My political opponent is not my enemy

I never expected to write a LabourList email about Ann Widdecombe. It’s not easy. I am not going to gloss over the fact that in life, she stood against almost everything I have fought for my whole life. Women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, racial justice – we disagreed on all these things.

I didn’t know her. We were occasionally on the same television shows, being opposing talking heads, but she usually dialled in so I never had the awkward experience of making small talk in the green room. I doubt we would have got on.

But I have been shocked at some of the responses I have seen following her death. I don’t know what exactly happened or why and I am not going to speculate. But before we knew anything – and even when it was clear her death was violent – I saw far too many people celebrating the death of someone they considered a political enemy.

I think we owe it to ourselves and to our politics to be better than that.

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I am a democratic socialist because I believe that it is through this politics that we can create the conditions where people can thrive. Others in my party share the same goals as me, though they prefer the terms progressive or social democrat. Whatever we call it, we all share the burning desire to change society for the better. To work towards a society where we can create the conditions that smooth out the inequality that exists purely through luck of birth into privilege or poverty.

It is that inequality that makes me angry. It is that poverty and the effects it has on the people living in it that sets a fire in my belly. I rail against Thatcherism, against those who would put the profits of a few over the progress of the many. I try to channel this into a positive politics – fighting for better education, better homes, better jobs and better lives.

I spent some time this weekend watching Boys From the Blackstuff – Alan Bleasdale’s seminal drama about the grinding poverty of unemployment and the desperation of trying to find work in the black economy in Thatcher’s 80s. It’s a heartbreaking drama – and all too familiar to those who remember those times. And sadly, not nearly enough has changed.

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What struck me most was how dehumanised everyone in it was made. By the poverty, by the systems they found themselves trapped in and tortured by. By the choices their desperation drove them to. The piece is about the breaking of the human spirit.

This should make us angry. It should impassion us to strive every day to make the world better.

But it should not make us hate. Because hate itself is a dehumanising emotion. We would be choosing to reduce our humanity – while thinking that we were doing so in the cause of human progress.

I am not going to claim to have never hated anyone in my life. I am no paragon. I too am human and full of flaws.

But I have worked to let go of hatred. Because when I didn’t it wasn’t those I hated who suffered – it was me. It made me less. Less happy, less effective – a smaller person with less space in my heart for the positive. And I realised that life, as we are all contemplating today, really is too short.

Ann Widdecombe campaigned for what she believed in – things that were anathema to me. I believe in things that were anathema to her. I hope my politics wins. But I refuse to weaken that politics by dehumanising it with hatred and vile behaviour.

I hope you all agree.

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