People want a change of political culture... abuse and vitriol have become the norm Luciana Berger

Luciana Berger

Since 2010 I’ve watched my area be drained of resources and hope by this rightwing Conservative government. They’ve cut police officers, firefighters, NHS services and our school budgets, and put deprivation, poverty and malnutrition back on to our streets. People are desperate for a real alternative. But I’ve despaired as Labour has turned inwards and to the fringes, towards internal debates and wrangles, more interested in the machine, tribal politics of the past than changing the country for a better future.

Since leaving the Labour party last week I have been struck by the huge outpouring of support and good wishes from people locally and nationally. There is a real appetite for change in our broken system. People are sick of the false choice between the established political parties who take voters for granted. People tell me it is time for something fresh, unfettered by the old 20th-century ways of doing things.

There’s also something more fundamental that people want, and that’s a change of political culture. Our politics in recent years has been devalued by the style, tone and language of its protagonists. During the Scottish referendum, the EU referendum, and since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party three years ago, a harshness, a shrillness, and a viciousness has become normal within our public discourse. This is not the same as robust debate and interrogation of ideas, which we all should welcome. Instead it’s a culture of abuse, name-calling and vitriol which has become the norm.

Some blame social media, but talking to friends on Merseyside who remember Derek Hatton’s Militant in the 1980s, there is nothing new about this style of politics. It is born of machismo and arrogance, of ideological certainties, and a tribal conviction that anyone with a different view or perspective is a deadly enemy. Whereas once it existed only on the fringes of left or right, it now surfaces in the mainstream, and is given the soapbox and megaphone of social media. It is pure poison.

Inside my former party, this corrosive culture found expression through the rise in antisemitism. As Ian Austin MP said on Friday, the party leadership is harder on those who complain about racism than those who perpetrate it. One of the worst offenders was only recently re-elected to the national executive. It is also manifest in the misogynist attacks on female MPs and activists, and in the atrocious name-calling of anyone who fails to submit.

This nasty culture is just one of the reasons Labour MPs are leaving the party. I blamed (among a number of things) the “bullying, bigotry and intimidation” in my statement on Monday. Each MP that leaves is subject to the vilest of attacks, slurs, character assassinations and accusations of treachery and betrayal, which only serve to make our argument for us. The worst of the abuse comes from those with #JC4PM19 hashtags, and the Labour leadership does nothing to discourage them. No wonder Tom Watson said he no longer recognises the current Labour party.

As the Independent Group, we are determined to try to forge a different style of doing politics. Our founding statement calls for a culture where every member has the right to be heard and the duty to lead. We commit to support each other and treat each other with respect – an approach which can be scaled up to a larger group, as and when people may join us. Culture is a reflection of values. Our values are solidarity, tolerance, openness, honesty, courage and intellectual curiosity. But values are useless unless they are lived. If we can’t behave and speak in tune with our values, then they aren’t really our values.

These are early days and forging a new political culture will not be easy. But it’s what my constituents and the country deserve and I’m certainly going to give it my best shot

Luciana Berger is the MP for Liverpool Wavertree and a co-founder of the Independent Group

This new grouping is the real barrier to change ... They may prop up a Tory government' Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner

I first learned the power of a Labour government to transform lives growing up in my hometown of Stockport. At 16, out of school and pregnant, my own life could have been written off. It was the help I had from some of the then Labour government’s policies such as Sure Start that turned it around.

So it is desperately sad for me that the people I grew up with in Stockport no longer have a Labour MP, following the resignation of Ann Coffey. It is even more so because right now they need another Labour government more than ever.

Labour put forward a manifesto in 2017, which won over millions of new voters, including a majority in Stockport, with a programme of policies that would transform our country.

So it was bizarre to hear Chris Leslie, one of the self-appointed leaders of the so-called Independent Group, say last week that Labour wanted “to keep everything exactly as it is”. They must be living in a different country to the rest of us.

