Labour: lurching towards where it always has been

Posted on Thursday 11 March, 2010
Filed Under New Labour

 

LURCH, according to my dictionary, is an archaic or dialect intransitive verb, which means ‘to prowl or steal about suspiciously’. Seemingly its sole use in twenty-first century English is to provide Tories with an all-purpose pejorative designation for any identifiable outbreak of milquetoast social democracy inside the Labour Party.

Labour, you see, never moves to the left in a cautious and considered manner after a period of due ideological reflection and deliberation. Nor does it ever hop, skip and jump in a general westerly direction, or veer to port in the wake of demonstrable justification for setting just such a course. Oh no. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, Labour is perpetually ‘lurching towards the left’, even when it is idling in neutral.

You can find a classic example of the genre on conservativehome.com, which warns its readership that Labour is lurching leftwards after … get this … selecting trade union officials for winnable seats. The piece is based on an article in The Times, headlined ‘Safe seats for union backers prompt fears that Labour will turn Left after election’. Seduce my aged footwear.

This is patently nonsense, for two obvious reasons. First, trade union officials have always made up a substantial chunk of Labour MPs, ever since the party was founded. It is no more unusual for union employees to make it to Westminster on the Labour ticket than it is for stockbrokers or army officers to be elected as Tories.

Second, there is no correlation whatsoever between working for a union and leftism. Indeed, former union officials have historically constituted the right inside the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Unite deputy general secretary Jack Dromey, PPC for Birmingham Erdington, strikes me as pretty likely to uphold the tradition. Youthful flirtation with radicalism notwithstanding, he is not the sort of guy who walks past a boat, only to find himself overcome with a sudden inexplicable desire to rock it.

John Cryer, political officer of the same union and picked to fight Leyton & Wanstead, is a former workmate of mine, at both Tribune and Lloyd’s List. He has been an MP before, representing Hornchurch from 1997 to 2005, when he was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group.

But while John is an all-round good egg, his politics are solidly mainstream Labour left. Unlike many Blairite cadres, for instance, he has never been in a far left organisation of any description.

Finally, there is Ian Lavery, president of the National Union of Mineworkers and selected for Wansbeck. Conservativehome happily brands him a ‘convicted football hooligan’ and he was indeed found guilty of a public order offence at a football match in 1985.

Lavery counters that he was victimised by the Old Bill for his role on picket lines in the miners’ strike, and was assaulted and spat on after his arrest. OK, I wasn’t there, but that version of events doesn’t sound in the least implausible to me.

Conservativehome’s gripe seems to be ‘mining seat picks NUM activist as Labour candidate shock horror’, which is about as surprising as an Old Etonian securing majority support from a Conservative Association in one of the leafier parts of the Home Counties. It’s hardly earth-shattering stuff, guys.

In ideological terms, Dromey, Cryer and Lavery are all entirely unexceptional examples of the type of people who have tended to become Labour MPs over the last century. If Labour is lurching anywhere at all, it is lurching towards exactly where it is already.

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