12.10.1995

Turkeys praying for Xmas

ANYONE who has watched the nauseating, unprincipled middle class road show which the Labour conference has become must now be aware that we are no longer looking at the action of ‘traitors in the leadership’, but whole swathes of rank and file members who have been won to Blair’s version of a Tory Britain.

Delegates lined up to pontificate about how modern, clued up and high tech they are, and the party has to become; how they didn’t know what clause four meant; and how old-fashioned, out of date and irrelevant class struggle and socialism are. All this certainly demonstrated the changing composition of the Labour Party.

Occasionally someone spoiled the show. Scargill’s impassioned pleas and the occasional rough and ready northern person caused shuffles of embarrassment.

However the venom that these distant echoes to a socialist conscience produced, and the criticism they were roundly buried under, shows clearly which way the vast bulk of that party now thinks.

I felt sorry for Arthur: he was in the wrong room, talking to the wrong people, about things they really didn’t want to know about. The applause he got was nothing to the bristling neck hair which was almost perceivable on the collective collar of the conference.

The scandalous undemocratic treatment meted out to the leftist candidate for Leeds by the NEC was matched by almost ecstatic approval by two thirds of the conference. One felt there was something of a public execution here. A blood sacrifice to show the middle class, middle England voters, that socialists would be shot on sight.

The image of Glenda Jackson, who once had principles during her anti-Vietnam war days, waxing lyrical about Claire Short’s ruthless red-baiting of the Leeds candidate was a miserable sight. One-time self-styled ‘progressive MPs’, caught up in the wake of Blair’s reactionary crusade and giggling excitedly about how good his speech was, required a strong stomach indeed.

With 100,000 new members this year it is clear the Labour Party is now the party the middle class and growing sections of the upper class feel at home in it. The old values, the old campaigners can now be quite safely and publicly rubbished.

For folk like Scargill, Skinner and perhaps a few hundred thousand genuine working class socialists still hanging onto that wretched organisation, it’s time to take real stock. That particular bus has gone without you. It’s going in the wrong direction and they were about to kick you off it anyway. Let the damn thing go. Let them get into office, steamrolling over everything they ever said they stood by. How long will it be before the bubble bursts? Six months? 12 months at most, and a very disillusioned and angry working class is going to nail the bastards to the floor. When that happens there will be no more refrains of “just one more chance”. Hopefully that party will be burst asunder - I was going to add ‘or else die of shame’, but this week’s conference has shown very clearly they haven’t got any.

Dave Douglass
Vice chair of South Yorkshire NUM panel