Where I Stand

Readers of this page must think sometimes that I am very anti-Labour. I do seem to be knocking them all the time, after all.

Well, I actually live in fear of the inevitable Conservative Party victory at the next election. The only people who don't must either have a vested interest in seeing them elected, or be too young to remember what a horrible, mean-spirited, soulless, oppressive, immoral society they created the last time they were in power.

The Eighties, to steal a comment Sam Shepard made about the Fifties, "sucked dogs". Even its supposed high point--Live Aid--was really a nastily onanistic spectacle, despite the good it did. In the Eighties workers' rights were stripped away, unions were devastated, gays were persecuted, rainbow travellers were assaulted with impunity by the police, and money became the guiding principle of every endeavour. We are, actually, still living in the shadow of Thatcher's erosion of all the civilised values painstakingly built in the decades before she was elected and after Queen Victoria shuffled off the mortal coil. How else would a brand of beds for pre-teen girls called Lolita make it into the Woolworth's online catalogue with nobody at the company realising the name was synonymous with sexual precocity because of a novel by Nabokov? Nobody, it seems, at one of the biggest companies in the country had even heard of the book.

I want to see our society rebuilt, with the inner man being as much of a consideration as the suit he's wearing and the bulge of the money in his pocket. And the Conservative Party aren't the party to do that.

Are Labour? Well, at least in their traditions they might be, however hard Mr. Blair and his pale shadow Mr. Brown might have tried to distance themselves from those traditions; and however appalling the government's misadventures in Iraq and their immoral association with China might be. But I feel sometimes that those of us trying to steer Labour away from its still-obsessive desire to become a more fair-minded version of the Conservative Party might be shouting into a wind so heavy it carries our voices out to sea.