More on electoral strategy
A number of correspondents point out that if people want a Labour Government returned, as I do, then they'll have to vote for it, which will entail voting for candidates of very different views from Tony Blair's.
Couldn't agree more. That is the right thing to do, and I hope that will be the outcome. There has never been an election - not even 1997 - in which I have been so desirous of a Labour victory or so contemptuous of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (and their predecessors). Recalling that Labour received (and merited) a derisive brush-off from the White House before the 1987 election, I am thankful that Labour is now the only truly Atlanticist party. Wishing for a Blair third term, I would vote in almost every case for an anti-war Labour MP if that were the required route to it. Some of them are good MPs on other grounds. The best constituency MP I have had, Kate Hoey in Vauxhall, is anti-war; the worst, Frank Dobson in Holborn & St Pancras, once roused himself to pen a statement of support for the liberation of Afghanistan that wasn't bad.
Almost every case, but not quite every case. I mentioned two in the previous post, and it's a measure of the importance of this election that I can so far think of no others (though there are individual Conservatives, and even the odd Liberal Democrat - Chris Huhne, and the existing Treasury team - whose return I would like to see). My own horror at Labour's defence policies in the 1983 and 1987 elections was mitigated by the certainty of Labour defeat, so I didn't worry too much about particular Labour candidates in those elections, other than those who were either infiltrators from the Militant tendency (Pat Wall, Dave Nellist, Terry Fields), pro-Soviet (Ron Brown, James Lamond, Renee Short), or, in one case, pro-Ceausescu (Stan Newens) - all of whom I wished to see defeated. I recall being pleased at the defeat of Tony Benn in 1983, though in truth that was the wrong response. Benn's own contribution to Labour's electoral humiliation was unrivalled, and there was justice in his suffering in the denouement; but it would still have been better if he had stood in the subsequent leadership election and been defeated. I can also genuinely claim to have urged Labour friends living in the Hillhead constituency of Glasgow to vote in 1987 for the sitting SDP MP, Roy Jenkins, in order to defeat his Labour challenger - George Galloway. (Galloway had already made his mark on Scottish politics by flying the PLO flag from Dundee Town Hall.)
In this election, where a Labour MP is in effect running an independent anti-Blair campaign, as in the case of Glenda Jackson, then - notwithstanding the tolerance of one of her constituents, the Times columnist David Aaronovitch, on the matter - I hope for her defeat. My own constituency is a special case where a Labour candidate selected only a matter of weeks ago (the sitting Labour MP, for whom I would have voted, decided not to seek re-election) sought the nomination knowing that she was opposed to the foreign policies of the Labour Government, when those policies were certain to be a central election issue and when her own position is about as extreme a statement of reactionary politics as you can get. I am not able to quote her email to me on this subject, as - though I sought it for my Times column - I don't have her permission; but it's both a political stance and a mode of political behaviour that I am unwilling to regard as merely an idiosyncrasy.
Meanwhile a local Labour activist has sent me an article that Nicholas Boles, the interventionist Conservative candidate, wrote for The Times a couple of years ago in which he argued that, "A war to defend open access to the Middle East’s oil reserves would be a just war – and a war fought primarily to defend the world’s poor." Though Boles uses the term 'Left' too much in a derogatory sense (the Left is, after all, where I stand and belong), this argument seems to me entirely correct, and I'm glad to have it.