I cannot be clearer about this. I am not in politics, let alone Labour’s shadow cabinet, to keep things as they are. The transformation that the Labour party today can make to our country is even more fundamental than that which the last Labour government made to my own life and so many others. And far from leaving the centre ground, we are occupying it.

More than three-quarters of the public back our plans to run our public services so they work for people, not shareholders. The British people overwhelmingly favour big businesses and the wealthiest individuals contributing their fair share so we can invest in our schools, hospitals and services. Two-thirds agree that austerity has gone too far.

Our policies captured the public imagination. I am sorry we didn’t win the election, and I will do everything in my power to bring Labour in to office, because every day we do not succeed is a day when we let down those who need us most. But we won millions more votes because investment trumped austerity, public ownership trumped privatisation, and hope trumped fear.

Our economic and political system is broken and this is no time for tinkering around the edges. Far from wealth trickling down, nine years of terrible Tory rule have dramatically worsened the lives of the least well-off. A fifth of the population – 14 million people – are living in poverty and welfare cuts have hurt millions of families. Only days ago we were warned that child poverty could rise to a record high in a matter of years.

About 20% of Britain’s wealth lies is in the hands of just 1%. Oxfam found that the poorest 10% of people pay a higher rate of tax than the richest 10%. For the first time since 1945, life expectancy is actually going down in the poorer parts of the country.

So we cannot and will not “keep everything as it is”. My fear is the opposite: this new grouping is now the real barrier to change.

From what we have seen and heard so far, all that we know is that they would continue Tory policies from endless privatisation to sky-high tuition fees. They defend austerity and don’t want to ask the richest to pay a little more in tax. They could hand the Tories victory at an election and may even prop up the Tory government in parliament.

To put it simply, it is they who would keep everything as it is. It is the Labour party that is the real movement for change. I urge anyone who shares that goal to join us and fight for it.

Angela Rayner is shadow education secretary.

Opposition to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership is a matter of principle as well as necessity Roy Hattersley

Roy Hattersley

The Labour party, despite claims that its membership exceeds 500,000, is withering away. Day by day it loses credibility. Last week’s defections were no more than a spectacular manifestation of the growing belief that Labour cannot be saved – and is not worth saving.

The prophets of doom are wrong. But survival as an effective political force requires Labour’s genuine social democrats to demonstrate now that they are still a power within the party. That is only possible if they have the courage to admit why so many people, once natural Labour voters, have drifted away.

The millstone around Labour’s neck is the party leader. Jeremy Corbyn has supported so many squalid causes and defended so many disreputable regimes that opposition to his leadership is (or should be) a matter of principle as well as political necessity.

Leaving Labour would be the most traumatic experience of my life. But I can only remain a member with a good conscience for as long as I make clear that the man who defended the exhibition of the antisemite mural and attended the wreath-laying ceremony which paid homage to the Black September terrorists does not, and never could, speak for me. Innumerable other Labour party members feel the same. The party’s future depends on them saying so.

Yet all we have recently heard from “moderates” in the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) is complaints about their ill treatment. Politics is a tough business and the proper response to assaults and abuse from the wilder shores of socialism is neither surrender nor retreat. It is a determination to take the ideological battle into enemy territory.

The failure to fight back made the misused moderates culprits as well as victims. They have much to learn from the untiring campaigning of the far left. Last year a Corbynite MP toured the country, urging local Labour parties – with which he had no connection – to subject their MPs to the full rigours of re-selection. Why did no one follow him from constituency to constituency explaining that mandatory reselection is a device by which mainstream MPs are forced to support the extremist agenda or be evicted? Reasonable people do not want to spend every night in political meetings. So the reasonable argument is lost by default.

Two years before Neil Kinnock killed off the Trotskyite infiltration of the Labour party, some of us prepared the way by arguing, in the constituencies, the case for the militants’ expulsion. We challenged, head on, the doctrine that Labour has no enemies on the left and argued that a political party has a duty, as well as the right, to define and defend its ideological frontiers.

