Watt the F***?
Iain Dale is understandably pretty pleased with himself for the publicity surrounding the new book about Peter Watt, the ex-General Secretary to the Labour party. I hesitate to say the book by Peter Watt, as he didn’t write it himself.
In fact , while it’s temporarily embarrassing for Labour I don’t think the ‘revelations’ about life in the inside of the Labour party will have much long-lasting effect. For most people picking up on it at all, it will only confirm what they think about the way things are done in the Labour party, and in politics more generally.
What interests me more is what on earth is going on inside Peter Watt’s head, and how this reflects a wider malaise within the organisation of the Labour party. Why would he choose to allow the publication of this book just months before a general election, and allow it to be published by a publishing firm run by a high-profile Tory who knows how to work the rightwing press into a frenzy?
The reason, I assume, is that Peter Watt now feels he has at last left politics behind, and the fate of the Labour party, and consequently the country, is not his problem.
Behind that, though, lies a deeper problem. The reason Peter Watt feels able to leave politics behind is that he never ‘did politics’ in the first place. What he did do was a career in politics. That is a different thing.
If he had ever ‘done politics’ properly, he would have understood that just because you fall out with people within the party, and even get treated like shit, that doesn’t mean the politics of that party have nothing to do with you. He’d understand that politics is more than about your position in a party, it’s about commitment to a cause.
Dave quite often rails about ‘career politicians’ making their way through student union politics, more focused on their own career prospects than any political principles. To be honest, it’s not something I’ve ever really picked up on because I don’t live in that world; I live in a world where Labour politics is, for many people who ‘do politics’, ‘in the blood’; it’s a feature of their working class environment; it’s who they are. Even when there’s a major fall-out and people leave or are thrown out of the party, it doesn’t mean they suddenly simply ‘rise above’ politics as Peter Watt now seeks to do; there are different fora, even different leftwing parties to get involved with, to ‘do politics’ in.
For someone who understands the espousal of Labour politics as expression of class solidarity and of tradition, rather than as handy career move, the worst thing about this whole affair with Peter Watt is the hypocritical way in which he has used the notion of tradition as a convenient boost to his career, only to reject it when it is no longer needed.
In his introductory email, the very day he was appointed General Secretary, this is what he said to Labour party members:
I feel really privileged and proud about my future role and I hope I will always be able to count on your support and commitment.
There is only one person as proud as me – my mum, who I told on Monday night. She then bounded into the Poole CLP’s EC and spilled the beans!
I will take over from Matt Carter in January and until then we will be working closely to meet the challenges ahead. Challenges on which we’ll all have to work together, like the upcoming elections and our party renewal agenda. We both know that to continue to deliver on our shared Labour values will be tough, but I look forward to working with you to bring continued success for our party and country.
I don’t really care about Peter Watt. I don’t really remember much about him other than that he didn’t quite appear up to the job as General Secretary of the Labour party. But I do wonder what his mother, whose name he invoked as part of his efforts to seem like a good old Labour boy, and whom he even had photographed at 10 Downing Street as part of his ‘Labour values’ charade) feels about his new book.
This is what (h/t Steve Hanlon) a long-standing member of my CLP said in an email on hearing of Watt’s appointment:
The next General Secretary, to be appointed in two years time, is currently on the SureStart programme where he is learning to babble…`privilege’, `proud’, `challenge’, `’renewal’, `shared values’ etc etc.
None of you will remember the legendary General Secretary of the Labour Party, [Len] Williams. Lost an arm during the war, hard as bloody nails and didn`t talk shite. But somehow I found him very reassuring.
Why do I find it so hard to `modernise’? Answers, please!
He had a point, and still has a point, which the Labour Party will find it difficult to ignore in five or ten years, when young voters are asking questions about the backgrounds of the Labour shadow cabinet and how well they can represent the country.
Well done. Thank you for putting this so well. “just because you fall out with people within the party, and even get treated like shit, that doesn’t mean the politics of that party have nothing to do with you. …. politics is more than about your position in a party, it’s about commitment to a cause.”
