Here is a fun hypothetical,
Would you have voted for a Socialist Party/Militant Tendency member, i.e. a Marxist-Leninist, to sit on the green benches in order to put Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne in the heart of government, if it meant to stopping Brexit — the worst act of national self harm in generations?
This is the choice Remainers would’ve had in the constituency of Pudsey, if Labour had been neck and neck in the polls in 2019 and had a realistic chance of being the largest party in Westminster.
Luckily I never had to answer such a moral quandary. It’s ironic that the path to stopping Brexit lay at the hands of a bunch of committed Brexiteers. Politics is a funny old thing…
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In the spring of 2017, I spent 6 days a week for 6 weeks canvassing for the Labour Party during the build up to the general election that May.
I’d spend Mon-Thurs from 10am to 8pm, working with my boss in Mitcham & Morden. On Fridays, I’d go to a defensive marginal seat in London — Ilford North, Enfield North, Dagenham & Rainham. Seats I feared we’d lose. On the weekend, I’d campaign in my home constituency. I was my branch campaigns officer.
During 2017, the polls swung hard during that election campaign. Theresa May based an entire election strategy around her personal image and then revealed herself to be wooden and distant on the campaign trail. Decisively, the Conservatives announced plans to tax wealth and tackle intergenerational inequality — an act akin to signing your own death warrant in our gerontocracy — and they never recovered. Meanwhile, Labour ran a superb campaign. Corbyn was fantastic on the campaign trail, coming across as warm, energised and hitting the right tone after the awful London Bridge terror attack. At the time of the polling day and for a few short months after, Jeremy Corbyn was actually fairly popular with the public.
In 2017, Labour piled up huge majorities in safe urban seats like the one I had lived in. Labour’s ‘vote share’ was used to claim success. My vote for Labour in Lewisham Deptford helped justify Corbyn remaining on as Labour leader and my vote was used to justify his actions as leader from 2015 onwards.
My efforts had helped keep him in place, and I struggled to live with that.
In the dark years that followed, I consoled myself with the fact that a hung-parliament nearly saved our country from another political calamity, as parliament came a whisker away from accepting a second Brexit referendum.
When Labour accepted an early general election in 2019 before Brexit was resolved and despite catastrophic polling, I was devastated. I knew I couldn’t campaign for Labour again.
Labour’s polling at the start of the campaign suggested complete destruction, and though our polling somewhat recovered after we confirmed our commitment to a second referendum, we still suffered our worst defeat since 1935.
Even with our commitment to a second referendum, I still felt that I could not campaign for the Labour Party in good conscience.
Below is the speech I read out in a Labour Group meeting in the autumn of 2019, informing my colleagues that I would not be campaigning with Lewisham Labour and would only campaign for Labour candidates who had been endorsed by the Jewish Labour Movement in the upcoming general election.
I didn’t finish the speech. I was eventually heckled into stopping. I can’t remember if I gave up trying to speak over the heckles, or whether the chair intervened and stopped me, in order to protect me.
I knew I would get heckled from our Corbynite councillors, and I certainly received a few cries of “shame on you” from them. But what struck me was the response I received from my moderate colleagues.
I remember my voice breaking as I told them the story of a Jewish Labour member who sobbed to me on the street. At that moment, I had hoped to receive an arm on the shoulder. Someone to reassure me and tell me I should carry on. Instead, all I remember was the looks of fury and indignation on the faces of my friends. Some looked on in sadness, but it wasn’t sadness from guilt. It was sadness at the fact that a good lad like me had let them down.
I don’t think I have ever felt so alone.
The backlash I received from my colleagues was so severe that in the end I crumbled and backtracked. They told me that as a local Labour councillor I had a responsibility to my local party and should campaign with them or quit altogether. I felt they were right. In the end, I did campaign in my ward for Ellie Reeves, an MP I respected and admired. This speech was never published.
I would stick to my word and go to Canterbury and Stoke-on-Trent North to campaign for Rosie Duffield and Ruth Smeeth respectively, two of the handful of candidates backed by the Jewish Labour Movement. Yet overall, my activity on the campaign trail was fairly minimal.
Looking back, one comment by a colleague stuck with me.
They said that my speech read like a resignation speech. But instead of resigning, I had found a compromise that would allow me to keep my political career.
Deep down, I think they were right. I knew that resigning meant that my political career would be over. I would be barred from standing for the Labour Party again and I would be barred from re-joining for at least a couple of years and that this resignation would be a lingering mark against me.
But I also knew Labour were heading for defeat and Corbyn would soon be gone. Was I really going to throw away my one chance of having a say in ensuring the continuity Corbynite candidate didn’t win? After everything I had been through, why would I throw away a chance to have a say in saving Labour?
Was it cowardly for me to not resign? Was it dishonest? Or was it wise for me to keep this speech private, keep my head down, and stick around for just a few more months to vote for Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer?
To be honest, I don’t know. My resignation and my one vote wouldn’t have made any difference to Starmer’s win. To this day, I remain conflicted about my decision.
On polling day itself, I spoilt my ballot. It was an easy decision for me to make. I knew my MP, who I consider a friend, would comfortably regain her seat.
It becomes trickier if I had lived in a marginal seat. As my speech suggests, I took the view that I would have judged each Labour candidate on their character and politics and on the question of whether this person would stand up to the leadership, if the national interest called for it.
It’s three years on now and I thought it was right for me to come clean. In a way, I felt compelled to.
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SPEECH
I do not have a poker face.
To sit across from me in a committee meeting is to witness a face twist and contort as if to offer a wordless minute-by-minute report on the matters arising. Upon hearing something I disagree with, I will shuffle my feet, furrow my brow and most likely mangle any pen in my hand.
