The Guardian, book review, 22 January, 2005 Billy Bragg weighs up John Harris's look at the alternatives to voting Labour, So Now Who Do We Vote For? So Now Who Do We Vote For?
by John Harris
160pp, Faber, £7.99
Those whose job it is to second guess the forces of nature are a hard-pressed bunch these days. Concerns about global warming have given climatologists a higher profile, yet the records on which they base their conclusions are being broken with alarming regularity. Psephologists, too, find themselves struggling to come to terms with the changes that the political climate has undergone in the past 25 years. The great ideologies that once bestrode the landscape have seen their habitat disappear. Utopian ideas that inspired societies around the globe now exist only in isolated pockets. A new politics has evolved in which parties offer to manage the world rather than to change it.
In the follow-up to his highly entertaining look at Blair 'n' Britpop, The Last Party, John Harris addresses this situation, setting out to answer the question that nags those of us who came into politics in opposition to Mrs Thatcher. Having worked hard for a Labour government as an alternative to Thatcherism, how do we feel about what has happened in the past seven years?
Harris has been a Labour supporter since his days as a 15-year-old party activist in Wilmslow in the mid-80s. "There was never any question of coolly scanning the options, weighing up the parties' respective standpoints and then mathematically making my decision. I voted Labour. That was who I was." Though his identification with the party has lapsed, it is to his credit that he is unwilling just to walk away.
Instead, he seeks out ministers and ex-ministers, backbench rebels and peers, expressing his doubts about the direction in which the party is moving. They are almost unanimous in telling him that, whatever his misgivings, he should vote Labour. You genuinely feel for him as he struggles with the implications of this advice. "Was the only permissible thing to do to obediently vote Labour and then kick up a stink about a great deal of what they did? Elect a Blair government and then carry on marching against it?" Ultimately, the changes in the political climate force him to think the unthinkable. He leaves his traditional stamping ground in search of an alternative repository for his progressive vote, but, before long, it becomes clear that the problem is not confined to New Labour.
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