On loyalty and tribalism

Loyalty is unquestionably a virtue. It shows a very human ability to love another and stick with them, through good times and bad. It is an admirable thing that we do not just drop our friends or our football team if they happen to have been guilty of an indiscretion or simply gone out of fashion. Being loyal to a friend shows an ability to see a human being in the round - that despite their mistakes they are still people, with a right to be understood. At times loyalty requires great bravery - standing up for someone or something when everyone else is calling for their head.

But we tend to see tribalism as a vice. This is when our loyalty to something leads us to irrational or unreasonable behaviour, our emotional commitment to something driving us to commit absurd acts that conflict with our own fundamental ends. Our heart overtakes our head to such an extent that most third party observers think us slightly mad.

Political commentators in the Westminster Village tend to be dismissive of partisan loyalties - which they typically describe as 'party tribalism' rather than as political commitment. I think they see it this way because few of them are particularly politically loyal. I can think of few newspaper columnists or members of the commentariat who spend their weekends trudging the streets in the rain delivering leaflets for their local councillors or constituency parties - or have ever done so. 99% of the population of course do not do that either - the difference is that the commentariat are as addicted to politics as the party activists, but have a much more fickle commitment to its contending forces.

I have always been a political loyalist - at least since my political beliefs settled and I decided, around the age 16, that I was a democratic socialist. I have been an active member of the Labour party since I was 17 and have voted Labour in every election since then. Back then - and now - I see the Labour party as the best (indeed only) available political instrument for creating a more equal and fairer society in this country, for supporting the poorest and most disadvantaged. Nothing that has happened in the last fourteen years has led me to re-consider that in any way at all - and everything about Labour's history and achievements tells me that I'm right.

I have never been one of those people who wants to find out about the personal qualities of particular candidates in this or that election. I just want to know whether in their gut they feel the same way that I do about the big issues eg) that they prioritise social justice, that they see improving the life of the working class in this country and the poor around the world as their biggest political priority, that they oppose racism, sexism, xenophobia and other bigotries in all their appalling forms etc etc. Labour candidates, selected by Labour members who hold those values like me, almost always do - whether they be Peter Mandelson or Tony Benn, to take two obvious extremes. When I change constituencies and meet members in my new branch or GC - I immediately reocgnise something you might call 'Labour people' - kindred spirits, despite their varying personalities and backgrounds.

I have never voted tactically - I have voted Labour even when we're in third or fourth place, simply on the basis that it sends a signal that there are people like us around, in a certain number, whose views need to be taken into account. I would vote tactically to stop the BNP - even (because this is the logical if uncomfortable consequence of my position on this) if it meant voting Tory - that is politics with different stakes, where the political considerations are of a different order. I suppose I would have voted for Jacques Chirac to stop Le Pen when they were the only two options for the French presidency - but would of course have done so entirely unhappily.

My loyalties are also international - I have supported many of our sister parties in other countries - I have distributed literature for the Chilean Socialists, attended rallies for the Broad Front in Uruguay, given out leaflets for the German Social Democrats (I came unstuck when an angry conservative voter took issue with some of the content, given that I speak almost no German). Here my view is that in these countries similar people to me, with my values, are in those parties of the Socialist International - and I want to see them do well.

So, there are various acts of disloyalty or lack of commitment that grate with me. I have never really liked defectors. I felt riled while at party conference in Manchester a few years ago I saw Shaun Woodward pottering about, like me, in the People's History Museum of all places! Apparently he's alright, people tell me, but I will always look on him with suspiscion. Same goes for our latest recruit - Quentin or whatever his name his.

Tony Blair's recent antics - speaking at a political rally for the centre-right and saying that left and right have no meaning anymore (instead, he claimed, it is now just a question of yesterday versus tomorrow - oh, purlease....!) are particularly annoying and to be condemned. He is also speaking at an audience of breakaway 'Third way' socialists. Why doesn't he speak to the Parti Socialiste? (he'd probably get booed, which I guess says something!). Despite disagreeing with him on many occasions I have never been given to doubt that Tony Blair feels a great sense of respect for the Labour party that supported him (often through gritted teeth) in his ten years in power - why then be a political rat on the international stage? The difference with Gordon is you feel he would never do that - he's a loyalist, its written all over him.

Martin Kettle is a particularly annoying commentator in this regard (although I am enjoying his comments on the US elections at the moment). From backing Labour under Blair, he then turned on Brown, has recently flirted with the Lib Dems - and called for a vote for Angela Merkel in the last German elections. No doubt, like David Owen (whom Dennis Healy famously and accurately called 'a shit'), he would claim that he's not changing his views - its the parties that are changing their's. Oddly these centrist people, because they are at the margin of the various parties, are a bit like the people on the far left or far right, also at the margin, who swap parties that differ from them on relatively minor issues - because they do not deliver exactly what they want. The loyalists among us do not see politics in such a consumerist way (will they give me everything I want?) but rather as being about shifting the balance generally in our favour - which requires, to use an old Marxist phrase, an 'accumulation of forces' - sticking with and building up your party, through good and times and bad, because they are basically right about most big questions.

So what of tribalism? This is not a virtue, when contrasted with loyalty - because it implies one has lost control of one's rational faculties. An element of it is however natural and inevitable - we're all human. For those of us involved in politics it becomes an emotional affair - we have committed ourselves to a cause over decades of our lives, the party becomes almost like family, through it you have met and sustain relationships with many friends and colleagues - over time you feel your allegiance to it like that of your football team or kinship network - if someone attacks it, you back it, when you watch PMQs you cheer your side and boo their's almost regardless of whatever they are saying. On election night you experience genuine mood swings (elation, anger, despondency) as your side swings in and out of favour. You have invested a lot of your life in this thing - you feel a loyalty to it as well as think it.

But there of course are limits - there are things that a Labour government could do in theory that would be so divorced from what I could accept, that I would be forced out - but it would have to be something big, that made it utterly irrational for somebody who beleives what I do about the world to remain in party that acted in a certain way. In short it would have to give up its belief in achieving social justice - the thing that holds people together (from Tony Benn to Tony Blair), its very raison d'etre - something which is most unlikely.

So contrary to the view of so many political commentators, I believe political (and, because political achivements require collective action, partisan) loyalty to be a virtuous thing. Tribalism is a natural, human consequence - but, as ever with the emotions, it has, from time to time, to be reigned in by the application of reason.