A floating, maybe drowning voter
Brendan O’Neill
SO NOW WHO DO WE VOTE FOR? by John Harris Faber, £7.99, pp. 160, ISBN 0571224229 John Harris, the mop-topped commentator from Manchester, better known as a music journalist (and a very fine one) than a political correspondent, is in a pickle. Having voted Labour his entire adult life, he now finds himself horrified by the New Labour project, and by Blair and Blairism in particular, and wonders whether it isn’t time to swear allegiance to another party. In Harris’s childhood home ‘the Labour Party was like Church’, and that morning in 1985 when, as a 15-year-old, he came down to breakfast to find a Labour party membership form next to his cereal bowl it was the ‘equivalent of Confirmation’. In So Now Who Do We Vote For?, this once loyal altar boy to Labourism weighs up the pros and cons of excommunicating himself and seeking solace elsewhere.
I have never voted Labour (or Tory or Lib Dem, in case you’re curious) and have no loyalty to any of today’s sorry excuses for political parties, but even I felt a pang of sympathy with Harris’s predicament. He is clearly a creature of politics, who believes passionately in equality and opportunity, yet now his once beloved Labour gives us ‘war in Iraq, top-up fees, Blair in bed with Bush, private companies buying into schools and hospitals’. And it must be galling for those who were signedup members of the Labour Party (even if that membership, like Harris’s, was short
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