The Enemy Within

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Going back to my beginnings. My background is firmly working class and the Labour party of my youth was the Labour party of Harold Wilson. This was a broadly left-leaning party with liberal values. That is why my parents generally supported it. It’s why I not only supported it, but joined it in the fight against the Thatcherite excesses of the nineteen eighties. During my early rail career, I was an active member of the RMT, serving as the health and safety representative for my signalbox. This gave me a grounding for my subsequent roles as a signalling manager and latterly as a training manager working in the Railtrack safety department. My subsequent resignation from the Labour party was prompted by the assault on liberty by the particularly authoritarian David Blunkett. They had betrayed their erstwhile opposition to identity cards when proposed by Michael Howard during the nineteen nineties. I recall even now, Tony Blair’s rhetoric condemning them. He was right then and wrong later to embrace the idea.

The coalition government came to us in a moment of hope. Hope that things could not be worse than they were under Gordon Brown –  a man who dragged the Labour party down with his arrogance and incompetence. This was made worse by his being selected via coronation rather than through a proper leadership ballot. Now there is an elected leader who can face off the coalition and its ideological programme of cuts –  well, reduction in increased spending –  that make matters worse for ordinary folk. People like me, who have found that the cutbacks have effectively taken away their market. Once again, we feel the chill wind of Thatcherite assaults on the working classes by the Old Etonian elite.

Things have changed in the Labour Party. Blunkett has returned to the back benches where he belongs and Brown is nowhere to be seen, let alone in parliament representing his constituency. The new leadership has renounced the control freakery of its tenure in office. There are green shoots that suggest a change –  a genuine change –  of heart. Even if the annoying Balls is still gurning from the front bench (you can’t have everything). Even if the new leader lacks the necessary judgment for the role. A lost election will, doubtless, see him ejected in favour of someone more capable –  much as happened to the Conservatives during the past thirteen years in the wilderness. During that time, the party can recover and build a new a platform for government that is less controlling and steps back from micro-managing peoples’ lives, yet is built upon fairness, social justice and equality for all.

But, but, but, these changes cannot happen if the party does not embrace liberty and it can only do that if it has dedicated people within it to fight for that. People who will be prepared to argue for it at local level, influencing the root and branch of the organisation. People who are prepared to be the enemy within. To change the ethos from inside rather than shouting impotently from without. To return the Labour party to its liberal core. My membership of the Libertarian Party UK expires this month. Time, perhaps, to return to my roots, re-embrace the Labour Party and send off my membership fee.