‘I can’t forgive the anti-Corbyn conspirators’

CAMPAIGNING FOR CHANGE: From left, Russ Litten, Steve Cobby, and Jeremy Corbyn

From the Miners’ Strike to Keir Starmer: writer and musician Russ Litten describes his political journey

My Dad and my Uncle Terry both worked at Capper Pass, the now defunct metal smelting works on the banks of the Humber. One weekend they hired a mini bus, filled it with food and drove to a working mens’ club in Barnsley. It was 1984, the year of Band Aid. I was 15 years old. People were starving in Ethiopia. I couldn’t understand why people from Hull were ferrying loaves of bread and tins of beans to Barnsley.

The Miners’ Strike was the catalyst for my interest in political activism. I went to a few meetings of left-wing groups in Hull, but they were invariably fronted by earnest, middle-class university types, lecturing working people on how to organise themselves. I wasn’t too inspired. I naturally gravitated towards the left, but party politics and all its trappings left me cold. Anyone with an ounce of common sense or soul could see that the Tories were carving up the country for the benefit of a minority, but there didn’t seem to be anyone in opposition who could muster a coherent response.

One evening, around election time in the early 90s, there was a knock on my door. A fellow with a red rosette handed me a leaflet. Another fellow with a red rosette skulked at the front garden gate, looking pointedly away, up the street. This fellow at the gate, I was told, was my local Labour councillor. Did I have any questions I wanted to pass on? I invited him to step up to the door and have a proper conversation but, for reasons I am still not entirely clear on, this was declined. Maybe they had a lot of other doors to knock on. If I had any detailed questions I could perhaps get in touch? Every four years I would put my X in the box marked Socialist Labour. When their name disappeared from the ballot card I voted for the Legalise Cannabis Alliance.

Then came Tony Blair, with his sixth-form prefect guitar pose and his salesman perma-grin. What a lovely fellow! Modern, progressive, a good talker. New Labour coincided with me getting married and having kids and, for a brief and glorious period, it seemed that the world had tilted itself into something resembling sanity. New Labour oversaw lots of great things - the minimum wage, peace in Northern Ireland, SureStart. Then they went and spoilt it all by aiding and abetting George Bush with his illegal invasion of Iraq. Overnight, Blair went from being the groovy pal of Britpop to a weapon of mass destruction. Subsequent TV appearances showed a man who’s eyes had died. It was though someone had ushered him into a private members room in hell and offered him immortality in exchange for his soul. Only God can judge me, he said. I’ve since heard that line again and again, from the mouths of convicted murderers in high security prisons.

‘POLITICS SHOULD BE A VOCATION’: Russ Litten

Around this time I worked at Viking FM as their Head of Creative Services. It was there that I received some careers advice from Jo Swinson, the future Lib Dem leader who, back then, was the Marketing Manager at Viking. She was also an MP for somewhere in Scotland. I didn’t quite understand how she could combine the two roles, but we enjoyed a good working relationship and many a vigorous political discussion. You should go into politics, she told me. It’s a really good career. That was my problem, right there. I didn’t think politics should be a career. Politics should be a vocation, like nursing or teaching or the probation service or social work or journalism. Something that you were deeply driven to do because you cared. Because you wanted to make a difference, not a good living.

My party political indifference lasted through the Miliband years. I still hated the Tories with a passion but the Labour Party seemed to be intent on becoming a sort of Conservative Tribute Act. Mugs emblazoned with anti-immigrant rhetoric? No thank you. When I heard that Jeremy Corbyn was up for the leadership I wasn’t overly enthused. To my mind, he seemed to be of the same tribe as those pious, plum-voiced tub-thumpers who bored me senseless as a teenager. Then I examined his track record. A man cut from the same compassionate cloth as Tony Benn. Massive plus. Voting record? Impeccable. Then I listened to him speak. No spin, no focus-group film-flam, just basic common sense. He answered questions directly. And he cared. He genuinely cared. You could see it a mile off.

