Letter to a Young Fabian - stop sabotaging the movement, and yourself
and any young politico engaged in left wing societies
Dear Young Fabian,
I still have three years left of membership to the youth wing of the Fabian Society (a Labour adjacent think tank/membership organisation) but have very much checked out of its machinations. For the years I was most active, first as chair of the Law Network, then as Parliamentary Liaison officer on its national executive, I got tired of the worst part of politics: pettiness. I am writing this letter to set out the habits that made this wing of an otherwise treasured society a burden and which I hope you will avoid. I will also mention those you should embrace, for they are what makes the social trauma worth it.
Any society or club made up of young politicos illicits complicated feelings for people in the political circuit. Many of us cut our teeth in one of those when as students and then recent graduates looked for a hook to express our political views and find likeminded peers. The friendships we make there often follow us throughout our careers. Many Labour MPs met each other for the first time as Young Fabians before they run for selection.
I ran for Chair of the Law Network (being a law graduate who gave pro bono advice and representing people in social security tribunals) after a year of coming to its meetings. I was challenged by a man who had zero legal background and whose first meeting with the network was the AGM. He lost and we never heard of him again until he run for the national executive committee and started a slander campaign against me (as I was also running for the exec) based on a Facebook post I had posted some years back where I argued that freedom of religion rights are a valid consideration in the Supreme Court case where a religious baker was asked to make a wedding cake with a pro-gay marriage message. Frankly a milquetoast opinion, but this was the beginning of my disillusionment with the level of nuance allowed by people in a society that is broadly seen as ‘centrist’. For the crime of that Facebook post rumours about me being a homophobe festered during Labour Party conference, until a friendly member approached me to ask what was behind them and I broke into tears realising that the whispering and looks I thought I was picking up weren’t paranoid PTSD from the years of bullying I endured in high school, but an actual character assassination campaign by a guy who did not want to lose a second election against me. Lose the election he did of course, because sanctimoniousness never makes people like you so here is my first lesson, Young Fabian:
Sanctimoniousness may make people pretend to agree with you out of fear but will never make them respect you.
Not to dig deeper into the gay wedding cake hole I dug myself into years ago but what the claimants were looking for at the time was respect, not a wedding cake with a pro-gay marriage message, and that is not something you can sue out of someone. Similarly, in politics you can make other people, particularly if they are young and insecure about their place in the Westminster bubble, like your tweets and sign up to your pledges but you can’t follow them into the voting booth. You can’t spy their private whatsapp groups. You can’t eavesdrop on their conversations at 2 am outside Player’s bar. If you are constantly telling everyone what a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, bad socialist person they are if they don’t do as you say, you might be able to bully them to publicly agree with you out of fear of socially ostracising them. This is a very common occurrence in young political circles but it is not the same as doing the hard graft of engaging and convincing and befriending. From experience I can also tell you that relationships like these don’t last. There is no short cut to political credibility and people don’t like feeling manipulated into doing things they don't want. You may force an instagram influencer to post a black square on their feed and seize posting for a week but you haven’t magically created an enlightened champion of anti-racism by doing that.
Avoid people who are liabilities.
If you are sure you are not the self-righteous bastard yourself, avoid people who have a tendency to ascribe every mundane detail of normal life to an -ism. They are a plague and I won’t do any throat clearing here, if you want to take this out of context and pretend that I am suggesting something I am clearly not, be my guest, I don’t check twitter more than once a day and neither should you, Young Fabian.
These are people looking for opportunities to ‘call out’ things: i.e. for socially acceptable ways to bully people. They are often people who don’t have much social capital to speak of because of poor social skills and unpalatable personalities. Rather than addressing their personal weaknesses, which would include holding themselves accountable for things like their career not progressing as they would like it, not having genuine friends, not being invited to things because they aren’t pleasant to be around, they like to put the blame on some imaginary oppressor, which is often a more successful peer who did not pay them enough attention. That is particularly the case as these young politicos start working and don’t manage to get the jobs and careers they believe they deserved. Usually it will be because they are not very good at what they do and don’t accept or work on feedback. No matter their personal responsibility, their resentment will lead them to attack anyone in their vicinity who will let them close enough to gather evidence of anything that can be misconstrued as the wrong type of politics. This is standard practice in such spaces and you should bounce as soon as you realise a person is prone to such ‘call outs’, even if you think they have no reason to target you (yet!!). First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist …etc etc
Pick your battles.
