John Harris, the mop-topped commentator from Manchester, better known as a music journalist (and a very fine one) than a political correspondent, is in a pickle. Having voted Labour his entire adult life, he now finds himself horrified by the New Labour project, and by Blair and Blairism in particular, and wonders whether it isn’t time to swear allegiance to another party. In Harris’s childhood home ‘the Labour Party was like Church’, and that morning in 1985 when, as a 15-year-old, he came down to breakfast to find a Labour party membership form next to his cereal bowl it was the ‘equivalent of Confirmation’. In So Now Who Do We Vote For?, this once loyal altar boy to Labourism weighs up the pros and cons of excommunicating himself and seeking solace elsewhere.
I have never voted Labour (or Tory or Lib Dem, in case you’re curious) and have no loyalty to any of today’s sorry excuses for political parties, but even I felt a pang of sympathy with Harris’s predicament.
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