Confessions of a demoralised Labour Party member

FEBRUARY 15, 2025

By David Osland

If people freely gave up days of their time for weeks on end to leaflet and knock on doors, just to ensure my return to well-remunerated public office, I’d do my best to feign gratitude. Heck, I might even summon up the grace to say thank you.

Not so the Labour MPs and councillors who constitute the Trigger Me Timbers WhatsApp group, the rancid content of which made it into the newspapers this week.

The messages went heavy on the kind of juvenile racist, sexist and homophobic banter that I haven’t come across since I was a pupil at a 1970s grammar school. Inevitably, the targets of the uncomradely invective were colleagues, activists and constituents.

Angela Rayner was hailed as a blow job queen, because that’s all that working-class women are good for, right? Partially-sighted Battersea MP Marsha de Cordova was mocked for her disability.

We learn that Diane Abbott’s groundbreaking appearance as the first black politician to respond for the Opposition at prime minister’s questions might better have been handled by a rightwing Tory MP given to blacking up.

A gay councillor was accused of organising Town Hall orgies with “decrepit trade unionists”, because everybody knows what a promiscuous bunch that lot are. And anyone with a Jewish surname surely has to be working for Mossad.

Way to go, guys. Bernard Manning couldn’t have put it better. Women, the disabled, people of colour, LGBT people and Jews will readily get the funny ha-ha tropes. They’re a laugh a minute up there in Tameside.

The Two Minutes Hate is then refocused on activists, dismissed as “marxists loonies” (sic) and “Trots”, as if “we hate our members” were somehow optimal recruitment advertising for a political party.

And why stop there? The word up to a constituent with concerns about bin collections is “fuck you” and the hope that she gets run over by a refuse truck. A party that harbours a death wish to the electorate might as well harbour a death wish towards itself.

It would be reassuring to see this as a one-off that has been dealt with by a whiff of grapeshot in the shape of subsequent disciplinary sanctions. I only wish I could believe that.

As I have sometimes heard with my own ears, Neanderthal attitudes such as these are echoed among senior local and national Labour figures up and down the country. Theirs is a culture of organised contempt for everyone outside their circle.

The Trigger Me Timbers saga should at the very least result in a round of trigger ballots. Not that it will. It’s not as if Andrew Gwynne and Oliver Ryan voted against the two-child benefit cap, or anything really bad like that.

I am – still, just about – a member of the Labour Party, admittedly of the kind that Gwynne and Ryan detest. If I were to leave, their co-thinkers would be happy at my departure, in so far as it would be noticed it at all.

In an era when Cayman Islands-registered hedge funds with fossil fuel interests are donating millions of pounds to Labour coffers, “Marxists loonies” and Trots like me aren’t even required as a dependable subscription base.

But I’m not alone in my disillusionment, with 40,000 members quitting since the general election. Euston Station will be looking on in envy as Labour manages to achieve a departure every ten minutes.

Then we get to the polls, some of which now put Labour behind Reform UK. Its actions are disappointing not just we perpetually discontented minority nut jobs who actually join, but many voters who enthusiastically put it in office in the expectation of a qualitative break with 14 years of Tory administrations.

A government should have a cohering thread, and this one patently doesn’t. Keir Starmer is not a stupid man, but his ostensibly commonsensical lack of interest in political ideas is a drawback for a prime minister, not a virtue.

Tory chancellor Norman Lamont famously described the Major government as in office but not in power. Starmer, according to his own staffers, is not even driving the train.

They joke that his position is akin to sitting in the front seat of the Docklands Light Railway. The analogy is to a Thatcherite infrastructure project primarily designed to ferry bankers between the City and Canary Wharf, ignoring the desolate poverty on the intervening council estates.

Instead of a vision, we have an obsession with “hero voters”, as if winning over Reform UK supporters were the exclusive key to winning in 2029. To this end, videos of shackled deportees are promulgated for the light entertainment of malignant racists.

The two-child benefit cap has been resolutely maintained, winter fuel payments have been axed, there are repeated rhetorical sallies on sickness and disability benefit claimants. All in the name of hard choices.

A third runway is to be built at Heathrow. Employment rights legislation looks likely to be watered down, even as Reeves backtracks on the much-trumpeted clampdown on non-doms.

As with previous Labour governments, subservience to US foreign policy remains a besetting vice. The world has been shocked by untrammelled slaughter in Gaza. But Britain’s Labour government palpably hasn’t been.

Underlying all of this is Peter Mandelson’s fatuous assertion that Labour voters have “nowhere else to go”. The dictum was debatable when first advanced; it certainly isn’t true now.

The problem with pushing a platform morally abhorrent to millions of Labour’s natural supporters is that they now have an extensive range of alternatives.

Independent candidates have a proven capacity to win seats. Meanwhile, the Green Party is presenting to the left of Labour, at least in urban areas, and even the Lib Dems are opportunistically appealing to the more radical elements in their tradition.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the launch of the Labour Representation Committee. The risk right now is that the endeavour of a century and a quarter could find itself bankrupt in two ways, gradually then suddenly.

Next time round, a majority of 174 – give or take those without the whip at any given point – might not prove as commanding as it now looks.

Naturally, I don’t suppose anybody in the Labour leadership is going to read this article. But if by any chance they do, maybe they could discuss the salient points in their WhatsApp group.

David Osland is (still) a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time leftwing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer. Source: UK Parliament. Author: © UK Parliament / Maria Unger,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.