Years ago I used to spend one evening a month in some dank and frowzy local authority hall attempting to prevent crazed and scary lesbians from becoming my local MP or councillor. This was during my time as a Labour party activist in south London — and attendance at the staggeringly dull ward meetings was compulsory for a small group of us who hoped that one day the party might select candidates who had not whizzed in from the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Zone, that strange, dark and cold place on the edge of our solar system from which all manner of trouble emanates. But we were in a minority and the local party always selected crazed and scary lesbians, Roz Termagant from the important steering group, Streatham Wimmen Against Everything, Fran Harridan from the Brixton Radical Lesbian Workshop and so on. Their lesbianism wasn’t a problem, although it was worn as a badge of honour. It was everything else.
Now, I was on the Tribunite left of the party — nationalise the top 200 companies, tax the rich, give up the nukes etc — but this lot were in a very different place indeed. They were very radical on issues like, uh, lesbianism and the patriarchal society, disability, race awareness and the loathsome white hegemony. But they were also implacably middle-class, however much they might wish to deny it, and they clearly hated and despised the working class for what they perceived as its reactionary impulses, lumpenness and stupidity.
This was my introduction to what we might describe as the metropolitan faux-left, a grouping which within the Labour party was far more estranged from the roots of Labour than even those loons in Coventry and Liverpool who signed up to the Trot entryist cabal, Militant Tendency.
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