Sitting in a public meeting a resident arises to perform his very own haka. It is his warlike cry of lament and indignation at the parking pressure on his road and the indifference of the local authority to his blight. Though I try and tackle the matters he is concerned about and offer up my solutions, in the moment he speaks my face says something different. I react to his criticism. An adversarial smirk of smug disdain that puts Owen Farrell’s to shame, appears.
I am instinctively defensive and far too often impetuous. While I joke about my lack of poker face to my colleagues, to those closest to me I tell them I am not cut out for this job.
A politician must be able to calculate every action towards a larger strategic goal. Concealing your true beliefs and motives is essential to keeping your slate clean. At times you need to play both sides, and crucially, you need not alienate those who you might occasionally disagree with in an effort to build support for a wider cause.
As a young councillor, I am often patronised. My nickname amongst some in Labour Group is ‘the manchild’. Time and time again I met after meetings and offered advice and the theme is always the same. “I agree with you, but did you have to say it then/do it that way?”. My brief political career is littered with the mistake of being too straight with people. It is not just my face that gives it away.
***
There is a toxic culture in Parliament and in politics in general, of knowing your place. Of keeping quiet and being a ‘team-player’, no matter how much damage it does or how much it weighs on your principles.
I already know the response of some colleagues to this speech, “I agree with you, but did you have to speak out now/why did you say it this pubicly?” ….
A Jewish Labour member recently told me that the idea of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister fills him with dread. He also told me to stay in the Labour Party. We both continue to do this dance with ourselves. We know to pack it all in would be to guillotine to our dreams, so we tell ourselves it’ll be alright.
We tell ourselves that Andrew Murray abandoned Stalinism and converted to democratic and constitutional socialism in 2016, and that he would never subvert Britain’s constitution. We ignore Seamus Milne’s sympathetic views for dictatorial regimes and we tell ourselves that he was talking about countries ‘over there’, and he would never enact the same here.
We watch with dismay as Corbyn’s acolytes in the ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’, rip up conventions to silence members at Conference and stitch up parliamentary selections. We’ve seen how rules have been re-written to centralise factional control and silence dissent. Yet we tell ourselves, they would never attempt the same as the leaders of Executive power in our country.
We scratch our heads and I wonder how such a genial figure as Jeremy Corbyn — someone who railed against the illiberal tendencies of New Labour, can be so dogmatic and authoritarian once in control. We witness smears against whistleblowers, bullied and abused for speaking out against institutional racism. We see journalists held in contempt, booed at press conferences for holding his views to account. We wonder what we are legitimising.
Three years of working in Parliament has made me sick of the codes of loyalty in politics. Political tribalism now makes me uneasy.
A Jewish woman in my ward meets me at her door and she collapses in tears. She says she has voted Labour all her life and cannot do so any longer. Initially excited by Corbyn’s leadership, she says she cannot understand what has happened.
But we do.
I knock the next handful of doors and responses are instinctive, reflexive, ‘tribal’. ‘Labour’. ‘Labour’. ‘Labour’.
As Party representatives, we are naturally feverish observers of Party politics. Many of us have spoken out about the increasingly toxic culture in the Labour Party and we have suffered as a result.
But we dare not tell our voters about it. We get on that doorstep and we put on that poker face.
Well not anymore.
I cannot continue to campaign to make Jeremy Corbyn our Prime Minister. In solidarity with the Jewish Labour Movement, I will only campaign for candidates they explicitly endorse and for our Lewisham labour candidates, who I know personally and believe to stand up for liberal and anti-racist politics.
Our nation faces a dire choice. Boris Johnson has shown that he will ride rough-shod over our constitution and embrace the populist narratives which chip away at our common belief in our democracy. A hard-Brexit will damage my generation and reduce the standing of our nation, and as a patriot, I oppose it. Unshackled from EU laws on worker’s rights and consumer protection, I am fearful as to what a Conservative majority will do this country.
Yet a Jeremy Corbyn premiership is a leap into the unknown. His lifelong desire to avoid specifics, to speak in rote platitudes and beige homilies has depoliticised him — when his isolationism led to slaughter, when he sat alongside terrorists, and when he celebrated the revolutions that led to the murder of people like me — well, he did it in the language of ‘peace’, of wanting ‘dialogue’ and ‘decency’.
His politics have been so easy to revise and sanitise because if you look closely, there was nothing there. No policies enacted, no compromises necessary, no consequences suffered. After the 12th December that may change, and we do know which way things will fall.
We clutch our rosettes tight and tell ourselves we’d be competent in government — rolling back on austerity, ending the housing crisis, and the obligatory handouts to the middle classes.
We tell ourselves that his impulses of isolationism and protectionism would be kept in check. We tell ourselves that the leavers of the state will never be used against external critics, like the leavers of the Party have been used against us. We tell ourselves, silently, that 87% of the Jewish community who believe he is a racist are being hysterical and have nothing to fear.
So what do we do? I only have one suggestion. An immature, impetuous suggestion.
We need to return honesty to politics. Be honest with ourselves and be outspoken. Drop the tribalism and the poker face that comes with it.
I will urge voters to think long and hard about who they vote for. Vote for candidates that will fight for ‘remain’ and liberal values. Do your research, know the candidates who share your values. Respect those MPs who have shown bravery and integrity to face down the thuggishness of their leaders.
My hope is that if we get this right, these MPs could hold the balance of power.
I know this honesty is bad politics. I’m a bad politician. I can’t hide my face, my views, who I am.
