you can’t make me like it

🎶 the landslide brought me down… 🎶

There was a while, after Keir Starmer became the leader of the Labour Party, where I was still just about prepared to vote for Labour. I would, I told myself, trudge into a polling station and mark an X in the box, as a harm reduction tactic, as a grudging tactical duty. I would do it, but I wouldn’t like it. Labour could have my vote, but never again my heart.

I can’t remember what finally pushed me to decide that Labour would have neither my heart nor my vote. It was likely something to do with either trans people or migrants - who knows exactly which announcement? There have been so many. It was a short step, but a meaningful one - from “you can’t make me enjoy this” to “you can’t make me do this”. Of course, it didn’t matter to the outcome: Sir Keir didn’t need my heart, or my vote. He won, and don’t we all feel wonderful about it?

In my pride post a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I’m very resistant to being told how to feel. It’s been a bad few weeks for that. The National Feeling, apparently, is that we’re all ready for a change of management. The liberal and centre-left establishment is crowing that the grown-ups are back in charge. I do not want to be managed or parented. I will not celebrate a new manager or a new ‘grown-up’ parent.

For a few days, I did feel some of the relief start to creep. Starmer’s cabinet appointments seemed to signal, at the very least, a willingness to break away from the Tories’ style of governing exclusively to the Daily Mail comments section. But it took less than a week for them to announce a continuation of the Tories’ ban on healthcare for trans kids. I’m waiting for something on migration - they will probably wait a little longer for that, since liberals pay very slightly more attention to it. But it’ll be coming.

The response to this will be the same response given to anyone who’s criticised New Labour in the past 20 years: ‘but what about…’ and then a list of things they’ve made slightly better. How can you complain? Are you saying you’d rather not have [surestart centres / onshore wind farms]? As if asking for better negates those things. Yes, I will admit a Labour landslide is a few increments better than a Tory landslide. But you can’t make me like it.

This sounds somewhat petulant, and perhaps it is, but in a deeper sense it is central to my politics. We cannot reach into each other’s hearts and put what we want to find there by force. This applies to all of us, not just smug Starmerites. Vanguardist communists can’t assume the correct flavour of revolutionary fervour will spontaneously erupt in the masses’ hearts either. Or rather, they can assume, but they will fail.

I believe that this idea - that we cannot make anyone else feel anything - is a useful starting point for all of us. We can’t force people’s hearts to change - so what can we change, if we want the world to be better? We can start with what we have, where we are. We can find the people who want to work with us, the people it gives us joy to work with; and we can build connections and common ground based on actually making things better, right here and now, via direct action and mutual aid. This is what is giving me hope, what helped me wipe my tears away after the exit poll. We carry a new world here in our hearts,¹ and you can’t make us give it up.

Photo by Akshat Jhingran on Unsplash

1. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buenaventura_Durruti