'I believe Jeremy Corbyn is a force for good in the Labour party and the country'

Sung to the tune of Ode to Joy:

“My thoughts freely flower,

My thoughts give me power,

No scholar can map them

No hunter can trap them

My thoughts do not cater

To duke or dictator”.

Way back in 1972 my wife and I joined Northampton Labour Party. We had just arrived in town and our neighbour, the wonderful Doll Pickering, heard Marie and I bitching about Tories.

She invited us to join Castle Ward Labour Party. At the time the MP was Reggie Paget QC, Labour MP for 35 years.

He was an eccentric choice for industrial Northampton; a Leicestershire landowner, prosecutor at Nuremberg and his solution to the problems in Ireland was to shoot every second prisoner in a British jail.

Reggie wasn’t kicked out of the party, he was given a peerage.

Joining the Labour party was a huge step for me. I had been what Americans call ‘a red diaper baby’ with a Communist Party family, including an uncle who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain.

My first political movement was as part of the Yellow Star Movement (YS), an organisation founded by an East End vicar and run by AJEX (Jewish Ex-servicemen). The function of YS was to defeat the re-emergence of Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists on the streets of London in areas with a large Jewish and Afro-Caribbean population.

We disrupted their meetings. Simple (I missed out on the tolerance guidance lectures).

But I already had been expelled from the Young Communist League for thinking differently from the leadership and daring to write in an alternative magazine, published by, of all groups, Kensington and Chelsea YCL. The organisation was called democratic centralism, more commonly known as ‘Stalinism’; a bit like the head honcho is determining who can be a member of the gang.

It seemed my thoughts were not free.

Northampton Labour Party was a far different creature. While I loathe the phrase ‘a broad church’ there was a recognition that it came from lots of different traditions, craft trade unionism, Methodism, Marxism, different strains of socialism and social democracy.

Whilst there were often personal strains, there was always fierce debate and discussion in the meeting room in Charles Street.

The party, nationally and locally, went through upheavals, while factions vied for control, also locally and nationally.

Nye Bevan and Michael Foot both had the whip removed from the PLP, and at one point the entire constituency party in Northampton South was suspended. Hey ho, what times those were.

I was quite rightly expelled for breaking a very clear rule of not working for a non-party candidate (Tony Clarke, if you’re asking) and it seemed my time with the party was over.

However, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, there was a huge surge in youthful optimistic membership and it seemed right to reconsider my decade in the wilderness.

Attempting to rejoin was a painful process involving an interview with the regional chair plus others from Nottingham. It was a bit like a TV courtroom drama, complete with photos taken at a meeting during my interregnum and the head prosecutor demanding I identify folk in the photograph. The spirit of Joe McCarthy stalked the East Midlands LP.

Confronted with a hideous pandemic and a hideous government, with the spectre of authoritarian far right governments worldwide, this really is the time for radical political people to work together. I believe Jeremy Corbyn is a force for good in the party and the country.

His only weakness is that he is far too kind and tolerant and allowed abusive behaviour from a section of the PLP. The actions against him by Starmer and his toadies bring no credit on the party.

We all have to oppose the rising tide of authoritarianism, and that should start in our party. I want the freedom to think as I please, and I want that freedom to extend to Jeremy Corbyn, who has never been a racist or an anti-Semite, but a principled socialist like so many who have gone before.

An afterthought: Perhaps the Labour Party should take the lead and abolish the whipping system in Westminster. It never worked in local government and I should know. I was a whip on NBC for a time!