Labour United? The problem with the next generation…

By A. Supporter

UPDATE: Kezia Dugdale has responded to this post with an alternative view of Young Labour activists.

John Prescott and Alastair Campbell treat politics like football. Regardless of how poorly the players perform; they will always wear the team colours. The problem is that politics is not like football. Football, though sacred, does not determine the amount of tax you pay each year, nor does football determine how much a pint of lager costs, nor does football decide to send your son or your daughter to Iraq. Football is football. Politics is everything else.

So why do John Prescott and Alastair Campbell insist on treating politics like football? Is it inconceivable that, during the course of the next millennium, a Conservative Government or a Liberal Government might do a better job of managing the economy? Of course it isn’t. To say so would be to say that only one particular group of people knows how to manage the economy. If that were true, we would not have elections. No, what compels Labour stalwarts like Prescott and Campbell to campaign for a fourth term of Labour Government is that the team they support is all they know; it is also the hand that feeds them. Without team Labour, it is unlikely that any of us would know who these two men are.What is becoming increasingly evident is that Prescott and Campbell, both campaign veterans, are not the only ones playing at Political Premiership. One only has to scan the blogsphere to appreciate just how deep the football analogy goes. Indeed, even a cursory glance at LabourList, Labour’s shiny new blog, reveals a sub-culture of pubescent scarf-wearing and Tory bashing. Self-avowed Labour Students, affectionately known within the party as “Nolsies”, have daubed the blog’s walls with vitriolic attacks on the opposition and, more often than not, have been given a virtual pat on the back for doing so.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for political engagement, particularly among the nation’s young. But what I do not agree with is the party politicisation of young people, some of whom have yet to vote in a General Election. Indeed, to hear Young Labour activists speak of their hatred of Margaret Thatcher is, quite frankly, bizarre. The rhetoric smacks not of empirical dissatisfaction but of irrational hatred, inherited hatred even. For if my mum, who raised two children singlehandedly during the Thatcher years, can let it go, then surely an educated teenager, born after Thatcher left office, can survive the day without giving the ailing Iron Lady a damn good tongue-lashing?

I must state here that I am a card-carrying member of the Labour Party.

I say this because some might accuse me of being a crypto-Tory; such is the nature of the blogosphere. In any case, back to the game. The game works like this: if you want a career in politics, you must support a team. Furthermore, never criticise your team while sat in its stadium. Take Wes Streeting for example. Currently serving as President of the National Union of Students, Wes writes for LabourList “in a strictly personal capacity”. So, by day, Wes criticises the Labour Government for introducing top up fees but by night, Wes writes articles called “Top Tips for Team Labour’s Online Recovery“. The question is: how does one reconcile the two? How does one rage against the machine while also wanting to be a cog in its wheel? Such is the apparent allure of Labour United.

Another Labour United supporter is Rob Newman. According to the Internet, Rob was shortlisted by the Labour Party to contest David Cameron’s seat of Witney at the next General Election. According to the Internet, Rob studied English Literature and Philosophy at Cardiff University, after which he worked as a Research Assistant to Labour backbencher, Julie Morgan, after which he was elected as National Secretary of Labour Students, after which he got his current job, Senior Parliamentary Assistant to David Blunkett. At the risk of scuppering Rob’s chances of robbing the Prime Minister in waiting of his parliamentary seat, I’m not sure if the constituents of Witney want to be represented in Parliament by a 28-year-old who has, to date, only ever worked for the Labour Party.

Maybe I’m naive but I don’t know how constituents will be able to connect with people like Rob Newman, or for that matter 19-year-old Emily Benn (granddaughter of Tony Benn), Labour’s candidate for the Conservative safe seat of East Worthing and Shoreham. Incidentally, when asked by the BBC whether or not her name had been an advantage as far as her selection was concerned, Miss Benn replied: “They would be mad to do it just because of the name.” At the risk of sounding cynical, would a 19-year-old be selected to represent nearly one hundred thousand constituents at Parliament for any other reason?

The problem is not necessarily one of calibre. There are reasons why these young Labour careerists have been selected. They are bright, upwardly mobile and most importantly, they are loyal. Indeed, loyalty, commitment, brown-nosing, whatever you want to call it, is the main reason these young men and women have been chosen.

However, there is something fundamentally wrong with the Labour Party if it seeks to endorse readymade MPs, most of whom have been grown in the soil of the party machine.

We, the average voter, don’t measure our elected representatives on their party political credentials, or their connections within the party, or their ministerial turns of phrase. We want people like us, who work in the world outside Westminster, people who know what it means to have a conversation down the pub without referring to politics. In short; we want people who don’t play for, or support, Labour United, or any other political football team for that matter.

