Now then, Mr. Squeaker.
First of all, thanks for the long and considered reply. I'm too tired to do it justice, but I didn't want it go unanswered - it more than deserves a better response than this, and apologies if this is a bit incoherent.
One thing that struck me about both of our posts is how similar our aspirations are, not just for Labour, but for what politics can and should do, if you strip away our differing amounts of hope in how we read the present. (For me, that's why I tend more towards Ernst's position, and keep banging on about how the opposition has to offer something more explicit in the way of vision and something to vote
for). Anyway, I've no intention of reigniting old squabbles in talking about Ed Miliband. I think it's more the case that our similarities have gotten lost along the way.
firstly, I don't think Ed Miliband is infallible (as both you and Notso have both suggested I do) but I do think he is by far the best option we have at the moment, and a worthy successor to John Smith; he makes mistakes, and will continue to make mistakes as we all do, I just don't feel concentrating on them when their are bigger battles to fight is productive.
So Miliband is the reason I rejoined the Labour party, last time. If I've been angrier at him than I would at others, it's because he seemed to be the biggest example of the changes the party needed to go through after Blair and the best hope for them; because I had more hope at stake, it's easier to feel more let down. (That might be why the LibDems are so much more resented than the Tories are for having done the exact same things as them). My problem not his, in part. I never required him to be infallible - for all I'm an idealist, I'm also a cynic with a long memory, and if I thought he was infallible, I'd run like stink out of terror. Enough Infallible Leaders. It's a very fallible world. They don't belong in it.
It's because he's not infallible that it's fair to recognise when he makes a mistake, otherwise the response to - and recognition of - his success looks no different to what's been said when he needed to be better. There's bigger battles to fight, as you say, and that's why it's a complete waste of effort to try and claim those that he's lost are in some way a win - or to fight the need to talk about the bad as well as the good. Giving someone a good mark every time is as bad as giving a bad one - both make every single thing they're supposed to grade meaningless. It devalues both good and bad. For all you see me exuding nothing but criticism, I've not done that, although it certainly seems the occasions when I do criticise him are remembered far longer than the others. That's probably my own fault for being better at writing damning snark than I am at giving praise, but all the same - you misremember my attitude to Miliband if all you remember is when I've criticised him. If I've accused you of saying he's infallible, there are times when you seemed, to me, to refuse to let any criticisms of him go unchallenged. But maybe I've missed your criticisms of him on the way, too.
So it is about choosing your battles, deciding priorities, and the first priority is not purging the Labour Party of Blairites, the first priority is getting Miliband through the door of Number 10; because if that doesn't happen then the Blairites will swarm back out from underneath their rocks and take back control of the Party, and then we are all truly screwed. But when he and Justine are over the doorstep, the rules change ..... I don't know how old you are, but do you remember when Labour took control of the GLC back in 1981? The election was fought and won by the very moderate Andrew McIntosh, who was then ousted the very next day by Ken Livingstone; from '81 until '86 Livingstone's GLC was the only effective opposition to Thatcher.
For the record, I much preferred when the party was a broader church (there's nothing like a good, old-fashioned left-wing schism to liven up a dreary October Thursday night meeting, is there?). I exactly
don't want a purge, because a one-sided party can't even march - it just hops round in circles. Any group with only one view in it ends up making itself at least ridiculous and, at most, dangerous. I also don't think marching backwards would get us anywhere: the golden socialist unity of the past is as much a myth as the scary stories the right tell the kiddies about the unions.
For all that, and for all I know it's not all Blarites now, there's more than one way to move to the right than calling it triangulation and then bombing somewhere sandy - and the socialist Trojan Horse that Blair
wasn't is far more common than what happened back in the days of the GLC. I just don't see it happening in these times. That's because direction the parliamentary party - like all the parties - has gone in is one where the centre has become the left, simply by standing still. I know it's different, but I am very much not alone in feeling alienated and abandoned as a result. And we can't be a successful party by stopping talking about that every five years there's an election - that only makes it worse by limiting what getting elected can allow us to do. So I'm still working out where I stand on the "if you want to change it, join it," point, because, well, you know. At the moment, I'm more in the "I can't change it so I won't join it," camp. You know the reasons - I respect your disagreements, but need more from the party to be convinced to actively support and engage. We'll see.
That is what I find so frustrating. To me exactly that radiates from so many of your posts and, after the repeated occasions where I was condemned as "an apologist", I've tended to steer clear. So let me make my position equally clear.
BTL over there - as opposed to over here - is so often a cauldron of unreason, it's natural that we both go on the attack. I bloody-mindedly try to apply the same standards of criticism to my preferred political stance as I do to others (I'm one of
those), but I don't deny I'm angrier when I feel let down by
my own side, for want of a better description. You are usually very quick to defend Labour and Ed from all sorts of idiotic attacks - often rightly enough, but, for my own part, I see you defending things that simply don't deserve defending and can't be safely dismissed. From there, if we clash, it's an easy step to seeing nothing more in the other than an apologist versus an enemy of the party. And neither of those simplifications are any truer than the other, for all our genuine and healthy differences of opinion about where the party is. I'm sometimes far too eager to call every prang a pile-up, but, to me, you sometimes seem as equivalently eager to try to win every battle, to airbrush every car crash. Maybe I need to let some mistakes go. But picking our battles goes both ways.
One of the things I've always disliked most in politics is the need for MPs who are looking at a trainwreck in their backyard to have to claim it's a success. They know it's a disaster. The interviewer knows it is. The people watching it know it is. And yet everyone crucifies them if they say it is, while at the same time, the same would-be crucifiers sit there complaining about the way these MPs are denying what we all know to be true. It's idiotic and it kills debate. We can't change that from here, but I think we do need to be careful about the how the way in which we talk to each other appears to those outside our own well-worn habits in discussing politics. We forget that we're already zealots, by everyday standards.
Worse than that old chestnut is that we now have Shapps-trolls calling everything Labour do a disaster, regardless of whether it is or not. We owe it to ourselves not to become too much like a mirror image of them - I don't mean doing the same to the Tories (they deserve it, ha ha), I mean being overly defensive about ourselves in turn. It's just as big a danger as too much negativity, and for all it's done for the best reasons, it's very offputting to those we need to include, because it's just as flawed a method. Our shared strengths depend on acknowledging our weaknesses - and being just as careful about obsessing about the negative as we are about dismissing a problem out of hand, or of dismissing something that others care deeply about as trivial, a battle not worth fighting; of glossing over the kind of thing that troubles those less positive than you or, on my better days, I. Of people who more in need of the acknowledgement of being listened to than being told it doesn't matter with what looks to them like a line. They're wrong to dismiss your passion for Labour as a line, but we've lost them no matter how right you might be.
Can we do better? I think we both have tonight. And it could be worse: it could be rusty. What baffles me about him is how he seems to be able to type at the same time he's already giving himself a round of applause for what he's typing. We're his "two daftest lefties," apparently. I'll drink to that.