So why am I voting Labour?

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

Who you vote for is a mixture of conflicting emotions and rationalities: tradition, family, your personal circumstances, ideas and values, tribal attachment, fear of the alternative, affinity, instinct, and trust. These things cut across class, gender, faith, race and ethnicity, and sexuality. Trying to predict someone’s political allegiance in this modern world is a mug’s game.

My personal history of family, place, values, ideas and belief place me firmly in the labour tradition. Freedom is nothing without power and capability. There is no freedom without an equality that means something more than the opportunity to fail. Only through collective action – the state or more preferably through community – can each achieve in accordance their endeavour and abilities. We should never give up on anyone; there is always hope through persistence. What someone receives they should put back in equal or greater measure. Each individual is precious and their rights should be respected as such. A human society that is equal, free, cooperative, empowered, and optimistic is also creative, fair, secure, and effervescent.

For me, these things place me in the labour tradition. There are clearly liberal elements within these and even some conservative elements. But as a whole, they more resemble a labour outlook – one that has historic roots in the labour and co-operative movement and Britain’s working class communities but now is cross-class and the dominant ideological alternative to conservatism in modern Britain. It is an instinct and outlook also and is shared by somewhere in the region of 30% of British people.

I don’t hate Tories a la Gary Younge in yesterday’s Guardian. I just don’t trust the way they think. Their primal instincts are different to mine. And that will ultimately mean that they will do less for people who need help and support than a Labour government of any description would ever do. And their inheritance tax policy sums them up: to prioritise only the wealthy while we face a national mission to get through rough economic waters reveals their instincts in garish technicolour.

I agree with much of the Liberal Democrat agenda – political reform, civil liberties (by not respecting rights, the cost actually falls on the most deprived and alienated rather than the criminals and suspected terrorists they are supposed to target), compassionate amnesty, green investment. My own personal philosophy and outlook owes much to the liberal tradition – where would we be without Smith, Mill, Russell, Hobhouse, Green, Keynes, or Beveridge?

We are different traditions largely within the left. But it comes down to tradition, instinct, emotion, and trust. The ideal future is a plural left – as distinct from a ‘new left consensus’ – and Labour and the Liberal Democrats will have much in common but distinct we remain.

And the Labour party in government has been far from perfect. Failing to hold a leadership election in 2007 will be seen as a long-term error – not because Gordon Brown wouldn’t have won but because it would made him better. Labour has been too unquestioning of the motivations of others in the fields of foreign policy (the invasion of Iraq will forever be a scar) and civil liberties, and failing to properly reform politics will come to be seen as an error of historic proportions. We can always argue that it should have done more on poverty, equality, on improving education and health. As people who insist on justice and change it is in our nature to always demand more and this impatience is a virtue that can become a self-destructive vice if we are not careful.

Saying that more – even much more – should have been done is not the same thing as saying Labour has done nothing. It has achieved an incredible amount.

Would the Conservative Party have introduced a minimum wage, transformed the standard of healthcare, massively improved educational achievement – for the poorest more than anyone else – legislated for civil partnerships and expanded equality across the board? Would the Conservative Party have given workers more rights to be treated decently, or devolved power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, or created Sure Start, or invested in families through tax credits and the child trust fund – thereby fighting inequalities in income and wealth? Would the Conservatives have moved 100,000s of pensioners out of poverty, and massively expanded higher education? Yes, you can point to flies in the ointment in all of this. But really, do you believe any of this would have happened under a Conservative government? Really? Have you looked at what happened from 1979-97?

And Labour has a vision for the future – political reform, investment in a more sustainable and productive economy, protection of health, schools, and policing and the expansion of user involvement in these public services. It’s not flashy but it’s sound.

Criticise away, but do so alongside an analysis of what the Conservatives would do. Neil Kinnock’s “Under the Conservatives, I warn you not to get old” speech applies just as much now as in 1983.

And in Methodist Central Hall on Sunday – the birthplace of the UN General Assembly – amongst people steeped in the labour tradition, Citizens UK, as Gordon Brown found his authentic voice, I remembered precisely why I was voting Labour. It is because there is a deep and abiding labour instinct in Britain – one that should have a voice and proper political representation. It is an instinct that created the party that became the greatest engine for social justice in our history. Its work is far from finished. Despite all of its many shortcomings, it is a force for good. I’m voting Labour because I am labour.