A matter of hours after Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour Party, he was a class traitor. The TUC general council’s Bob Crow decided Ed might not attend next week’s rally against public spending cuts (to which, incidentally, he hadn’t been invited). No matter. Bob declared: “He’s already abandoning working people.”
In normal circumstances, I’d say, “Give him a chance, Robert old chap.” But, as we are creatures of the left, it’s a perfectly respectable reaction. Even when we get a break, such as Ed instead of David, we poke around to discover some reason to bewail our fate. We much prefer a traitor and a failure to a hero or a triumph. We’re rather anti-success.
We salivate with joy at the memories of the Spanish Civil War, the miners’ strike and the Tolpuddle martyrs, despite the fact that the aggregate score here is 3-0 to Them. It’s very bizarre.
The left is the only club I’ve joined that likes a good failure. The rest of my life is the complete reverse. Take footy, for example. Not long ago we – by which I mean, of course, Everton – roundly hammered our local rivals by a convincing margin. A goal, in fact. Did we emerge from Goodison Park muttering that one goal wasn’t enough? Did we grumble that at times our style had been pedestrian? Did we complain that next week we might not play as well?
We did not. We sang and hugged each other, visualised a glorious future, planned language classes for our forthcoming European adventures and voiced opinions of outrageous optimism. We had won! Life was marvellous!
Visit any sports club and you will be led to the trophy room. Within the polished cupboard you will be shown gleaming silver goblets, symbols and reminders of great victories, singular successes. Pictures of players from winning teams hang proudly on the walls. It’s all about The Day We Won.
By contrast, the trophy cupboard of the left is as bare as that of the legendary Ms Hubbard. Neglected and disparaged, it stands three foot in dust. Instead of proud smiling boys wielding cups, we gloat over images of Comrade Guevara, shot dead in Bolivia after a campaign of madness, where he ignored every maxim he had insisted was necessary in his handbook on guerrilla warfare. Che sums up the aspirations of the left: to be murdered on CIA instructions whist engaged on an impossible mission, ignored and misunderstood by an ungrateful populace. Perfect! That’s as good as it gets.
So what was all this nonsense about “optimism” that Ed Not-the-Red called for? Optimism is anathema to the left. We don’t do optimism.
The right takes a very different attitude towards success. The streets of our cities are littered with vast memorials to their triumphs. Smuts, Gordon, Kitchener and their imperialist ilk provide pigeon resting places on every corner. Our great squares and even the odd railway station celebrate their victories.
By contrast, we revel in great trouncings we have received. We frisk coal miners to unearth tales of misery endured during the utter destruction of their industry. We have a knees-up to commemorate the expulsion from this country of our founding fathers. We gather festively to recall our corpses of Catalonia.
Have we honestly never managed any successes? Have we achieved nothing worthy of celebration, bar martyrdom?
It amazes me how we manage to convince anyone to join us with our rallying cry of “Failure and deception, now or later!” I’ve stood with union recruiters at factory gates at first light in the pouring rain, miserable as sin as I’ve passed rapidly disintegrating soggy flyers to alarmed passers-by. “Sign up now and you can be like me.” How attractive is that?
Even our songs are monuments to misery: framed dead Joe Hill; broken-backed Shurat weavers and abused Sandgate girls. It gives the impression that our idea of fun is a wrist-slitting jamboree.
Last Saturday, I spied Frank Dobson canvassing along Kentish Town High Street with a disturbingly large smile on his face. “Hello Frank”, I said carefully. “Are you feeling optimistic?” “Of course!” he replied.
I called him a right-wing revisionist and went on my way. He clearly lacks the proper attitude of the left.
I comfort myself with the closest the left comes to contentment, the maxim that there’s always someone worse off than yourself. At least I’m not recruiting for a Christian sect. That really must be difficult. They’re trying to sell a belief system where their top man ends up nailed – yes, nailed – to a cross halving joint supping vinegar from a sponge. By comparison, our Che passed on in relative comfort.
A few years back, the Awkward Squad of left-wing union leaders such as Bob Crow, Mark Serwotka and Tony Woodley, considered revising their image by calling their group FUWL – Fed Up With Losing. This was as optimistic as they could manage – and they were still fed up.
It’s marvellous how we espouse hopeful politics brimful of decency, morality and idealism – and then dress it up in sackcloth misery and gloom before we try to sell it. I was going to try setting up the Ed’s Optimism and Chuckling Left faction – but gave it up in depression. I know that as soon as I recruit another member there’ll be a split.
