Brendan O’Neill
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I have never voted Labour (or Tory or Lib Dem, in case you’re curious) and have no loyalty to any of today’s sorry excuses for political parties, but even I felt a pang of sympathy with Harris’s predicament. He is clearly a creature of politics, who believes passionately in equality and opportunity, yet now his once beloved Labour gives us ‘war in Iraq, top-up fees, Blair in bed with Bush, private companies buying into schools and hospitals’. And it must be galling for those who were signed-up members of the Labour Party (even if that membership, like Harris’s, was shortlived and involved little more than ‘dutifully delivering election leaflets’ and attending constituency party meetings with his dad) now to watch it departy itself, if such a word exists. Labour is no longer a party in any meaningful sense, but a collection of ambitious individuals and cliques. As Harris notes, the gap between the grass roots and what passes for the party today was perfectly captured by the mass protests against the Iraq war in February 2003, when ‘one got the sense of a worrying schism between Westminster politics and the opinion of the people our MPs claim to represent’.
My sympathy soon ran out, however. Harris is like the spurned, perhaps even battered, lover who keeps going back for more. His devotion to Labour is an unthinking one, born of tradition, duty even, rather than critical political engagement. Loyalty to Labour has been ‘hardwired into my subconscious,’ he writes, describing the strange sensation that grips as he enters the voting booth once every four years, when any attempt to ‘use one’s rational faculties’ is overridden by ‘the most Pavlovian kind of reflex’: ‘I voted Labour. Of course. That was who I was. Labour, Labour, Labour,’ he says, sounding more like a Dalek than a free-thinking, unmolested voter. He describes his relationship with Labour as an ‘addiction’, and despite the war, the foundation hospitals and all the rest of it, he would ‘still like to vote Labour’. For all the evidence that New Labour is bad for you, Harris, it seems, cannot kick the habit.
This is a lively and spirited book. But while Harris is good at describing the problem with politics today, his ‘hardwiring’ prevents him from putting forward solutions for dealing with it, except for the kind of solutions that threaten to send his readers into a collective coma. He regrets the way in which ‘ideological’ has ‘mutated into the worst kind of political insult’, and notes that ‘political debate is very rarely bound up with competing views of the best kind of society’. Too true. But elsewhere he suggests things might get better if Gordon Brown usurped Tony Blair, and describes how some Labour supporters now utter the words ‘this time I’m voting Liberal Democrat’ as if they were a ‘statement of revolutionary intent’. I’m sorry, but when that sourpuss Brown is seen as the saviour of ‘progressive politics’ and voting for Kennedy and Co. as an act of rebellion, we know that politics needs a firm boot up the behind. Only it’s difficult to administer such a blow when you’re a self-confessed Labour junky whose rational faculties don’t work very well. Harris might be better off going through cold turkey at this year’s general election; as a music journalist, he will be familiar with the lyrics to John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ — there will be ‘36 hours rolling in pain’, but then you’ll be ‘free again’.
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