Corbyn has surrounded himself with recent supporters of political movements which no genuine democrat could possibly endorse. And moderate Labour MPs meekly accept their authority as the price which must be paid for a quiet life.

The time has come for genuine social democrats in the party to say that the only political authority they accept is a combination of conscience and conviction. Tom Watson has pointed the way. Moderates must band together in a distinct group with distinct policies, hold regular meetings and become the real Labour party-in-waiting.

Corbynites will shout “treason” but the broad church, which the party leader defends with such passion, stretches both ways. And the haemorrhage of one-time Labour supporters would at least slow down when it was clear that the party of Attlee, Gaitskell and Wilson is not dead, but sleeping.

Leaving the party, as nine MPs did last week, was an admission that the battle to resuscitate democratic socialism was too dangerous and difficult for them to fight. But unconditional surrender takes a variety of forms.

Choosing a quiet life on the backbenches while the Labour party drifts into oblivion, is – in its way – just another form of capitulation. It is almost 60 years since Hugh Gaitskell swore to “fight, fight and fight again” to save the party.

Labour’s survival as a potential government depends on an army of democratic socialists promising the same – and meaning it.

Roy Hattersley was deputy Labour leader from 1983-1992.

We failed to keep those nine MPs with us. We should ask ourselves why Jess Phillips

Jess Phillips

I’m a tribal sort. Always have been. I was raised singing songs about putting Tories on a bonfires and being told that even saying “Maggie Thatcher” was swearing. My parents would have been deeply disappointed if I had married a Tory.

It wasn’t all cynicism and vitriol. I was also raised with stories of solidarity. Soulful yarns about striking workers fighting for better pay, and tales of the unexpected where the little man won out thanks to the Labour party and the union. If you cut me my blood is made up of one part Birmingham, one part Labour party.

I’m a tribeswoman without doubt. And yet I find myself questioning the very nature of tribalism more and more. I have never liked the idea of the MP who sits on a massive majority, knowing they are secure. I don’t like the rot that can set in when one group of people is a shoo-in for a particular political party and without question this type of person will always vote one way.

I think the ordinary citizen is not served well by safe seats or a politics that takes their votes for granted.

The 2017 election saw most voters split down the middle, and again go back to the politics of the two main parties. People were voting as much for what they didn’t want as what they did. I should be dancing around because I have a bigger majority, a safer seat, an easier ride. But I’m not. I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth but I do want to earn the votes I get. Hey – perhaps all that conditioning in childhood about never benefiting from unearned income worked.

While all over the world division and vitriol is blasting across our airwaves, I still think, from my experiences as a local MP and an ordinary citizen, that this is not an accurate portrayal, and that people desperately want reasonable, pragmatic solutions to the problems in their lives. I think they are sick of the tribal squabble and want us talk to them and about them. So, yes, I am sad that my colleagues have left our party. I am even sadder that some were bullied out by antisemites that have not been kept in check. But I don’t think I am sad that this breakaway has happened.

I think politics needed a kick up the bum, with both main parties seeking to feed red meat to their bases above serving the country. Both have engaged appallingly in a squabble for the heart of the party and forgotten that the average person doesn’t give a toss.

I don’t buy the argument that the new breakaway group are handing the Tories a victory over the Labour party because they will split the vote. I think we in the Labour party should try to win every vote we receive by being better than the others. We will not do that if we don’t tackle the antisemitism in our ranks, or if we continue to obsessively fight with one other. Every one of us needs to back down. Me included.

If we – with all our history, our folk tales, our heart – can’t set out a vision that would win an election, then that is on us. We failed to keep those nine MPs with us and we should ask ourselves why, not just slag them off. How the party responds will determine our future, not a split in our ranks.

I don’t want the Labour party to split, but I don’t think it deserves to exist just because. For me to leave would be like having a full-body blood transfusion, but when you’re sick that’s what you do. I hope the party can get better. Lord knows, my constituents need it to.

Jess Phillips is MP for Birmingham Yardley.