Over the past few days, I've been able to write almost as an observer, discussing what I think is going wrong, but without it really affecting me. Yes, I've managed to whip myself up into the odd bit of righteous anger, but that's about it.
This post is different though. This one is personal. This is about my own disconnect.
Two years ago, I wrote a lament for English socialism. In it, I told of my sorrow that what was left of socialism in the Labour Party couldn't even mount enough of a challenge to Gordon Brown to make him face an election rather than a coronation.
But I didn't leave the party. To do so would have been unthinkable. This is the Labour Party, for heaven's sake. This is the party of Keir Hardie, of Nye Bevan, of Tony Benn. They are owed my loyalty. They demand my loyalty.
And so I resigned myself to forever being disappointed in what the Labour Party did, of making steady compromises with myself to continue voting for them, telling myself that at least they weren't as bad as the Tories.
But things just got worse. After an impressive start, the Brown government started to fall apart, in style as much as substance - and this was before the banking collapse. Last year, I wrote a series of posts about the Brown government, including whether I could vote for Labour again, and what I thought was wrong with politics. And ultimately, I copped out on deciding whether I would vote for them again - but I clearly stated I could never vote for another party:
I am a tribal animal. It is a terrible flaw, but there you go. And my tribe is Labour. I am Labour. Always will be. The Liberal Democrats are inconsequential, the Tories beyond the pale. Neither could ever get my vote.
I was so sure of my commitment, of my connection to Labour, to my tribe. But...
I suppose deep down inside, I wanted to believe that some of the people at the top of the Labour Party were like me. They too had had to compromise remorselessly, steadily moving away from what they believed in their heart to something that would get them elected, elected so they could achieve at least some good.
But then came the financial crisis. When the Telegraph is calling for bank nationalisations, but the Labour government is resisting, you know something has gone very wrong with the world. To the surprise of nobody but me, it turns out it really wasn't a government of revolutionaries reluctantly turned bureaucrats. The lines they had been peddling about the superiority of the market, about its magical efficiency, about how it should be trusted, they really believed them.
The financial crisis shattered the last of my dearly held illusions about the Labour government. Once upon a time, I could believe in their financial competence, rather than them just being the beneficiaries of blind luck and bad decisions made in America. Once upon a time, I could believe that deep down inside, they believed in the same things as me. Once upon a time, I could believe they wanted to change the world.
But once upon a time ended.
And so my certainty that I was Labour through and through, tribal to the end, has been shaken. And, finally, slowly, it has collapsed.
It's so hard for me to express the pain this causes me. I suspect it is like a priest losing his faith - the one clear, definite, fixed point of his life has been destroyed, the one certainty he could cling to no matter what, the defining part of who he is is gone.
But it is worse than that. Because this collapse in my belief also means that now, finally, I can think about voting for someone else. It feels like I am betraying a dear friend, that I am cheating on a spouse, that I am lying to my parents.
The only thing I can point to, the only experience that this feels close to, is the empty, icy-cold feeling inside when your lover leaves you, when the person you had shaped your life around shrugs her shoulders and walks away. It sounds melodramatic, but the hollow devastation is all I can compare it to. But thinking I can vote for someone else means I am also betraying her, that I am the one in the wrong.
Betrayal is the only word I can use, the only one that seems to get over the shock and hurt I feel at where the party has gone, and the shame I feel myself for thinking of going elsewhere.
And I tell myself I shouldn't feel this way, that it may once have been the party of Hardie, Bevan and Benn, but that it isn't anymore. That the party moved away from me, not the other way round. I tell myself this, but it doesn't really help.
I'm grieving for the party as it used to be.
I'm not the first to feel like this. The Labour Party has been leaking members for years. Always I felt they were making a mistake, that sure, not everything was perfect, but that's what politics is all about. And then my father left the party. Secretly I believed he'd end up going back, that he couldn't possibly turn his back on the party.
But now I am seeing more people who have been committed to the party for a lifetime leaving, quietly, unobtrusively, sadly. I know of people who have been lifelong supporters and members, people who have been councillors for decades, people who have devoted a good portion of their lives to the party, simply slipping away.
These are not people who would make a fuss about it - they still have too much respect for what the party used to be to do that. But when we meet each other, then we can share our private grief. We can talk about what used to be, what we still believe, and what we wish would change.
And all this before the revelations on MPs expenses. That will drive people further away. Further away from all parties, but I can't help but feel that Labour will suffer most.
Because, regardless of the truth of the matter, many traditional Labour voters, people like me, would always have expected Tories to be out for themselves, out to get every penny out of us that they could. But not our MPs, not Labour people, surely? But their venality has been lain bare, the dramatic difference in lifestyle they demanded between how we live, and how they do. And they will suffer.
I feel sorry for the honest MPs out there, the ones who have only claimed what they must, those who claimed little. Those who didn't take advantage of the system, regardless of what the rules were. Because now they are tarred with the same brush. Already politicians were viewed as untrustworthy, and now they are viewed as greedy, venal, criminal. A plague on all their houses, primary and secondary.
And so, this is the final disconnect. A personal disconnect. One I have found very hard to write about. Because my party has betrayed me, in thoughts, in words, in deeds. And I have betrayed my party, in my mind if nowhere else yet.
I can't forgive the party. It remains to be seen if I can forgive myself.
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