When I first found Harry’s Place, in the summer of 2004, I was a Stopper...
I was not a Stopper in the "We are all Hezbollah" sense, but I was a Stopper in that I had a very strong sense of the wrongness of the Iraq War. I had watched the first bombardments of Baghdad in the early hours of that morning in March 2003 and had been terribly upset...
When I first found Harry’s Place in 2004, the Labour Party was the dominant force in British politics, with a majority of 167 seats. The party had, three years previously, won that majority. And that was a mere 12 seats short of the 179 seat majority the party had won in 1997. The Conservative Party was dead. Vanquished. Destroyed as a substantial political force...
And, as a result of reading Harry’s Place, I came to an understanding that there were enemies to the left as well as the right. And an understanding that the left could be wrong too. A revelation, to a certain extent, though I would not wish to overstate it. I had always considered Trots weird and wrong. But I increasingly came to an understanding that the Far Left and the Hard Left and even parts of the Soft Left were a threat to the values that I wanted to promote.
Because so many of them opposed the democratic self-determination of the Iraqi and Afghan people, the former of whom I had seen with their purple fingers. The flowering of trades unions. The sheer belief that a better world existed outwith the Stalinist miasma. And it became sickening for me to think of the very fact that I had given my personhood to a vile and reactionary counter-revolutionary demonstration in central London, which I would forever be tarred with. The utter scum who would forever call my name in favour of the defence of the latest popular anti-western dictatorship. Well, not in my name, to coin a phrase.
And then I moved back to London. And later that year I went to campaign for Oona King against that most vile and demagogic opponent of hers. Because her seat was the nearest marginal to where I lived in central London. And I did that day after day for weeks on end. Because I hated him. And because she was a good and proper example of what our party should be for.
And so it was very easy to attack those on the left for the idiocies they promoted. Because they were utterly wrong. Their disgusting communalism. Their horrific defence of the most reactionary elements of Islamist thought. Their pathetic peacnick hippy shit. Their attacks upon our demonstrably relevant nuclear deterrent. Their opposition - with no hyperbole - to our very way of life, and to the way of life we wanted others to be able to enjoy...
If you search back through the archives in this site, you will see the desperate trials and tribulations we faced against those who had no respect for the democratic norms of our society. And you will see why a police officer was placed on every polling station, and why the roads were blocked off around the Labour Bethnal Green and Bow election night "party" (it hardly was) by police vans because, I was told by officers, the police feared reprisal violence from Respect. And, in the final analysis, look up "Les Dobrovolski" on Google. It was a horrific and very dark imitation of what one would normally expect from a campaign in this country...
The reason I became a "Decent" in the first place is because of the values that made me Labour to start with. I didn’t become a Eustonite, or a liberal-internationalist, or whatever we’re meant to be called these days, in a vacuum.
Of course, Ben remains a Labour supporter, albeit a fairly disappointed one. He has a highly optimistic view of the successes of the Labour governments which we would not share. However, the underlying values are those of respect for the democratic norms of our society, and opposition to those forces which seek to destroy them. Furthermore, the standpoint of the "Eustonites" (i.e. supporters of the "Euston Manifesto") has little patience with those on the left who equivocate on these issues. There are, equally, those in the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, and many in no party at all, who share the same values. The state of the nation and the world is such that a new progressive movement is urgently needed which can transcend the traditional party lines of the past, and defend the values of freedom and democracy which we all share.
The New Party News