From Nye to bye: my journey in and out of the Labour Party

Almost ten years ago to the day I joined the Labour party after attending a talk by the then prospective leader of the party Jeremy Corbyn given at the Nye Bevan memorial in Sirhowy.  I wrote about it at the time as I went along to the talk with no real intention of joining, I was just interested in hearing what this man had to say.  As I said at the time I wasn’t particularly impressed by him as an orator but his message did resonate with me.  He talked of developing the party into a mass grass roots social movement aimed at tackling some of the worst inequalities in our society. That to me felt new and refreshing as it was aimed at putting politics back with local people and communities and moved away from what we have seen in the UK, particularly since the 1960s, of an increasingly dominant political class  who come up through Oxbridge with degrees in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and then follow a well-worn trajectory of a political career. That night following that talk in Sirhowy I joined the Labour party and in the coming years went on to become a party activist and community councillor. 

Those were heady day back in 2015 and 2016. Various rallies were held across south Wales such as Cardiff, Merthyr and Swansea.  These were always well attended with a sense of hope, enthusiasm, joy and camaraderie.  Along with the party UK wide our local branch had an influx of members who were keen to get involved and go out campaigning.  We all know what happened next, the disappointments of 2017 and 2019, the treachery of the parliamentary Labour party who continually undermined Corbyn  and tried to remove him even though the membership made it clear, on a number of occassions, he was their preferred leader. The weaponisation of anti-semitism against the Left and the maniacal rantings of the legacy media, including the BBC and Guardian, against Corbyn as a man.  It was unsurprising to anybody who had been paying attention that by the time of the 2019 election that the British Establishment had been successful in their aim of maintaining the status quo by using all means possible to assassinate the Corbyn Project and any hope of a new kind of politics. 

Worse was to come however. The far Right of Labour had been emboldened by their successful destruction of the Corbyn project and were waiting in the wings to wreak their revenge. The Labour leadership campaign of 2020 was a very uninspiring affair with none of the candidates really appealing to me but I am proud to say, particularly in hindsight, that I did not vote for Keir Starmer, I voted for Rebecca Long-Bailey. A lot of people who I respected and admired though did vote for Starmer as he promised to unite the party and build on Corbyn’s legacy of making Labour and anti-austerity party. Well we all know what happened to those promises after he got what he wanted. 

Although early in his leadership I was somewhat indifferent to Starmer it was during his leadership campaign that he said something that began to ring the warning bells for me and again in hindsight should have been a red flag.  During one of the hustings Starmer said “ I support Zionism without qualification” Again as is usual with his modus operandi he couched it in a wider discussion, but I remember thinking at the time  it was an unwise thing to say as it could be interpreted as that you support the establishment of an Israeli state no matter what is done to achieve it. 

 

Anyway, as we know Starmer became leader and then he quickly abandoned all his pledges aimed at garnering the support of the centre and Left of Labour.  Locally  attendance at branch meetings quickly tailed off and socialists that had been elected in to prominent positions were removed by hook or by crook to ensure all legacy of the Corbyn era were erased in Stalinesque purges. Again this was repeated nationally as the hard Right of Labour rounded on those they had always categorised as “trot, rabble dogs” and who they saw a fleas that need to be shaken off. Bullying became the norm both locally and nationally as evidenced by the appalling behaviour meted out to the likes of Corbyn and Diane Abbott both individuals who had given a lifetime of service to the Labour cause but who the Starmer administration did their best to remove from parliament, luckily however they failed. 

Then just over a year ago Starmer’s grotesque mutation of a “democratic socialist” (that’s what it says on the membership card) Labour Party was elected in to power and brought with them a gaggle of parachute wearing career politicians imposed on communities  that they had not connection with whatsoever, such was the arrogance of the new regime. To my eternal shame I kept quiet up to this point in the belief that surely a Labour government would be infinitely better than any Tory one.  Boy was I wrong!!! Straight away it became obvious with the appointments of the likes of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall that the Tory cult of austerity was going to continue and that those who were going to be asked to pay for it would be the old the sick and the infirm via cutting their benefits, this was a version of socialism I didn’t recognise, it just seemed like the old neo-liberalism we had been having since Thatcher’s time but being delivered by a different team. 

 

The straw that finally broke the camel’s back for me though was when it really became obvious what Starmer had meant all those years ago when he said “ I support Zionism without qualification”. When the horrors of Gaza started to unfold Starmer was only too quick to go to the studio and intone “Israel does have that right” when it came to the Israeli state cutting food, medical aid and electricity into Gaza. As a human being I find human conflict abhorrent particularly when it impacts on the lives of ordinary people. Here we had the leader of a supposedly socialist party advocating for a state to use a tactic that would directly make the lives of ordinary people a living hell. Previously we had seen both national and local politicians fall over themselves to virtue signal how much they felt support and aid should be sent to the people of Ukraine but now all of a sudden for some strange reason our politicians are strangely muted or even advocating that the civilian population of Gaza are fair game.  I really don’t want to take sides in relation to the point I am making here but as any compassionate human being  I am against human suffering and what I am calling out here is the rank hypocrisy by both local and national Labour politicians of how they fall over themselves to speak up in relation to Ukraine but remain muted or silent over Gaza. An almost comical illustration of how Labour politicians display these double standards and staggering levels of an absence of self awareness was when we saw Labour MPs cosplaying as suffragettes while at the same time happily voting to proscribe Palestine Action. 

 

Anyway, what I am saying; that is it, I’m out, I have had enough.  Nobody can say I didn’t give them a chance but the party I joined is not the same as what the party is today.  I am not the one who has changed the party has and I am no longer prepared to lend my support to a party I see riddled with hypocrisy and bullying at every level. Please don’t come back at me and say “well you are just enabling Reform.  That enabling is squarely on Starmer and his supporter's shoulders. Starmer clearly said if people didn’t like the changes the door is open and they can leave and that is what I am doing as I want to use my time and effort working for good not simply making do with the lesser of two evils. I am in no doubt that there are still good people in Labour who are doing their best to try to fight to save this once great party and I wish them well but as history has clearly shown it has become the party of a political establishment offering no real alternative to the other parties. I joined Labour in the first place with a vision of an alternative grassroots based politics; naive or idealistic maybe but it is not a vision I am prepared to give up as you are never truly defeated until you stop trying. Now before the naysayers chime in with the tired old trope of “the cult of Corbyn” this is not about him or Sultana this is all about people and communities doing politics for themselves not handing it over to some Brahmin like political caste parachuted into communities  to do politics to them as this anointed political elite are convinced they know what is best for them. To misquote one of the great figures of the once proud Labour movement James Keir Hardie: Neo-liberalism is the creed to the dying present; socialism throbs with the life of the days that there are to be and to quote him directly “ better to rebel and die...than bear the yoke of a thwarted life"