“To think we knew him when he was only a duplicitous, young careerist schemer” was my comment to a friend on learning that someone who’d been active in the early days of the Corbyn movement locally is now a Labour MP in what used to be a safe Tory seat. He won due to Reform taking about 10 000 of the most racist Tory votes. It wasn’t exactly a resounding personal or political endorsement.  

In his way he’s quite archetypal of much of this intake of Labour MPs and they give cause to reflect on my three significant points of contact with the British Labour Party. 

Now, some of the stereotypes of the British far left are pretty accurate. The personal hygiene isn’t always what you might hope for, dressing smartly is often seen as an indicator of Menshevism, polite conversation is counter-revolutionary, and it’s assumed you want to talk about what the Australian Trotskyists got wrong in 1975 in a pub at 10pm. That said, most of the time you can assume the person you are disagreeing with isn’t out to get you sacked or destroy you as an individual. Labour do things differently 

My first dalliance with Labour ended when I told a selection panel a long time ago that I didn’t think councillors should act against the interests of the people who elected them. I knew that was a controversial opinion. The interview was conducted in a room in a Labour Party social club which had a portrait of Elizabeth Windsor behind the bar. It’s fair to say that I’ve never known that sense of tribal loyalty that’s reported to exist.  

The second contact was back when this blog had a modestly significant readership on the left. I wrote something about a meeting in the local community centre which had an unflattering reference to a Labour councillor who attended it. He decided that the best way to deal with this was to try to get me sacked. I deleted the offending post and dodged that bullet. With hindsight, I should have been a lot more vicious because he came for me again. What I assumed had been a tetchy individual turned out be a political method. 

Time passed and then some students who were pissed off at a massive increase in their fees slightly harassed the couple who are now the queen and king of England. My jokey article about the least threatening things any angry commoners had ever done to a couple of parasites gave the wee fucker a pretext to try to get me sacked on the basis of lèse-majesté. The condition was that the blog came down if I wanted to keep my job. The fact that variants of my jokes were on Have I Got News For You? that Friday night and Merton and Hislop got £20 000 for making them was salt in the wound.  

Starmer and Ebert

This brings us back to Corbyn. I re-joined Labour just before he became Labour leader after a few pints on the anniversary of the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. That bit was pure chance. What I discovered fairly quickly was that all sorts of political traditions endure. The heirs of Friedrich Ebert (a 1920s German Starmer admired by Luke Akehurst) now run the Labour Party and I was prone to saying to people in the pub after meetings “they’d happily shoot us if they thought it was necessary”, a view I think may have been taken as Belfast hyperbole, but I meant it.

They actively tried to get Apsana Begum thrown into prison; they explicitly tried to destroy Jeremy Corbyn on a personal level as a way of defeating his Attlee style project; they gifted a seat to Iain Duncan Smith rather than see Faiza Shaheen get elected. They may not have much in the way of positive ideas, but they are really good at fighting dirty. The Corbyn left may have had some dodgy individuals but my experience was that the ones who stuck with it didn’t use character assassination as a way of resolving political differences and they certainly weren’t interested in politics as a career move.  

These are only a few examples which are well enough known. In the time I was in Labour I could never properly find out where the real power lay. It has the mirage of democratic structures, but MPs and the vast majority of councillors can plough the furrow indicated by the party apparatus without taking members’ views into account. I saw that every time they explained away closing nurseries.  

If you have been looking at the numbers, you will see that this Labour majority is fragile. Many people are going to learn the hard way that successfully gaining control of a party machine by lies and stitch ups is not the same as winning a political argument.