1983. Never again.

I wrote this ten days ago and forgot to cross-post it; however, given that it's about something that happened thirty years ago, I don't suppose it matters. For the record, today's Labour's poll lead is only six points.

Today was the thirtieth anniversary of what was arguably Labour’s postwar nadir: the 1983 election.

If George Orwell had, by chance, chosen the title of his future-shock novel as one year earlier than that he finally settled on, the irony would have been complete: fact would have been competing with fiction for the most dystopian vision of the left's future.

Many of today’s Labour members and supporters were not even born then, and surely those who have only primarily known Labour as the established party of government must find it difficult to comprehend the dire state of the party back then.

We all laughed till it hurt at John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better, because my Labour generation empathised exactly with both his idealism and his pain.

Goodbye, Lord Ahmed. You will not be missed

Ah, Nazir Ahmed. There are two sides being put to your story. On the one hand, there is yours. Its claim is that you have been put upon by an unfeeling Labour party, which will not give you a “fair hearing”.

On the other, there is the more obvious, alternative explanation, that you were allegedly caught saying something anti-Semitic, following a long stretch of seemingly unpardonable behaviour from your good self, and then resigned from the party in anticipation of being pushed – via a letter which can only be described as weaselly – in order to hang on to some vestige of personal credibility.

I shall leave the reader to decide which explanation seems the more fitting.

In praise of Peter Tatchell

I must admit, I am pleasantly surprised to be writing those words. I didn't always feel that way.

In the 1990s, Peter Tatchell was in the news because of OutRage!, which had a policy of outing gay men still in the closet, with the motivation - or at least this is my understanding - that they were betraying those already out and that their keeping quiet would only delay public acceptance of homosexuality.

Although I understand the logic and respect his sincerity, I thought it was wrong then and I still do now, even when that acceptance has come such a long way as to have seriously diminished – although clearly not removed – the importance of the whole issue. To my mind, it is someone’s right to be in the closet as and when they choose, and come out of it when they choose. It is not for the state, or any third party, to interfere with that decision.

But recently, despite still differing with him on a lot of things, I have come to have a great respect for Tatchell for his work as a tireless human rights campaigner (a fact he might well be horrified to hear, in the unlikely event he has any idea who I am).

A good example is the resounding brilliance of this post, in which he states what is clear to most thinking people, that hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an anti-Semite of the most unpleasant variety, and calls out the “so-called left” on their tolerance to such characters:

“When OutRage! and I protested against Qaradawi being hosted by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, in 2004, much of the so-called “left” denounced us as racists, Islamophobes, imperialists and neo-cons. Sick!

I’m a left-winger but nowadays too many leftists are apologists for Islamism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and homophobia.”

Quite right, and arguments with which readers of the Centre Left or Harry's Place will be familiar. But I mention Tatchell also as a great example of a wider phenomenon.

What is happening in left-wing politics, including within the Labour Party, over recent years is a realignment.

It is not a realignment of right and left, as evidenced by the marked differences between my views and those of Tatchell, and others well to the left of me, with whom I fully share an abhorrence of this apologia for Islamism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and homophobia. It is a realignment which cuts across traditional left-right shades of “progressive” opinion, and separates into what Nick Cohen calls “the decent left”, and the not-so-decent left. The Galloways and, I’m afraid, the Livingstones.

In the middle, there is a large body of Labour supporters and other assorted leftists who are pretending that there is no issue here. Move along, nothing to see here. The easy explanation is that people like me are trying to stigmatise people with whose views they disagree; the Labour “right” trying to push out the Labour “left”.

But I am not so factional. I am not. The fact that I side with Tatchell, with whom I disagree on many other things, and have a strong desire to keep people like him within spectrum of mainstream left debate, gives the lie to that.

I do not expect everyone to agree with me on the size of the state, or borrowing versus austerity, immigration or healthcare. I want a pluralistic party which debates all those things. In some my views may win out, in others they may lose. That is the battle of ideas.

But I do expect – no, I demand – that Labour be a decent party. That we turn our back on that way of thinking that Tatchell describes. Because those little outward signals already damage us a little in the eyes of the public now, and that is nothing to what will one day happen when they and the media truly realise the extent of the problem.

What is abundantly clear to me is that, at some point, that large, neutral body in the middle of the Labour Party is going to have to take sides.

All I hope is this: that the members of the not-so-decent left, who have a history of entryism into mainstream bodies such as my beloved party stretching back to the 1980s and before, have not by then infected part of the “neutral middle” with their tolerance of intolerance. And, quite probably, made another part leave the party in disgust.

Bravo, Peter Tatchell, bravo, for your stand against those who pretend to be left but are really of the far right. And may we long disagree about some other, to me less important, stuff.

The three words Labour needs to hear from these elections are “change course now”, not “one more heave”

My seventh piece for the Independent's IndyVoices, on last week's local elections, is here. I'm afraid it makes rather uncomfortable reading.

Boston was all the West's fault, of course

Ah, and in the excitement of the local elections (well, I don't get out much), I had missed this gem from our old friend, Ken Livingstone. 

For face time on TV he is now reduced, like Galloway, to speaking on the none-too-fussy PressTV, mouthpiece of the repressive and undemocratic government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, talking here about the Boston bomber:



Naturally, it was all the West's fault (see Centre Lefts passim, ad nauseam).

No longer encumbered by political office, funnily enough, that was not at all like the message he gave after the London bombing of 7/7, as Guido Fawkes pointed out. This time his apologies for the cause of radical Islam remained unhindered.

It is fairly obvious that, had he made similar comments back in July 2005, he would have been, rightly, hounded from office by the families of the terrorists' victims.

Livingstone seems still not to have realised that what finally did for his credibility more than anything was precisely this: being seen to say one thing to one audience and another to another. In the age of the internet, you just can't get away with that any more.

It is clear that he is no longer a serious politician: what is frustrating for Labour is that he was considered one for so long.