The Dora Gaitskell Rule is exactly wrong
How to lose friends and alienate people
A month or so ago I drafted a post defending Owen Jones’ decision to quit the Labour party. After a quarter-century of being on the red team, the Guardian columnist will now float around whatever leftist corpuscles emerge after Keir Starmer wins the next general election.
I thought that Jones was right about some of the Labour leader’s flaws. Starmer backs the two-child benefit cap; he refuses to limit bankers’ bonuses and impose a wealth tax; he ditched a £28bn-a-year green investment fund; and he’s been reluctant to deviate from “Tory fiscal rules that lock the country into dismal austerity policies”.
And yet, in keeping with his co-religionist Jeremy Corbyn, it appeared foreign policy had decided the matter for Jones. Starmer’s equivocation over Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which Jones termed “the great crime of our age”, had added “moral indecency to the pile of dishonesty and vacuity”.
I don’t quite agree with Jones on Gaza, but he is right to suggest that Starmer is a liar1. The contradiction between Starmer telling LBC that Israel had the right to cut off power and water from Palestine then later claiming he never said this is undeniable. As it’s implausible that he forgot his previous position, he must have lied.
But I suspect it’s not only Starmer kidding us. While I believe the sincerity of Jones’ objections to Labour’s new policy agenda, I suspect it stings less than the internal putsch Starmer has organised against the Labour left. As Jones alleges, the ambition of the leader’s lieutenants is that “anyone who wants to redistribute wealth and power is denied a voice in Starmer’s administration”.
And it’s not merely in southern Britain that things aren’t to Jones’ liking. Having recently taken a column in the Scottish nationalist paper The National, Jones has arrived just as the Scottish National Party imploded, its incumbent leader Humza Yousaf sinking into the political abyss after scuppering a deal with his Green party coalition partners.
Others can talk about the merits or demerits thereof. But read this opening to Jones’ most recent piece:
“There’s a good rule in politics which has served me well. Let’s call it the Dora Gaitskell Rule. Dora was the wife of then-Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. After a fiery speech at a Labour Party conference in 1962 opposing the UK entering the European Economic Community, she turned to him and said: ‘All the wrong people are cheering.’”
This kind of thinking can be found in the corollary that a policy can be justified by on the grounds that it’ll ‘annoy the right people’. A migration policy might be dubious, but it’ll annoy the racists; this education reform is unsound, but it’ll annoy the wokies.
Most politics is fundamentally coalition building, keeping in with the right people for reasons of horse trading. But an independent columnist should have the integrity to champion good policy irrespective of who is in favour of it.
In Jones’ case, I think it’s what comes of identifying too closely with Labour since he joined at as a 15-year-old. It seems to be a problem that is more likely to affect Labour than the Conservatives. While I’m sure you get Tory families, they don’t seem as attached to their party as the other side.
I can understand older relatives having strong opinions about who their young should vote for, and shake their heads and tut when the sprogs choose poorly. To feel emotional about leaving as party, as Jones clearly does because his family’s history intertwines with Labour’s, is too strong an attachment for clear thinking.
Contra Mrs Gaitskell, who cares if the wrong people are cheering? What is it to me that some deplorables support the same cause as me? Does an opinion become foolish just because a fool holds it? No moreso than an opinion being correct because a smart person subscribes to it.
The only independence of mind that matters is that which is willing to take lines that are unpopular with your peers. Jones’ view is a concession that he doesn’t want to be seen associated with the wrong people, and that he uses this as a proxy for considering which policies to back.
Alas, the wrong people are sometimes right – which is more than can be said for the Dora Gaitskell Rule.
Jones uses the term ‘gaslighting’, which is an overstatement if he’s genuinely accusing Starmer of trying to convince us all we’re mad. I think it’s better to call people liars if that’s what you think.
Owen jones is a vile human who hates women.