“What are the Labour Party for?”, asked a colleague who shall remain nameless, yesterday, as we were deciding who would write about this weekend’s party conference. “After all, what’s unique about them is not popular, and what is popular about them is not unique”.
It’s hard to argue with that. The Labour Party is in an unenviable position: Everybody else has stolen their clothes. It’s very hard, in the Ireland of 2021, to stake a place for yourself as the party of the centre left. Increasingly, Labour does not even try. This weekend’s conference demonstrated that.
Labour’s strongest remaining asset is its brand: It is the party of Michael D. Higgins and Ivana Bacik, and of Mary Robinson. It is the home of Ireland’s secular saints, and scholars. To be Labour is to be good, and upstanding, and kind, and decent, and tolerant, and brave, and, if they’re honest, just downright morally better than anybody else in politics. Labour’s distilled essence is Aodhán O’Riordáin, its deputy leader, who has never yet found an issue on which his position is not morally superior to that of everybody else. Other parties oppose new housing out of self interest and concern for their constituents. Aodhán and Labour alone can make it a moral crusade.
Labour was founded, of course, as a party for the poor. The working man. It was designed to stand up against employers, and secure better wages and working conditions and supports for the unemployed and the downtrodden. To this day, it pays lip service to that tradition – members will still ostentatiously call each other “comrade” and sing “the red flag” and embrace all the rest of the party’s traditions. But it is no longer that party.
Labour today is the party of the rich and the well off. It is the party of RTÉ, and Amnesty Ireland, and the Irish Women’s Council. It is the party for wealthy barristers who care about human rights, and sociology professors who care about cisgender norms. It is the party for middle class parents whose children shall not be baptised, and whose sons and daughters shall put their pronouns in their bio. It is the party of the Michael Tea Higgins tea cosy, and the campaign to save trendy Dublin pubs. It is the party that reads Fintan O’Toole, and Una Mullally, and stays awake at night worrying about Joe Biden’s approval rating in Virginia, for fear that Trump should ever return.
What animates Labour these days is not the cause of the working person, or the young person who cannot get a home, or the migrant mugged on the streets of Dublin by gangs of gurriers. No, what animates them is the cause of the progressive, well-off, middle-class couple who simply cannot bear the thought of their child being educated in a catholic school, of all places:
Let’s get them out. #LP21 https://t.co/U7ctDfQ5xU
— Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (@AodhanORiordain) November 13, 2021
What animates them is abortion, and trans rights, and the terrible fear that hiding in plain sight, in Irish society, are doctors who might tell them that they disapprove of their choices:
At #LP21 – @labour delegates have voted for the full decriminalisation of abortion. The motion from the party's Tipperary branch called for the repeal of the 12-week limit for abortion on request, the mandatory 3-day wait period; and ending conscientious objection. @rtenews
— Paul Cunningham (@RTENewsPaulC) November 13, 2021
They are the party of sex workers rights, and Onlyfans girls:
At #LP21 – @labour is to conduct a policy review re the law relating to the purchase of sexual services, and report back with recommendations. @rtenews
— Paul Cunningham (@RTENewsPaulC) November 13, 2021
If you are, in fact, an ordinary working person, chances are that these priorities are far removed from your own. The things that worry you – rising inflation and the cost of living, access to housing, rising crime, concern about whether immigration is sustainable, the amount of tax you pay, and so on – simply do not worry Labour. Their delegates and members come from a different world, a world in which the main problems facing the country are GPs who opt out of providing abortions, and schools that provide first holy communions, and prostitutes who can’t get access to free contraception.
What the party has never lost, even as its character, membership, and objectives have changed, is its unrelenting sense of moral superiority. That moral superiority – the idea that Labour is “good” while others are “bad” permits it to engage in the most heartless cruelties and feel good about it. The proposal passed this weekend, for example, to “abolish conscientious objection” amounts to a policy to compel doctors – on pain of losing their licences – to take part in abortions which those doctors believe are the moral equivalent of murder. With Labour, there is no space for honest disagreement on major moral questions. You are either with them, or you are a bad person. In their eyes, a doctor who disagrees with them on abortion has no rights whatever.
Labour entered its conference on 4% of the vote. That feels about right. They have, after all, conscientiously chosen to become the party of a morally superior elite in Irish society. But the problem with being an elite is that if there are too many of you, then you are no longer really an elite. There is an audience in Ireland for guardian-reading, law practicing, human rights preaching feminists who go by she/her, but it is not a big one. If it ever did become a big one, many of those who are currently part of that audience would have to find something else to make them superior and more intellectually advanced than their peers.
And so, Labour will lumber on, representing somewhere between four and eight per cent of Irish Society, and they will not mind. Because to their mind, their four to eight per cent encompasses all the best people – in the media, in the law, in the universities, and the NGOs, and the Students Unions. They will continue to win seats in places where those people live. And they will continue to be utterly baffling to just about everybody else. March on, comrades.