Labour Adrift

Ben Wildsmith

I would have been 11 and we were on our holidays in Bwlchtocyn. The long, sandy beach there was the perfect arena for a boy to re-enact the action at the Los Angeles Olympics that summer.

The groynes across the beach became hurdles, the dunes were a cross-country course, and the docile ponies for hire found themselves imagined into eventing glory.

One afternoon, as the sun began to tip lower, I eyed up the sea. I could swim from one end of the bay to the other, I resolved. So, after running to the far northern end of the beach, I strode into the water and out to where my feet didn’t touch the sand: sink or swim.

I started well enough, swimming parallel to the beach and heading south I could just about make out my mum and dad under their beach umbrella with the dog. I hadn’t troubled them with my expeditionary plans as Mum could be over-protective; no need to worry her.

Tyranny

It’s good to feel like the captain of your own destiny, especially when you are 11 and have escaped from the do-this-do-that tyranny of school. A man paddled past me in a canoe.

‘Are you alright, son? The tide’s coming out.’

‘I’m fine thank you.’

I glanced back towards the beach, and it was further away. I couldn’t make out Mum and Dad anymore. I set a course diagonally towards the southern end of the beach where they were.

Swimming against the tide was tiring, I was quite frightened, but I felt alert, vital even. Seawater splashing into my eyes caused me to close them as much as I could, squinting every now and then to make sure I was still going in the right direction.

The sun began to set, and I didn’t seem to be getting very far, I’d let myself drift.

The realisation that I was in real danger shot some adrenaline into my tired arms and I went hell for leather, desperate to feel sand beneath my feet. The moment I did, I sprinted out of the sea as if fleeing an enemy.

Mum and Dad were frantic, all scared-angry with borrowed binoculars and fears for the worst. I’d been gone longer than I thought: slapped legs and bed with no tea.

Disorientating

Listening to Donald Trump’s press conference about the Washington plane crash yesterday afternoon was disorientating.

We had four years to experience him as a politician, but the second time around seems different: stranger and more fearful.

After concluding the forced-empathy obligations of his appearance, the president’s subsequent remarks were so unlike anything I’ve heard from a political leader as to be beyond the pale.

With most of the wretched victims still in the Potomac awaiting recovery, Trump chose this moment to ratchet up his boastful lies, double down on his vindictive apportioning of blame, and drive common decency yet further out of the public sphere.

Wherever you had pitched your expectations of him, Trump plunged deeper into the deranged, obsessive bitterness that seems to be the driving force of all he does.

Before the names of victims had even been released to their families, Trump pinned their deaths on Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Before the recovery operation concluded and evidence could be gathered, he announced that the investigation would be short. He already knew the causes of the accident, after all he’s owned helicopters. Obama, Biden, and diversity were the culprits, with Donald J. Trump the hero. Got that? Good, buy another cap.

There was, of course, a time when brash excesses across the Atlantic were anchored by the weight of European tradition. A paternal tutting from the Old World would filter through the American intelligentsia and calm things down.

Those days are long gone. As I was nearly drowning myself in North Wales, the Labour Party was remaking itself after the electoral disaster of 1983.

Peter Mandelson

New leader Neil Kinnock, previously touted as a ‘firebrand’, latterly swaddled in ermine, was about to appoint Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications.

Mandelson’s urbane remodelling of the party started by replacing a red flag with a red rose. This week we saw where his direction of travel would lead.

To secure Trump’s acceptance as UK Ambassador, Baron Mandelson was required to appear on Fox News, right where the president could see him, and grovel.

His previous remarks about the president being ‘a danger to the world’ had been, he reflected, ‘ill-judged and wrong’. Accepting Trump’s claim to have won an ‘extraordinary’ second mandate, Mandelson gushed about Trump’s ‘dynamism and energy’ before declaring that the president had won ‘fresh respect’, not least from Mandelson personally.

When I look back on every betrayal and grubby compromise that Labour has engaged in from Kinnock onwards, I see a very clear, if not inevitable, path to this point.

From selling out the miners, to abandoning Clause 4, to the Iraq war, to maintaining the two-child cap, it was always leading here.

Gaslit

For four decades Labour has gaslit its decent supporters, God knows I was once one, into believing that its gradualism was a pragmatic approach to principled change.

When Mandelson told the Financial Times in 1998 that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, we were to believe that the mechanics of a Labour government would redistribute that wealth justly. The Prince of Darkness was, you see, a Machiavelli for the common good.

Labour’s remaining believers can only be motivated by horror at accepting how ruthlessly they have been bilked.

If you’ve spent a good portion of your life knocking doors and stuffing envelopes for social justice, it’s a hell of a wrench to admit it was all a con. What’s there left to see though?

The presumptive Labour Ambassador performing like a lickspittle jester on Fox News has no lineage to the Merthyr riots.

Nothing that prostrates itself before the court of Trump can claim moral authority anymore. The emptying out of all ethical considerations from the Labour Party is complete and irrevocable.

The sun continues to set; my arms tire, and the shore seems further and further away.