I was surprised and disappointed by what Peter did. He did get treated badly but he was a key figure within the Labour Party organisation for many years – it clearly has its problems but it is hard to see how he can now pretend that they are nothing to do with him. There are probably others who feel the same but would never put the boot in (and make money out of it) in this way.
Max Weber drew a good contrast between those people who lived “from” politics (i.e. it paid their salary and gave them a career) and those who also lived “for” politics.
It’s only those who live “for” politics who can have a true calling for it, what Weber termed the “vocation of politics”. And I think he also got a lot right when he said that the only escape from the rule of faceless bureaucrats and living-from-the-party aparatchiks was for there to be men and women with the vocation for politics. Something Watt is conspicuously lacking.
A lot of socialist groups have a similar analysis, though they would add (and Max wouldn’t) that you also need to take into account democratic structures and political orientation. If a party doesn’t orientate itself towards the working class, and make itself accountable to that class, it will never be run by those who regard politics as a vocation.
It’s no accident that the more Labour has got to be like the Tories, the more the party apparatus has become clogged with the former kind of people…just like both Tory and Liberal leaderships.
I cannot believe how deeply personal all of this is. I actually know Peter, he is my friend. He was treated abysmally by the party and has every right to set the record straight. Simple as. He was also a very able General Secretary. I think most of this blog post is extremely unfair. I also happen to know that his mother 100% supports his efforts to remove the unfairly-deserved stain on his reputation, as do all his family and friends.
Every man or woman has a right to air their views, and particularly if lies have been spread about them.
Nevertheless, the central charge of Paul’s article holds, in my view – that even when airing contrary views, one should do it through the prism of one’s wider beliefs, and in the interests of the movement to which one has chosen to adhere.
Watt has clearly not done this; he is a pawn in the profit making, anti-Labour propaganda machine of the Daily Mail. And incidentally, I thought some of the things he said were rather personal too, so his friends should hardly be crying foul as regards that.
Quite right, the point is not really the content of what he’s written, which has in any case hardly set the world on light. The point is the way he’s chosen to do it.
(declaration of non-interest: I have never met him and previously had no opinions on him.)
I suspect that, like me, many Labour Party members will not retain the content of what he’s written but will remember the means of expression. But I also suspect we are not his intended audience)
Dave @ 3: Good point. I thought about moving the post on to the need for a democratically centralist process for electing people to paid office in Labour, as opposed to the copy of the civil service/politician model, but decided I wanted to keep this post brief. Such a process would have eliminated Peter at an early stage, and he would have been saved the treatment he now feels he has to speak out about.
Paul @ 4: It’s good of you to defend someone you call a friend, and perfectly understandable. However, I do reject your suggestion that my post is unfair to Peter.
I bear him no personal malice, but I think if most people looking at what he has allowed to happen in his name would accept that he has put his personal pride/revenge before the needs of any political inclination he may hav ever professed. I could take you to meet literally dozens of people in the party, or sometimes expelled from it, who feel the party has let them down and treated them like shite, but who would never do what Peter did.
Indeed I could take you to meet people who had that shite done to them with Peter’s own complicity in his time as General Secretary, because Peter was unable or unwilling (and I attach no blame here) to confront the assymetric power relations within the current party, and from which he benefited in his career until it all went wrong. I won’t, because that would be an indirect betrayal of those very people, who understand what political commitment is really about. It would also be unfair on Peter, because I recognise (and acknowledge above) that he was a victim of the Labour party system.
My point was not so much about Peter, though; it was about the way Labour as an organisation promotes people like him because they are convenient on their way up, and convenient on their way down. To that extent, Peter was unfortunate, but it cannot excuse what he has done.
Hi Paul,
Peter Watt always struck me as a bit of a ticking timebomb – although I wouldn’t overstate the impact of his intervention – given the strength of the complaints of being shafted that he made at the time of the announcement there would be no prosecutions over Donorgate. I wouldn’t like to comment on the strength of his case but share the disdain for the actions he has taken.
Interestingly though, Watt’s career wasn’t entirely that of the gilded path of which you complain. He was actually an NHS staff nurse for a number of years in th early 90s, before becoming a constituency organiser for the 97 election and working his way up from there.