Not everyone shared my new found enthusiasm. What really surprised me was the venom spat across social media by people who were supposedly on the left. He has no charisma! Good. Look at where electing charismatic leaders got us in the past. He’s unelectable! Really? How can you be so sure? I’d been to see Corbyn speak at a rally in Hull and I was struck by the wide range of people of attendance. This wasn’t the usual crowd of dogs on strings and trust fund anarchists. These were ordinary working people who listened intently to policies that had a direct resonance with their life.

The Labour Party Manifesto for the 2017 General Election was the most positive and progressive social contract I have read in my political lifetime. At the time, I was collaborating with musician and producer Steve Cobby on a series of electronic spoken word pieces for release on Steve’s DeClasse label. We decided to compose a track in support of the manifesto and were subsequently invited to perform as part of the Labour Party rally in Zebedee’s Yard. That afternoon I was fired up with a positive surge of optimism as 5,000 people crammed themselves into that space to applaud a vision of peace, equality and social inclusion. It was a beautiful moment, and just for that evening it seemed real change was possible. I joined the Labour Party the very next day and threw myself whole-heartedly behind a party I believed in.

SUPPORT: Jeremy Corbyn addressed a crowd of thousands in Zebedee’s Yard, Hull, in 2017

But it was not to be. I don’t think I have ever seen such a successful media campaign as the one that smeared and slandered Jeremy Corbyn. We were asked to believe that this hippy with an allotment was everything from a Czech spy to an anti-Semite terrorist supporter. The levels of spin and bias was off the scale, almost laughable. What summed it up to me was a bug eyed Philip Schofield screaming “JUST APOLOGISE!” in Corbyn’s face one week, then posing for selfies like a giddy teenager with the racist Boris Johnson the week after. A few weeks later the Brexit Election was settled. The people had voted. Five more years of Boris Johnson. I had long resigned myself to the idea that my political views were out of sync with the majority of the rest of the UK. Now I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

I resigned from the Labour Party on April 20th of this year, following the publication of the ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014 – 2019’, report when it was confirmed that senior figures had conspired to undermine the party leader and sabotage any unified effort towards a Labour government. Words cannot express the disgust I feel for these people. They actively campaigned to prevent their party from winning the election. That, to me, is unforgivable. I’m still convinced that if they had put a quarter of the energy they used into denigrating Corbyn towards fighting the Tory party then we could have been spared the political nightmare we’re facing today - years and years of an unaccountable far-right set of gangsters and con men who lie with impunity and treat ordinary working people with contemptuous disdain.

‘FOR THE MANY’: Russ Litten and Steve Cobby wrote a song which Jeremy Corbyn used as his ringtone

As for Keir Starmer, I wish him all the best but I am too disillusioned to summon the energy any more. As a famous song once said, to withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy. Right now, I feel not only politically homeless but a stranger in my own country. The UK has shifted so far to the right that any attempt to speak up for humanist policies is seemingly met with with either patronising pity or outright hostility. Tax the rich? Don’t be ridiculous! Look after the vulnerable? Whatever for? Stop selling bombs to terrorists? What, are you some kind of bleeding heart do-gooder communist? Unthinkable! Get Brexit Done! Stay Alert! Rule Britannia! It’s an endless river of filth and the people of this country seem to be more than willing to get down on their hands and knees and lap it all up.

For the sake of my mental health and blood pressure I am currently avoiding as much mainstream news as possible and only occasionally dipping my toes back into the fetid sewer of social media. At the time of writing, we seem to be careering ever more gleefully in the slipstream of America, where truth is negotiable, racism is perfectly acceptable and the lives of people who have little is worth not much more than infected yeast. The next time an election rolls around I will read the manifestos, check the candidates’ voting records, and vote accordingly. Until then, I will be conscious and pro-active within my own community according to my beliefs. Friends, family, music and writing - that’s where my energy goes these days. A simple life. I might even get an allotment.