Before the cliques, before the conferences and weekenders, before you had to join Labour Students or Young Labour to get ahead, before it all got a bit silly, there were young people asking questions. Not defending policy prescriptions, or sucking up to Ministers, or running for public office, but just asking questions. Why, Mr Brown, do you want to scrap the 10p tax band? Why, Mr Prescott, do we need to Go Fourth when the vast majority of people don’t want to vote for us again? Why, Mr Campbell, do you not admit that you ‘sexed up’ a dossier that sent my brother to fight in Iraq? I don’t see these questions being asked by the young party faithful. Indeed, whenever something goes wrong, more often than not, the young party faithful blush and look the other way, as was the case with Derek Draper, or ask the difficult questions after they have left the stadium.

It is not about the dissent of youth and I am not suggesting that there aren’t young Labour activists that disagree with party policy. But all too often, the winners within the party, those that get ahead, do very little to challenge the status quo, preferring to defend the marginal seat instead of asking why the seat is marginal to begin with.

Quite often, they do so to get ahead and because they are told to win by their party leaders. Consequently, Labour now has a lot of young supporters who, like Prescott and Campbell, wear the team colours no matter how poorly the players perform. Some of these supporters will become players themselves and some of those players will perform poorly and like their predecessors, some will rely on the adulation of the young party faithful to feel better.

It never used to be this way. Labour was the party of the people and not of the party itself. Under Tony Blair, New Labour was born and with it, a generation of young activists who want to win and who seem oblivious of the cost of loyalty. When Gordon Brown scrapped the 10p tax band, a friend of mine defended the decision on his Facebook page, claiming that poorer people should expect to shoulder some of the economic burden during a downturn, a downturn which had been made worse, in part, by Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. I liken my friend’s attitude to Stockholm syndrome: the policy, though quite unreasonable, was from the mouth of his captive, the party machine, and he had grown too attached to the party machine to challenge even its worst behaviour.

While I don’t dislike the idea of a few younger candidates on the scene, it is evident that these people have been chosen not because of their ability to connect with constituents but their ability to connect with fellow Labour Party members. Indeed, the success of Emily Benn in getting selected has no doubt stirred the ambitions of a new breed of young Labour activist, the type that would rather hobnob with ministers than talk to constituents, the type that can proffer support for an unpopular policy but is too partisan to acknowledge the policy’s wider unpopularity, the type that will inherit the Labour Party for better but most probably for worse.

Indeed, the younger generation of Labour Party activist seems more interested by power than by policy and that has created a vacuum where once there was vibrancy of debate and yes, occasionally, dissent. Now, at Young Labour conference, there does not seem to be much difference in tone between the minister attending and the youngsters in the audience. It’s almost as if there has been a three line whip put into place for the duration of the conference, a conference which sees hundreds of brainwashed tweens administering lashings of applause to ministers who have supported top-up-fees, Iraq, and who have spent at least a fraction of their parents’ hard-earned money on plugs and porn.

Part of the problem is power. People just don’t want to lose it.

In the Premiership, most people don’t care that their team is backed by a Russian oligarch or an Arab consortium, or that one of their team has been accused of rape, or that some of the supporters engage in fisticuffs before, during or after the match, as long as their team is at the top. As long as their team wins, the means will never mean more than the end result. It’s the same with Labour United. As long as Labour wins the next General Election, the exuberant clapping, the glad-handing, the hobnobbing, it will have been worth it if you can stick two pubescent fingers up at the supporters on the other side of the stadium, right?

The public, however, are not stupid. They can go online, like I have. They can see for themselves the next generation of readymade MPs waiting in the wings, political youngsters who admire Ed Balls and love Ed Miliband, who think that talking exclusively to other Labour Party members is the way to win the next General Election.

Labour is not, should not, be this way.

Labour are not “born to rule” like the Tories, and yet, that’s how a lot of the younger Labour Party activists carry themselves, and they don’t even realise it. It is this arrogance that the electorate despise in the older generation and, in part, why Gordon Brown and Co. will not win next year. To revel in power is not attractive, particularly when you don’t deserve it.

So what’s the alternative? Disband the young Labour groups and return its supporters to a state of sceptical normality? Maybe. Encourage young activists to applaud less and ask more questions? Maybe. Turn off that PowerPoint presentation on the state of the economy and ask young Labour activists to look beyond the conference hall for solutions? Maybe. Stop worrying about careers, Go Fourth, peers, hobnobbing, getting ahead, careers, election victory, and careers? Maybe. I for one would rather see young activists in comfy clothes, not suits, taking the nails off the shutters and letting some light in, talking to people who don’t belong to the Labour Party about what they want, taking the activism out of the conference halls and into the towns, questioning bad policies and not trying to defend the Party when it’s behaviour is indefensible, and most of all, stop supporting Labour United.

What do you think?

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Addendum: This article was born partly out of frustration. Having attended some young party events in recent years, I came to realise that what used to be a loose affiliation of Labour friends has become a clique of ruthless young careerists, a gaggle of Labour Party diehards hell bent on winning. It’s a shame, given the transparency of the Labour Party (and of politics in general since the advent of the blogosphere), that the next generation being flaunted on LabourList are: white, university educated, middle-class careerists, nearly all of whom live in London, nearly all of whom aspire to public office of one kind or the other, and nearly all of whom indulge in the pompous fantasy that the Labour Party will save the world.