No tears for Blears

By Laurie Penny / @pennyred

This post was also published at Liberal Conspiracy.

I feel obliged to insist that however pissed off we are at our politicians, it’s still hugely important to vote tomorrow. Meanwhile, is anyone else completely sodding disgusted with the filibustering going on down on the Westminster farm today? In case you’ve been living in a bag eating candles, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith have just resigned, with Blears giving a statement timed to do maximum damage to Brown just before Question Time today.

‘Rebel’ Labourites are calling for his resignation and they just might get it. Guardianistas are rubbing their hands and cackling armchair anarchy into their cappucinos whilst the government crumbles around them. Brilliant. Thanks, Hazel, that’s absolutely what we needed to get us back to what’s important in politics, like that grassroots unrest you keep talking about despite the fact that you wouldn’t know community organisation if it jumped out of your tiny designer handbag and hit you on the head.

I’m not about to disagree with anyone who believes that Brown should be gone, and soon. Far from it. But this isn’t a measured process of leadership challenge, it’s not even a response to public pressure: it’s a playground pile-on born of panic over the woeful expenses fiasco, and it is stupid. It’s stupid, it’s so stupid and so childish and so far from what politics should be about that it even makes bits of Blair’s government look good by comparison.

To explain what I mean, let’s take by means of comparison another Labour resignation speech by another shamelessly goblinesque gingerite: Robin Cook. Here is the text of the speech; even as a 16-year-old with no faith in mainstream politics I remember being roused. The idea that politicians of principle could challenge their government so nobly and with such knife-twisting decorum, in protest at a military offensive which the people of Britain and the world were desperate to halt in its tracks, was exciting. It was magnificent.

It was magnificent and they went ahead and invaded Iraq anyway. They didn’t listen to parliament, they didn’t listen to two million people on the streets of London, they didn’t listen to international opinion. They went ahead and did it anyway, to the cost of many thousands of Iraqi lives, hundreds of British lives, billions of pounds poured into the defence budget and a permanent soiling of this Labour party in government.

Labour ‘rebellion’ from the backbenches actually used to mean something, before it was stained with futility and disillusionment. Now, as Nick Clegg (the only person talking any sense today) declared at Question Time, ‘The country doesn’t have a government; it has a void’.

I’m not impressed by this ‘rebellion’. I’m more impressed by the weary loyalty of Alan Johnson as he – please Gods – prepares for potential leadership than I am by Blears’ smirking, scruffy attempt to play rebel-without-a-cabinet-portfolio, even if she does have that very shiny motorbike. I don’t think it’s responsible to knock over the cabinet from within, not unless your Prime Minister has just declared martial law. Which Brown, for all his shambling clampdowns on Habeas Corpus, hasn’t.

What depresses me is that this ‘rebellion’ is not a matter of principle for any of the ministers and MPs involved. It’s a cowardly, schoolyard attempt to kick an unpopular Prime Minister when he’s finally down, just like the weedier gang-running kids who yell ‘we never liked him anyway!’ when their school bully is dethroned, and it’s come far, far too late. It’s not about the politics: it’s about their own jobs, a sorry attempt to cool down public and press indignation at an expenses scandal in which they are all culpable by attacking the man who, for better or worse, they chose to lead them (313 Labour MPs nominated Brown over John McDonnell in 2007). I am disgusted with all of them. And what’s worst of all is that they’re probably doing the right thing, for the party and for the country – finally.