Down the road

People at the Convention of the Left quickly settled on a euphemism for the ‘other’ conference going on in Manchester this week: they call it ‘down the road’, and then throw in a term of abuse or three. ‘Those sell-outs down the road’, ‘the bastards down the road who’ve betrayed the working class’, ‘the right-wing lickspittles down the road’, and so on.

Today, when there was a bit of a lull in the convention, I decided to see what life is like on the other side of the fence. Or, more accurately, I asked some Labour-loving friends of mine to venture out of their conference’s ludicrous anti-terrorist fortress – would any self-respecting terrorist want to lower themselves to assassinating Gordon Brown? – and go for a coffee. (They chose Starbucks, naturally.)

Now don’t get me wrong: I can sympathise with the projects to reclaim Labour, regardless of their slim chances. John McDonnell is great, and even Compass isn’t so bad (despite them wanting to lock us all up for 42 days). But I’m at a loss to understand why anyone who isn’t a closet Tory would actually support the government, let alone be excited to meet Brown, as my friend was.

There’s a banner that hangs outside the convention with two arrows: ‘peace’, pointing inside the Friends’ Meeting House, and ‘war’, pointing over at Labour’s ring of steel. ‘I saw your sign,’ she said when she called me. ‘And you chose war?’ I replied. ‘Yes,’ she sighed back, ‘I suppose I did’.

But the banner makes a serious point. Brown is complicit in a war that has killed over a million people – that’s ordinary civilians, not ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas’. Would you shake his hand if he’d killed a million people here in Manchester? No? Then, logically, you must believe that Iraqi lives are somehow worth less than British ones – that killing people abroad is something to be against, but not worth breaking with a party over. Can you justify that?

So why keep supporting Labour? Is it the magnetic attraction of power – power for power’s sake, power at any cost? Is it the lucrative career opportunities? When you drink the free red wine, do you not see Middle Eastern blood? When you applaud, do you not hear the gunfire that’s torn families apart?

When I started saying that sort of thing in that coffee shop just outside Labour’s ‘secure zone’, a besuited Blairite hack chided me for being ‘unrealistic’. I could scarcely contain my anger. I mean, OK, I am aware that my own views – revolutionary socialism, woo – are what some might call ‘extreme’. I’m an unapologetic idealist (someone’s got to be). But I don’t go around expecting people to sign up to a full anti-capitalist programme – basic social democracy would do. What kind of strange mentality is it that causes people to brand that ‘unrealistic’?

Britain was ready for a huge change in 1997. Have you read Labour’s 1997 manifesto? People voted for that in their millions. There was no need to break those promises; there was no need to dash those hopes. Labour’s support hasn’t collapsed because this country is ‘naturally Conservative’ – it’s collapsed because the ordinary voters, the ones who were excited when Blair came to power, were completely betrayed.

Some say the party’s unpopularity is all down to the economic crisis, and it’ll blow over. But economic crises aren’t like the weather – they don’t just fall out of the air. This one was caused by the global neoliberal policies – expanding credit, deregulating markets – that are central to Brown’s politics. The man who promised to abolish boom and bust has ensured that the recession here will be second only to the US in its ferocity.

The arguments are just so easy to demolish for anyone who’s spent a few minutes thinking about it. We ‘can’t afford’ this or that welfare spending, or student grants, or proper schools and hospitals? As if it’d really be so hard to stop starting expensive wars. As if it’s unthinkable to tax the super-rich and huge corporations (the fact that they might try to avoid it is no excuse – just use the time and money spent on catching benefit fraudsters to target the tax-evading rich instead). These things are downright obvious, but they just don’t get said.

The problem is that Labour conference is a whole other world: one where who’s up and who’s down is more important than helping the poor; where people made to pay inheritance tax on their million-pound houses get more sympathy than those forced to live on miserly benefits and state pensions; where all we can do to help the destitute is constituency casework, while making no changes to the system that caused the problem in the first place. Privatisation and cuts are somehow just unavoidable facts of life that we all have to live with. We live in a ‘meritocracy’, even though the statistics show that most of those born rich die rich and most of those born poor die poor.

The Tories would be worse, the Tories would be worse – keep repeating it till you believe it. Convince yourself that the parallels between Thatcher and Blair are nothing but dirty Trotskyite lies. Anything to be part of the big, powerful party.

How right-wing would the government have to get before you’d stop cheering? What if it raised taxes on the poor? (Ah, hang on, it did.) Bought new nuclear weapons? (Hmm, did that too.) Sold off schools? Attacked civil liberties? Held down pay? (You get the idea.) Yet you ignore the laundry-list of right-wing policies, and tell the old lie: TINA, ‘There Is No Alternative’.

But there is an alternative: stop supporting parties that go against your beliefs. If you’re anti-war, stop giving standing ovations to warmongers. If you’re against privatisation, stop leafleting for MPs who wave it through parliament. After all, don’t you get tired of apologising, justifying and excusing the most right-wing Labour government in history? Even if you think no-one else has a solution, I don’t see why you’d want to be part of the problem.

Maybe someday it’ll be us on the receiving end of the bombs. And halfway around the world, there’ll be your mirror image, applauding.

PS. This isn’t meant as a personal attack – it was nice to see you. I wish I could understand. Get well soon.