Why I’m Labour – in good times and bad

By Tom Bage / @tombage

Tony Benn once said of the Labour Party:

“We are not just here to manage capitalism, but to change society and define its finer values.”

As the Young Fabians gear up to celebrate their 50th year, with the most important election in a generation just months away, those words are a timely reminder of Labour’s raison d’être.

Tempting as it is to address the first part of the quote, I’ll leave the discussions on the mechanics of the market to the better-qualified James Purnell and our friends at the Open Left Project.

But, as ever, Benn echoes activists’ instincts: namely that merely ‘managing capitalism’ is not the succour that gets us knocking on doors in the cold and has us keeping the faith when times are tough. Instead we do these things because we believe the Labour Party is still the last, best hope of changing society for the better, and entrenching and defining those timeless principles of tolerance, solidarity, equality and respect.

I’m in the Labour Party not because of a blind faith in the goodness of human nature; but because I believe those better angels we do have need a vehicle of expression. Lofty ideals are all well and good, but without a party willing to fight for them they go unrealised.

Civil partnerships didn’t happen by accident; it took a Labour government to convert our instinct for tolerance into a piece of legislation that has brought happiness and security to so many.

The Minimum Wage didn’t fall out of the sky; it took a Labour government, spurred on by the movement’s belief in solidarity, to translate the ideal of a fair wage for our most vulnerable workers into an irreversible reality.

And we won’t tackle discrimination by simply feeling it to be wrong; it takes a party whose first principles are egalitarian and has the stomach for a fight to enshrine something like the Equality Bill in law.

There have, of course, been some terrible mistakes in the last 12 years. At times many of us have questioned the course those at the top of our party and government have plotted. But despite everything, it’s an exciting time to be a Labour member. Unlike the Tories, our convictions demand we make the future fairer — and it’s our convictions that must guide us over the coming year, whatever the outcome of the election.

In the 50 years since the inception of the Young Fabians, our movement has helped improve Britain immeasurably. In another half-century today’s Young Fabians will be nearly as old as Tony Benn is now. Let’s make the old rascal proud, by winning the fight to change society, and entrenching those finer values for all.