Is New Labour out of touch with its roots?

The local membership secretary of the constituency party called round yesterday. My resignation hadn’t reached him, so I told him about it and explained why. He wasn’t too surprised by this. He told me a lot of people have been resigning from the party in protest at the government’s behaviour of late. He would be remaining a member however, in the hope that he could change things from within.

I pointed out that I had tried all of that. Lobbying my MP, I went into great detail about why the authoritarian agenda is so wrong and so dangerous. Indeed, I responded to the consultation on the ID Cards bill clause by clause. Yet my concerns merely elicited a bland reply and a visit to the “aye” lobby come the commons’ vote.

So I told my erstwhile membership secretary that an illegal war and being blatantly lied to about the reasons, the politics of fear and the phony war on terror along with the ID cards Bill, the Civil Contingencies Act and the deliberate removal of habeas corpus meant that I haven’t left the Labour Party; it has left me. I haven’t stopped believing in the caring, compassionate society; they have. He said that he was still a socialist and that he hasn’t changed either.

Now that comment made me think. I’m not sure if I ever was a true socialist. As I’ve grown older my leanings have become more libertarian. While I do not hold with the libertarian ideal of living entirely by common law – that is as much a myth as pure socialism is – and I find the selfishness of the extreme libertarians distasteful, I am equally dismayed by the nanny state poking its nose into my affairs and attempting to exert undue control. Economically, I tend to lean towards the mixed economy; some things should remain in public ownership and free of the vagaries of the free market. I’m thinking here of the health service (an internal market, for crying out loud). I also believe water, gas and electricity; those essentials for daily life; should be owned by the public. Yet other things, the non-essentials, should be allowed to flourish or wither according to market demands. After all, as a self-employed person, that is exactly what I am doing with my career. On the political scale of things, I am well to the left economically of New Labour and well to the libertarian of just about all of the major political parties. I share a space with Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela – left wing libertarians – so I’m keeping good company.

Yesterday was a sad moment for me, because the local Labour Party membership and I still believe in many of the same things. It is after all why I joined. I wanted to help make the world a better place. It’s just that there isn’t a political party that does likewise.