Leaving the Labour party is uniquely traumatic, as Luke Bozier has just discovered – and I know all too well
Even now, exactly 17 years later, I can still remember the sense of anxiety gripping me on that fateful morning. The storm was about to break. I had taken a step that would irrevocably change my life. It was a damp, drizzly Thursday in late January 1995 and the latest edition of The Spectator had just come out, carrying an explosive article by me in which I savaged Labour’s record in local government and warned that the same addiction to waste, bureaucracy and politically correct ideology would be followed at a national level if Tony Blair gained power at the next election.
This was the first piece I had ever had published. What made it so incendiary was that, at the time, I was not only a Labour researcher at Westminster, but also a party activist in Islington. With this background, I knew that I would widely be seen as a traitor, while continuation in my job was obviously impossible. The day before the Spectator piece appeared, I had handed in my resignation to my boss, a decent Labour front-bencher called Doug Henderson, who showed understandable bewilderment and annoyance at my move.
Yet that was nothing compared with the tidal wave of fury which was about to be unleashed against me once news of the article spread. That bleak Thursday morning I boarded a bus in Islington bound for central London, with my coat collar turned up and a wide-brimmed hat turned down in a fearful attempt to avoid recognition by any enraged former colleagues. I went to the offices of The Spectator, where I met the editor Dominic Lawson, who generously took me for a celebratory lunch. But part of me was in no mood for celebration, given what lay in wait. The outrage was as ferocious as I expected. Angry phone calls were made, vicious letters sent, friendships torn apart. Some party members claimed I was having a nervous breakdown. Others maintained that, as an Ulsterman, I had always been a crypto-Tory or a closet unionist. One Islington councillor tried to traduce my character with references to my alleged fondness for drink, though the fact he did so through the vehicle of the Local Government Chronicle slightly lessened the impact of his calumny. Soon afterwards I moved from Islington to rural Essex, having become fed up with bumping into people who could not conceal their loathing for me.
I was reminded of this traumatic episode by the news that a senior supporter has just defected from Labour’s ranks. Luke Bozier, who had been an adviser to Tony Blair and a communications manager with the party, announced that he was leaving for the Tories because he had become appalled at the direction Labour had taken under Ed Miliband. The leader, said Bozier this week, ‘is now a national laughing stock’, presiding over ‘a vacuum of policy and a vacuum of vision’ that ‘offers nothing’ to the electorate. At the same time, Bozier denounced Labour’s ‘ludicrous attitudes to welfare reform and its dire mismanagement of the economy’, which mean that it was ‘not a serious political movement any more’.
Bozier’s attack has provoked the inevitable wave of anger from left-wingers, wallowing in the thrill of self-righteous indignation. As Dan Hodges, a Daily Telegraph blogger and one of saner voices in the party, wrote, ‘The Labour party loves a bit of betrayal. It cannot get enough of treachery.’ In recent days, Bozier had been condemned as a ‘baby Nazi’, a ‘cardboard iconoclast’, a ‘useful idiot’ and a ‘pariah’ who ‘deserves a boot up his jacksy’. One hardliner wrote, ‘Good riddance. If only Ed Miliband would have the guts to purge Labour of the rest of the Blairites.’ In the two days after the announcement of his step, he received more than 10,000 messages on his blog, many of them full of personal vitriol. ‘It’s almost like I’d murdered somebody,’ said Bozier. He further added that some of the abuse has even been physically menacing. ‘It is amazing how people feel that it’s OK to threaten violence because someone changes party.’
Amazing and also absurd. For the whole point of the political process is to persuade a significant number of citizens to change their voting allegiance. Inconsistency is regarded as a sin among Labour members, but a virtue among voters. Parties, especially on the left, demand a rigid, unbending loyalty from their activists, yet loudly celebrate changes of mind among the public. This double-think becomes even more misguided when the lessons of history are considered. After all, many of our finest politicians, including William Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain, changed party. Winston Churchill famously did so three times.
Unlike Luke Bozier, I never shifted to another party; I merely left Labour. But, as he is discovering, it is a move that requires courage in our partisan political climate. My own disillusion with Labour had been growing for years, partly because of my experience as a Labour councillor in Islington from 1990, when I saw all around me grotesque mismanagement, contempt for public money, a dogmatic obsession with race and sexuality, and a craven instinct to appease bullying trade unions. Although much of my social life and all my career ambitions were wrapped up in the party, I began to be repelled by Labour culture. But I am not a particularly brave person and it was only thanks to the stalwart support of my fiancée, now my wife, that I was able to handle the combustible consequences of my very public defection via this magazine.
What Bozier and I went through demonstrates just how tribal Labour really is. I don’t think if either of us had left the Tory party under similar circumstances we would have endured anything like this level of personal vilification. Indeed, a host of Conservative MPs, such as Shaun Woodward, Alan Howarth and Peter Temple-Morris, switched to Labour in recent years without incurring vicious attacks. But for Labour, with its emphasis on solidarity and its roots in the class struggle, a departure from the cause is the ultimate heresy. A special place is reserved in Labour’s hall of infamy for those who are said to have betrayed the cause, such as Ramsay MacDonald in the 1930s or the SDP’s founders in the early 1980s.
Yet this aggressive tribalism is profoundly unhealthy for our political culture. It stifles open debate, pluralism and new ideas. In a system where loyalty to the party counts more than moral integrity, abuse of office can be rife, as shown by Labour’s scandalous promotion of uncontrolled immigration and the introduction of mass postal voting as a cynical means of boosting narrow party advantage in the inner cities, regardless of the national interest.