Why I'm tearing up my Labour party card

The treatment of Walter Wolfgang, after Iraq, proved too much for one long-time supporter Colin MacCabeSunday October 2, 2005The Observer
Dear Tony,
I'm writing to you as the leader of the party from which I am now resigning. I joined the Labour party in 1964 but this week is the first time I have felt ashamed of my membership. You will say it was an accident that two men were viciously bundled from the conference hall on Wednesday. But then you lie as you breathe. It is impossible that you do not know that when you took power as Labour leader you were determined to stamp out all public dissent and discussion within the party. It is impossible, in a more recent time frame, that you did not know and approve of the decision that there would be no debate on Iraq.
Even as I write this phrase, its absurdity, its grotesqueness hits me again. No debate on Iraq, no debate on the most important foreign policy issue that has confronted Britain since World War Two. No debate on Iraq, which has brought such a fear of violence to London. No debate on Iraq - on the national disaster with which the names of Guantanamo and Britain will be linked in infamy for our generation and probably beyond.
It is unthinkable that the Labour party could not debate the Iraqi war. But, of course, it is equally unthinkable that it could. For the situation there is so dire, the peril in which you have placed the nation is so acute that if even the smallest murmurs of evidence and argument were to be heard they would soon become a gale that would sweep you from office. It was telling that you did not even dare to speak to the old geezer they roughed up. But you had only to take one look at Walter Wolfgang and you could see Old Labour incarnate. An Old Labour that believed in swaying democratic opinion by fact and reason. An Old Labour that believed in debate. Given 60 seconds in front of the television cameras with Wolfgang and you'd have been mincemeat. You presided over a government which suborned its security services to provide false headlines for you to mislead the Commons into voting for the war. Worse, you ignored every lesson of our last imperial disaster in Mesopotamia - a campaign which became a byword for our soldiers being slaughtered to satisfy the vanity of politicians.
Political parties are institutions which allow debate to be turned into action; they allow people from different class backgrounds, from different regions, from different races to debate policy knowing that the conclusion of the debate will be the determination of a particular course of action. There are no debates now because there is no question about what action will be taken. The Chancellor's peculiarly Presbyterian form of neo-liberalism is absolutely not open for debate. If it were, then the scandal of PFI, which represents a continuous tax on the poor by the rich, would be common knowledge. Worse in the short term, this lack of debate has allowed no political dissent from the disastrous economic policy of running deficits to fund unproductive investment.
Old Labour used to run deficits to employ low-paid workers in the unproductive old public sector; New Labour runs deficits to employ highly-paid consultants in the even more unproductive new public sector. In the only industry that I know at first hand, the scale of government handouts is jawdropping. New Labour has created a new film body, the Film Council, whose overheads now exceed the production budgets of the very efficient bodies that it replaced. There is enormously wasteful duplication of government resources. Friends from every sector report the same story.
It is true that your news management is breathtakingly effective but I do not think this is cause for congratulation. You have produced systems of Treasury funding in which there's always a government nark in the room and you have backed it up with a relentless use of patronage which would make an 18th-century Whig blush. No one dares to complain about the Film Council, for example, because they know it will prejudice their next funding application.
Last week a woman broke down in tears at one of the fringe meetings when she recounted how she couldn't talk about Iraq in her constituency. Looking at Wolfgang being manhandled from the hall, I was reminded of that chilling footage when Saddam staged his coup in the Baath party at a meeting of the central committee and pointed out the individuals who were to be frogmarched from the room. This is Britain, so what awaited Walter Wolfgang outside the conference doors was not a bullet in the head. The lady's tears were caused by her fear of expulsion, not of imprisonment. If the method is soft, however, the totalitarian desire to crush debate is hard. If Nazi Germany was fascism by radio, New Labour is the corporate state by television. The determination to control the party's image on television is incompatible with a democratic party and, indeed, with democracy.
I have not been an activist for decades. I live in Islington and watching Margaret Hodge and the Loony Left morph effortlessly into New Labour was not a pretty sight. Networking with power-mad social climbers was not my idea of the good life. I have remained a member of the Labour party, however, because it still seemed to me to be a way of connecting at the national level with people who shared my beliefs in the possibility of a fairer and more equal society. Last week has made clear what I've known but not wanted to admit for at least six years: that you have made it impossible for me to enjoy any such connection.
For well over a century the Labour party has provided a crucial forum where the marginal and the powerless could speak. You have ensured that this is no longer the case. The white working class of this country has lost its most important institutional voice as it undergoes the most brutal economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, it is clear that you yourself have no belief in any goal of real equality - the New Labour aim, Brown as well as Blair, is just to manage the underclass. Of course, there can be no debate.
When I joined the Labour party I was a schoolboy and I remember learning Kipling's poem 'Mesopotamia' by heart. It is a savage attack on the politicians who had sent young men to die pointlessly in what is now Iraq. In a Labour party defined by its opposition to Suez and opposed to all imperial adventure, it seemed a poem about a far distant past. But when I remember it now under a Labour government in the 21st century, it seems directly contemporary. You have told the world, to this country's enduring risk and shame, that Britain will back any American government, no matter how dangerous, in pursuing reckless schemes of military adventure. In so doing, you despise all the Labour party's best traditions. Kipling puts it better than I can:
(Your) lives cannot repay us - (your deaths) could not undo -The shame that (you) have laid upon our race.But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
Yours truly
Colin MacCabe
· A longer version of this letter will be published in Critical Quarterly vol.48. no.1