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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Zoe Williams

I will never leave Labour – but my new membership card makes me uneasy

Zoe Williams Blair
Labour party election campaign in 2019
‘Ornery old socialists and peaceniks who are propelled to disagree constantly with their own party’ … Photograph: Rob Pinney/LNP/REX/Shutterstock

I was on the train to the Labour conference in Liverpool, and an email arrived. Just to be clear: there is no way I’m voting anything other than Labour, I am definitely a member of this party, there is nothing on God’s green earth that would make me leave. Nothing.

The guy behind me was working methodically through his contacts, calling everyone to tell them he had a meeting with Peter Mandelson; a woman was listening to BBC Sounds without headphones; a man across the aisle was eating pickled onion Monster Munch wrong; and the two guys opposite were figuring out whether they were allowed to expense a taxi between two points whose distance I happened to know was about 200 metres. Is there anything louder than a journalist’s indoor voice? It’s like we all went on an outdoor broadcasting course, learned how to be heard above a hurricane, and then got stuck like that.

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