Young Fabian, if your career is to be of any value in politics, it needs to be long. Young people can be stupid. I say this with love, as a still young person. You need time and experience to become truly useful in politics. What you have now is energy and ambition, and you should use these to take the advice of people who are wiser than you (that’s not me, by the way). For that reason it is not a terrible idea to lay low while you are still deciding on what you believe about each topic, especially the trickier subjects. Very few people remain ideologically identical from adolescence to old age, and these are not people you want to emulate. You also need time to learn how to express your views in a productive way. When I was in university the only way I knew how to argue was to shout down my opponent- hardly an effective campaigning method (though producers seem to always call me back on tv panels when I get angry, again, I am still young). If you are picking up a fight with every other MP on twitter before you’ve ever met them in real life or asked them why they chose to do whatever it is you took issue with you will make enemies very quickly. Even people you vehemently disagree with have something to teach you. So, don’t make people hate you just yet, and on the basis of half-formed opinions, there will be plenty of time for people to hate your authentic self down the line, once you learn how to show up as that.
Stop wasting time on fluff
Left wing groups love processes. Rules, committees, motions, vice chair of this, officer for that. Your mom just submitted a motion to me in secret which says that she will never vote for the Labour Party because of how unbearable her child has started to sound ever since they joined Labour Students.
A few years back safeguarding became a big issue in the Young Fabians. There was a big scandal involving a female supporter of the slate I was running on being told by a guy on an opposing slate that there would be ‘repercussions’ if she did not support them. This sparked a year long disciplinary process that overshadowed everything else we did as part of the executive committee. The Labour party’s woes with anti-semitism and other thorny subjects (e.g. trans rights) gave the opportunity to members of the exec to do a lot of things that as far as I can tell contributed nothing intellectually or materially to the Labour movement. One of the first priorities of the exec was to pass a motion condemning anti-semitism, a second was to pass a safeguarding policy. Any normal person off the street would ask, were the Fabians ever in favour of anti-semitism? Of course not, but passing a motion meant that some people got the opportunity to have the floor and show what good anti-racism campaigners they are for a few minutes and post on twitter about the brave action they took to fight anti-semitism within Labour’s ranks. This made zero difference to the lives of jewish people affected by anti-semitism, if anything it was a tedious burden on jewish members who had to pretend to be grateful to the exec for speaking words in a room surrounded by people with identical beliefs. Stunning! Brave! I am not saying these people are bad for wasting all that time on a school night in a stuffy room off St James park. I am saying for the love of God, don’t waste time in obvious self-indulgence.
These time wasting efforts are being emulated as we speak, as the revisioning of the safeguarding policy of the young Fabians is still ongoing, sounding more obnoxious than ever- 5 years since its first inception. A troll commenter asked on one of the tweets gushing over the importance and bravery of the Young Fabians’ safeguarding policy ‘when will you stop hating the working class’ and I agree. Having a ‘safeguarding’ policy for a THINK TANK is a distraction tactic.
Why would you need it for an organisation that undertakes such dangerous activities such as panel events, roundtables, policy consultations and the most risky of all: boat parties where once you are on the boat you are trapped with all the people who think debating safeguarding policies for a think tank is an acceptable way to spend your Wednesday evening.
The only answer I have is that you need to spent time discussing such minutia because you don’t want to face the fact that you are otherwise powerless, or you want to avoid doing the things that would actually get you closer to power: consistent, professional work into coming up with policies a political party can use and strategies on how to communicate these effectively. But holding a consultation and writing a policy pamphlet takes many months and a lot of work. If people who are wasting time on safeguarding policies were willing or capable of carrying that out then maybe they would also be able to get actual jobs in policy and politics and they wouldn’t need the Young Fabians for their power fix.
Young Fabian, there is a better way to do things. Every minute you spent debating something that only exists in the minds of other people from your exact demographic (any and all motions, safeguarding policies etc.) is time you could be using to do policy research or producing communication that makes sense (the Young Fabians podcast is a good example of that, another is the mentorship programme).
Don’t give up
If we all chicken out of political spaces because of a handful of disfunctional people OR toxic influences that have leaked into good people, then we cannot complain when our treasured organisations disintegrate into chaos. If enough fair minded people remain they can challenge those who want to bully their way into relevance. Also, what do you think happens when you enter actual politics, either in local or national goverment? Voters and your local Labour Party members won’t be whisking you off your feet singing Kumbaya when you come knocking on their doors asking for their votes. They will be just as unimpressed and hostile as your current political peers, if maybe less conniving. For that kind of resilience, a left wing society is good training ground.
I hope you manage to avoid these pitfalls and I hope you don’t take it to heart if you are already guilty for some of the offences I describe above. There is time and space for redemption for all of us. When I was in university I banned Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ from playing in student union spaces. I would angrily ask the bar staff to change the station whenever the song would come on once the ban was voted in. I was very popular amongst students but probably too obnoxious and unproductive to survive an adult career in politics. If you need advice, reach out. To me, sure, but also others. You’d be surprised how nice people can be when you approach them positively, for help, rather than with hostility, looking for blood. Political spaces are tricky but also wonderful. We are fulfilling our childhood dreams by being here and have a raison d'être that’s a healing balm against the cynical humdrum of many other career paths.
In solidarity,
a still Young Fabian