Labour’s radicals need to grow up

As the well-worn cliché has it: if you’re not a socialist at 16, you don’t have a heart; if you’re still one at 60, you don’t have a head. The Labour party is on the brink of extinction. To survive, its members must use their heads.

At 16, I was a fanatical socialist, reading Lenin, wearing a Chairman Mao hat and marching against the Iraq war. At 19, I went to Cuba. I learned about the revolution and planted crops with farmers, working with Amnesty workers and middle-aged Trots. The year I left university, David Cameron was elected prime minister and, for the first time since I was in primary school, we had a Tory government.

In this new and troubling era, I joined the organisation I’d been told was run by warmongering Thatcherites: the Labour party. Having learned from Marxists what working-class people need, I began to knock on doors and ask them what they want.