Twenty years ago this week I attended
my final Labour Party meeting. It was
quite a meeting to make my last.
Held on April 29th 1995
in the Methodist Hall, Westminster, it was a ‘special conference’ called by
Tony Blair, the Labour Party’s new leader, with the sole aim of winning him
permission to remove Clause Four from the Labour Party constitution.
Clause Four committed The Labour
Party to Socialism; it made it clear that purpose of The Labour Party was ….to secure for the workers by hand or by
brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution
thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the
means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system
of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
Tony Blair won the vote and as I watched
‘Clause Four’ being amputated from the constitution I was
left wondering what The Labour Party was now for.
A torrent of questions seemed to pour over me;
if The Labour Party isn’t committed to Socialism then it isn’t a Socialist
party; if it now commits itself to the free market enterprise economy, then philosophically it is no different to The Conservative Party, so just what is the
purpose of this new “New Labour’ Party?
It struck me that the only real difference
between it and The Conservative Party was in the style of management that each
Party would offer the country.
Voting Labour or voting Conservative would be
just like deciding which new Chief Executive to appoint to run your business.
It wasn’t going to be about Politics anymore, it was now about competence, tone
and attitude.
Two years later, on the 1st May
1997, I walked into my local General Election ballot box full of trepidation
and heartache.
On the one hand I had the option to vote as I
always had, for The Labour Party, which was now led by this public school
rich kid who’d attended Oxford and spent a couple of years as a Barrister where
he’d represented a business who wanted to refuse to pay their workers holiday
pay.
But on the other hand I had The Conservative
Party, led by John Major, a working class man who’d left school at 16, been
unemployed, worked as an office clerk and never gone to University. He’d become
a local Councillor in Brixton and whilst there he’d pushed through a huge
expansion of council house building.
Between Tony Blair and John Major it was
obvious which one would understand and recognise the background I’d come from.
So my question to myself was, why are you about
to vote Labour?
The more I thought about it the more I saw that
the reasons I wanted to vote Labour were all based upon tradition, habit,
culture and fear. I had no idea at all why I was about to vote for a toff from
Fettes, rather than the working class kid from Brixton.
As my mind swirled I tried to focus on my key
questions: which of these guys would know what was going to be best for the
working class, which of these Leaders would instinctively understand the hopes
and dreams of my community, which Government would manage our economy and
public services in a way that would help families like mine improve our
circumstance; which Party would see their role as ‘helping’ the UK’s working
class communities and which of them would envision Government’s job as being to
‘take care’ of the poor?
This last question was crucially important to
me, because I didn’t believe my class needed ‘taking care’ of. The working class
didn’t want to be patronised. What we wanted was simple; the tools, the
chances, the opportunities to do better. We did want to know that there would
always be a safety net to give security to those who find climbing upwards
harder than those who are more agile, but no matter what our agility I knew
that we all wanted to climb.
Improvement and aspiration, that was what had
been at the heart of Clause Four, the philosophical soul of Socialism was about
the empowerment of the working class: but we no longer had a mass Socialist
party to vote for.
It was clear that there was no longer any
reason I needed to feel duty-bound to vote for The Labour Party. So the
question now was, what was I to do?
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