistic and would be over-simplifying the modern political system for themselves, and would be blindly limiting their electoral opportunities and shutting themselves out from the wonders of participating in a modern multi-party democracy. But I digress. My decision to join Labour wasn't, and hasn't been, a decision come to effortlessly or taken lightly.

I remember being appalled about erosions of civil liberties that took place in our country under Gordon Brown's government, such as with counter-terror legislation allowing terror suspects to be held for 42 days without charge. I felt that such extreme authoritarianism surely could not be the right way to deal with the problem. It certainly seemed in contradiction to Blair’s mantra of “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime too”. I found Tony Blair's illegal, immoral (and for that matter, ideologically Neo-Conservative) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan quite abhorrent, and I congratulate Ed Miliband for his admission, on becoming Labour leader, that the Blair government was wrong to take Britain into those conflicts.

I also believe that the Blair government was wrong to subject the country to mass-immigration - ideologically, economically and socially. To put it bluntly, mass-immigration is fundamentally a right-wing capitalist project to drive down workers’ wages and conditions for the benefit of greedy companies. For an allegedly democratic socialist government, it was a move that did appear contemptuous of Labour’s significant working-class vote – flooding the country with cheap immigrant labour that made British working-class jobs insecure by its very availability. The infamous Gillian Duffy moment proved more or less exactly how out-of-touch the middle-class, metropolitan social liberal, elitist leadership of the last Labour government had become with ordinary people. My party now needs to be totally up-front about the mistake of mass-immigration and all its peripheral complexities when last in government and, therein, fundamentally realise its duty of economic and social stabilisation to its core, largely working-class vote.

And I was, and still am, deeply concerned at the huge attack on social mobility and meritocracy in our country, and the effective removal of a higher education admissions system based on academic ability and not ability to pay, that was the introduction of university tuition fees in 2003.

So, in the first general election I had ever voted in, after reaching the age of suffrage of 18 in July 2009, on May 6th 2010 I quite without hesitation voted Conservative. I was then desperate to kick out Gordon’s government at the ballot box, and of course, frankly, looking back at it now, voting Conservative would have been the best way to ensure Gordon Brown’s eviction from Downing Street in any case. However, I’ve now realised, my true political-ideological motive against Brown – and my true political ideology – comes from being to the left of New Labour in many ways - but never sufficiently pro-immigration, Euro-federalist or socially/culturally liberal enough for Nick Clegg’s party, so I wasn’t going to – and wouldn’t today – seriously entertain the thought of voting Liberal Democrat.

I do not regret my brief membership and role as a youth activist for the Conservatives. Now I am joining Labour, my former Conservatism will in fact play a very informing role as a constant reminder that if the Labour Party ever again makes the mistake of resorting to elitism, excessive authoritarianism, Orwellian-style state control or man-in-Whitehall-knows-best-ism, rather than serving the interests of the ordinary people it is supposed to represent, ordinary people will continue to vote for other parties – the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, UKIP, or even – goodness forbid – turn to extremist party such as the BNP, in swathes and in protest against what was once called 'The Peoples' Party'.

In my mind, Labour must re-connect with ordinary people (at least, the 4 million working-class voters it lost between 1997 and 2010) by embracing a libertarian and small ‘c’ conservative Socialism, which enables the social and economic stability that society needs, in order for all the life opportunities for people that can be built upon that to develop, and protecting local public services, not least because of the key part they can play in local communities – and ideally introducing more opportunity for community ownership and running of local public services - whilst also respecting social and cultural tradition and recognising the importance of locality and community life.

And there also needs to be a recognition that none of this is anathema to modern Socialist values of egalitarianism, equality of opportunity, good public services for all paid for by a general taxation contribution by all, and the popular ownership and control of key industries and services that people rely on by the means of mutualism, and institutions such as co-operatives and building societies.

So then, you might not be entirely surprised to hear that I am encouraged by what I have heard about a new, so-called ‘Blue Labour’ movement within the Labour Party, which advocates an interesting (and in my opinion a winning) combination of economic leftism and social conservatism. This is intended to be a force to re-connect Labour with its traditional, working-class base by, in a fashion, (a return to) addressing the concerns of ordinary people. The intellectual deviser of Blue Labour, Dr. (and now Lord) Maurice Glasman, described it rather pithily as a “deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity". It emphasises a respect for tradition, locality and community.

David Goodhart, in a very well written article in The Independent, explained the intrinsic ingredients of Blue Labour further as “.....sympathetic to culturally conservative views – on issues of place, work and welfare – and hostile to mass immigration.....it also has a more leftist critique of the economics of globalisation and wants to see more controls over capital flows and company takeovers to defend national interests. It also dislikes the top-down bureaucratic state and stresses the importance of localism, mutualism and human relationships, in public service delivery, and life in general.” Well, my admiration for such a philosophy, and certainly my support for such principles to become the central feature of a renewed ideology for Labour, is my fundamental belief that what makes most Socialists what they are is in fact a profound conservatism, and hostility to radical economic or social change that may upset the economic and social stability which they value, for it is that which they see as the essential platform on which to build their livelihoods.

Let me just finish with probably one of the few quotes by a certain Anthony Blair that I shall ever use in my life – he isn’t quite my favourite Labour Party leader ever: “The true, radical mission of the Labour Party.....is this, not to hold people back but to push people forward - all the people.” He was right, in that instance, and the task of today’s Labour Party is to find the best way to restore that spirit over the next few years until the next general election. Let me be clear though, I’m no party political tribalist or unquestioning follower, and I’m not one who’s afraid to criticise his own lot if and when he feels they’ve made an error of tactic or judgement. I will always be, naturally, objective and tough in my analysis of any political party I am a member of, in order to make sure that – within reason, allowing for the give-and-take nature of party politics - my vision and direction is more or less, broadly, the same as my party’s vision and direction.