We get the politics we deserve – so let’s deserve better

My first ever blog post for this website (or indeed anywhere) was outlining my disgust at the revelations about Damian McBride’s antics. Labour members deserved so much more.

As Mark has written, the factionalism that scarred the Blair/Brown years needs to be banished forever. It is the poisonous shadow of the pride in our party that makes up our tribalist collectivism. It is divisive, nasty, shallow, pointless and probably to blame for the areas where Labour made least progress and got most wrong over our time in Government. It’s indicative of when our focus is inward, and our measures of success are not the lives we are transforming in the country, but the “who’s up? who’s down?” petty point scoring of Westminster.

Aggression is not a measure of success, but a measure of failure. But there are those who see politics as a specifically aggressive past time. Who speak admiringly of whips physically assaulting their colleagues. It is not just the damage caused by internal divisions that Labour needs to learn from, though after a summer of pointless petty sniping, this lesson is well timed and salutary. It is also the damage that this hyper-aggression causes to our politics, to those who wish to partake in politics and to those who are put of doing so by precisely this kind of behavior.

Those who smilingly tell you that politics is a “contact sport” are those who put their enjoyment of aggression ahead of the democratic necessity to broaden our political reach and ensure that it is more representative. If you don’t want politics to be dominated by hyper-masculine nonsense, you need to stop conducting it as if it’s a pissing contest at a frat party.

It really is that simple.

Of course that doesn’t suit everyone. There were many people who benefited from their aggression. They reached the top of the heap by making sure they were standing firm on the painful bits of everyone below them. Those who reached the top of our politics – both elected politicians, officials and the journalists/commentators who make up the wider political world – did so during this era of poison. They have a stake in defending such tactics as it impacts on their reputations.

They also understand such tactics. Taking the more complex path of engagement is harder to comprehend. As the villain of Strictly Ballroom (a great tale of the struggle of the imaginative new against the macho, aggressive old guard) said “If you can’t dance a step, you can’t teach it, and if you can’t teach it – we might as well all pack up and go home.” If we change how politics is done, a lot of people who have done politics for a long time will no longer know how to do it. You can see why that might be frightening.

But frightening or not, it is essential. Whether it is bypassing agressive union/leadership stand offs by developing an ongoing dialoge with union members, or whether it is ending the undermining of colleagues through briefing and bitterness, politics has to evolve away from the poisoned years.

I want to spend the rest of my life doing politics, in whatever way I can. To do so, I will continue learning, growing and evolving. I will defeat the arguments of those I disagree with because I know I am right. I will never defeat them because I believe they are weak and act on that belief. Might is not Right.

The ripples of the Blair/Brown years are dying out. This round of revelations may be the last gasp. But the damage done has been long term. We must now rebuild a politics that is positive, that engages and that attracts. Or we will fail ourselves all over again.