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.
All these situations required my urgent intervention, yet I was somehow managing to remain unperturbed. Then I got this email. “Dear Zoe,” it began. “I wanted to reach out and keep you in the loop.” What is this drivel? Did someone put a prompt into ChatGPT saying: “I want to start an email with multiple banal phrases meaning ‘I am sending you an email’. Don’t ask why – I just do.” It was from the general secretary of the Labour party, which I am never leaving, informing me of changes to my membership card. I now have to carry something with a union flag on it that says “putting country first” on the flip side.
Frankly, in the era that I joined this party, the late 80s, this would have marked you out pretty unambiguously as a member of the BNP. Am I being a grandma? Do all the other Labour members look at red, white and blue, and hear the language of formless but weirdly pugnacious patriotism and get a lovely, warm, modern vibe? Well, no: we’re all the exact same age. Good luck trying to modernise us, dude, as I for one am never leaving.
The new card will also proudly feature clause IV of the party’s constitution: “Through the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we achieve alone.” There’s some graffiti on my way to my nearest Yodel pickup, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”, that’s cleaner and less turgid, but this isn’t a hill I’d die on.
Except I know that this is a provocation. They’re not trying to smoke out a membership hardcore of individualists who think they can achieve more alone. Nobody who thought that would join any party at all, not even the Conservatives: they’d spend their leisure time at the gym or, I don’t know, archery practice. This is merely to draw our attention to that time, you remember that time, when some guy (What was he called again? Blair?) removed the socialist bit of the constitution and replaced it with a platitude. Blair won and everybody else lost, and didn’t that make you feel great, and work out brilliantly? Wouldn’t you love to walk around carrying its slogan in your pocket?
In 2005, there was a delegate in the hall at Labour conference called Walter Wolfgang. It was the first time I’d been, and I was struggling to wrap my head around its conventions, the disconnect between boring, managerial speeches and the obedient exaltation of the audience. Everyone seemed to just play their part, accepting that none of the words were really communicative in the regular sense. They were a call-and-response performance to the outside world, to show a party united, or purposeful, or strong, or … whatever. I was the wrong person to ask.
Everyone, that is, except Walter Wolfgang, who expressed his discontent with the war in Iraq by shouting “Nonsense!” during Jack Straw’s speech, and got manhandled out of the hall. The optics were terrible – he was 82! – and John Reid, the defence secretary, ended up apologising to him. Would I ever heckle anyone, at this conference of a party I’ll never leave? Absolutely no way.
Wolfgang died in 2019, but continues to embody as well as anybody else I can think of the spirit of the membership – ornery old socialists and peaceniks who would probably put bluetits and nuclear disarmament ahead of their country, and are propelled by some restless life force to disagree constantly with their own party. And this, fair play, is a common endeavour that definitely could not be achieved alone.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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