The Lanchester Review: I Have Not Re-Joined The Labour Party, But It Has Re-Joined Me

On Left Futures, my friend Ben Sellers (I don't know and one doesn't ask, but he does look quite like him), who runs the wonderful People's Bookshop in Durham, answers Jack Monroe from the fairly hardcore Labour Left.

Meanwhile, I give it the full 3000 words, of which these are tasters:

There are not many people who could make me looking working-class. But step forward,  Jack Monroe.

11 years her senior, I was on the Executive Committee of a Constituency Labour Party when she was a small child, and a Ward Sub-Agent who secured an overall majority of the total vote on a four-way split in a traditionally Conservative ward when she was nine years old.

I left the party long before she ever joined it, and indeed before she was old enough to vote. I had lasted somewhere between eight and 10 times as long in it as she was later to do.

...

For myself, I regard the death of John Smith as the greatest political tragedy of my lifetime, while holding that Bryan Gould would have been a better Leader, ranking as a Great Lost Leader alongside Peter Shore.

...

Accent or no accent, and opinions differ on that, I am very Northern. I am also very Catholic, although I was not born either of those things. Whereas I was born mixed-race, and I was born abroad.

I was entirely state-educated, and that entirely in County Durham, from playschool to MA. I still live where I grew up. I know every story of pain and glory about the Miners’ Strike and about the closure of the Consett steelworks. I knew them 25 years before they became the undisputed public record.

Yet, for tiresome local reasons, I have not been able to re-join the Labour Party. I shall not use the term “pound shop Jeremy Clarkson”, since I have nothing against pound shops. The Labour Party, however, has re-joined me.

It is more than 20 years since I first described my politics as “One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation”. It is 20 years since John Prescott talked about “One Nation Labour” in his Party Conference speech. It is more than two years since Ed Miliband returned to that theme in his.

During that time, Miliband has stood up to Rupert Murdoch, to the Israel Lobby over the recognition of Palestine, to the neoconservative war machine over Syria, and to transnational capital over energy prices and public transport.

His opponents have delivered abject failure on the national debt and on controlled immigration. They have delivered the privatisation of the Royal Mail, and the return of the East Coast Main Line to the private sector from which it has already had to be rescued twice. They have delivered such ruinous cuts in our conventional defence that we now have aircraft carriers with no aircraft on them. They have delivered yet further deregulation of Sunday trading, and used the taxation system to attack the work of charities and churches.

Those opponents want to devastate rural communities by permitting foreign companies and even foreign states to buy up our postal service, already done, and then our roads, for the use of which tolls would be charged where once there were the Queen’s Highways.

They have brought the United Kingdom itself to the brink of dissolution. They still seek to disenfranchise organic communities, as such, by means of parliamentary boundaries designed by and for “sophists, economists and calculators”.

They have failed to deliver the real-terms reduction in the British contribution to the EU Budget for which the House of Commons, including every Labour MP, voted. But they have given Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies everything that they have ever demanded, including our Armed Forces to protect those states from their own ideology, since several of them, including the giant, are quite as bad as the so-called Islamic State, having taught it everything that it knows.

Instead, it is time for One Nation.

...

Public ownership is of course British ownership, rather than the ownership by foreign states, as such, into which has passed much of what we, as a people, used to own. Public ownership safeguards both national sovereignty and the Union.

...

No serious person is against coal itself. We burn colossal quantities of it from the ends of the earth, while sitting on our own, for the sake of a politician who, to stick to unquestionable facts, is dead. This sheer silliness must end.

...

[On immigration] Of course, this problem could never have arisen if it had still been a matter of “no union card, no job”.

...

Climate change is supposed to be anthropogenic. The human race makes the weather. The burning of carbon is the foundation of the working class, the foundation of the Left, the foundation of human progress (problematic though that term is), the foundation of civilisation.

...

The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that. Rather, people produce wealth, material and otherwise. People are wealth, material and otherwise.

Have fun. I certainly did.