Though Cowards Flinch

I read David Lammy’s piece in the new Soundings e-book ‘Labour’s future’, and I wanted to scream.

It’s not just this kind of vacuous misunderstanding of why Labour lost power:

We must get beyond a conversation in which New Labour types speak only of lost support among C2s while idealists lament the betrayal of the working class.

It’s not just the unthinking patronization of a whole electorate:

People turned away from Labour because they were not clear what we stood for.

It’s not even the idea that, if Labour can rebrand itself and talk about ‘values’ a bit more, then all will just be fine and dandy come 2015.

Too often we have given the impression that politics is merely a process for determining ‘what works’. It should be a contest over what matters.

What really gets my goat, David Lammy, is your persistent use of ‘we’ to describe what you, the political elite at the heart of New Labour, got wrong.

I didn’t lose support amongst the C2s.  I gained it.  I didn’t betray the working class.  I know what values I have, and I can articulate them pretty damned clearly in word and deed. 

Of course it’s not just David Lammy.  Here’s David Miliband, doing the same thing in his Keir Hardie lecture:

We achieved great things and won great victories in government. I think we were insufficiently proud of our record during the election; but we lost the trust of the people and ceased to be the repository of their hopes for a better tomorrow.

No we bloody didn’t.  You did.

The key problem is that the political elite of New Labour didn’t listen. This is precisely what David Lammy just, like his colleagues, are now falling over themselves to be the first take into account:

Over the last fifteen years our own members have often felt ignored and patronised by the party hierarchy. Policy was centralised, our party conference became ever more stage-managed, and any form of disagreement was seen as an unwelcome distraction.

If the paragons of New Labour seeks the redemption that people like me really want to accord them, they’d better start recognising the real contradiction between, on the one hand, trying to win over Labour’s grassroots by telling it that it really, really should be listened to, and on the other using the royal ‘we’ to shift the blame for Labour’s loss onto that same grassroots.

In other words, they could do with taking responsibility for their past if they want to be part of our future. 

That’s ‘our’.  A socialist ‘our’.