TMP Online

TMP asked Ade Sawyerr what it would take to get him to join the Labour Party.  Here he explains what Gordon Brown will need to do to seduce him.

What would it take for me to join the Labour Party in the UK? Surprisingly, it would take a lot of persuasion from Gordon Brown the current leader; this is because I have not seen much difference between the policies of the Labour Party and those of the Conservative Party.

I came into Britain near the start of the Thatcher years, in between when I was accepted into business school and when I arrived here from Ghana, there had already been changes – the fees for overseas students were doubled as soon as she came into power – so I was quite ready for the rough ride of monetarism without a care for whether one was a member of the Commonwealth or from any other country without ties with the mother country.

I watched the Labour Party lose an election in 1983 when there were 3 million people unemployed in the country; their major concerns then were more about unilateral nuclear disarmament and whether black politicians in the Labour Party could or could not form their own sections. At that point I realised that the Labour Party was still playing the big paternalistic imperialist, something it still tries to do. So though I continued to vote for it, I did not join the Labour Party.

After Kinnock (right) took over he transformed the party and though he lost the election of 1987, he started making the party electorally viable. But it took the elections of 1992, after Margaret Thatcher had been thrown out by her own party in 1990, for the Labour Party to make a surge. John Major had supervised a Conservative Party that was tearing itself apart with concerns about Europe and was reeling under allegations of sleaze. But in the 1992 elections, Labour was too triumphantlist and the tax calculations of John Smith just did not add up.

So after the great work that Kinnock had done in modernising the party, kicking out the Militant Tendency and purging some of the loony left ideologies, he handed over smoothly to John Smith who made the party even more respectable.

After John Smith passed on we all expected that the senior partner in the Brown-Blair tag team (below) of high performers in parliament would have followed Smith. But Brown passed up that chance; some believe that he was outwitted by meddlesome Mandelson to allow Blair ascend to higher office as leader of the Labour Party.

Soon we had Emily’s list, all women shortlists, to increase the number of women in parliament but no such list for black candidates, I did not blink – maybe the signs were there but I could not discern them. Blair led the party to a spectacular election victory in 1997 – there was so much excitement; the party of the masses had come into power and the politics for the working class back in fashion.

I did not worry too much that they were taxing the super rich corporations to pay for the National Health Service or that they had given the Bank of England its independence. I was actually impressed that they had promised the country fiscal prudence and that the economy would be left to grow at a faster pace than the Conservative Party had left it.

I even laughed off their desire to turn this country “cool”, in line with their modern agenda and their decision to pump some much needed money into the health service. I was ecstatic that they dared to put through the proposals for the minimum wage and less so that they screwed single mothers for the little that the state provided. Elections are won at the centre, so it is all right to ensure that the middle class stays the course with you.

Read the rest of this entry »