There are moments in politics that simply and neatly crystallise everything. Today it was the absurdity of Labour expelling Alastair Campbell for voting Lib Dem last week. The only analogy my mind can conjure up is the prison guards on the Berlin Wall shooting the first people flocking through the gaps on 9 November 1989 before realising the futility of it, giving up, taking off their uniforms and merging into the crowd – forever trying to hide their Stasi past.
Last week tens of thousands of card-carrying Labour members voted Green or Lib Dem in the EU elections. Many of them voted tactically to stop the rise of Tommy Robinson. Should they be expelled too? They did so because for them their party’s equivocation over a second referendum was too much and had gone on too long. For them it was Brexit or Remain. Personally, I’m more sympathetic to a politics that tries to unify the country, but that’s another debate. What is clear is that this attempt to instil fear and an iron discipline to back the Party or else, is hopelessly misplaced in the 21st century.
Why? Because this is not the age of the factory – where everyone knew their place and took their orders. An age of paternalism and no questions asked deference. Rather it is the age of Facebook and a sentiment in which you join and leave different groups all the time, where loyalty is fleeting as the aggregating and accelerating effects of social media take their toll and people swarm from this to that group at a whim. You can like it or not, but this is how things now are.
