On behalf of the mob

Intimidation in politics is no laughing matter. There are parts of the world where airing your political views will get you thrown in jail, beaten up, or worse. Westminster, it is fair to say, is not normally one of those places.

This makes events in the past 36 hours of Labour politics perplexing. As the most right-wing government in living memory was appointed - Britain now has a Chancellor who holds the general public responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and a Foreign Secretary who wrote a poem about the  Turkish president having sex with a goat* - the theatre of conflict in Labour's civil war moved to the NEC.

The NEC voted to place Corbyn on the ballot without requiring that he seek nominations. This much is good news. What is less fantastic is that this vote was conducted by secret ballot. Corbyn and others voted against having a secret ballot. They were right to do this: NEC members ought to be accountable to those who elect them, and this requires their voting record be public. Accepting this is part of what prominent elected office in a democratic organisation involves: it is not everyone's cup of tea, it inevitably attracts lobbying and criticism. It can be hard. But this is democracy in action: NEC members (or MPs, for that matter) do not hold their position by right. They are put there by members and accountable to members. Lobbying, arguing, disagreeing with representatives is part of healthy democracy. To subscribe to the idea that the people (the demos - those of us NEC right-winger Johanna Baxter called, in solid Burkean conservative tradition, the 'mob') get their input only at election time is not to take seriously what it is for the demos to rule.

This does not mean that anything goes. It hardly need be said that the putting of a brick through Angela Eagle's window is disgraceful, and the sharing of Baxter's own personal mobile number on-line should be condemned. However, there are channels to deal with this kind of behaviour: legal recourses and internal Party procedure. These exceptional cases are being used as cover for a broadening of the understanding of 'intimidation' to block avenues of accountability and undermine the Corbyn campaign. So, the Guardian reports of Baxter:

“A prominent journalist was texting members of the NEC, saying they had to vote for Jeremy, a union general secretary was phoning round members of the NEC telling them they had to vote for Jeremy,” she said. “It is intimidation and he endorsed it.”

It cannot be stated loudly or often enough: the described behaviour is not intimidation. It is lobbying. And it is legitimate lobbying, as Labour's ruling body preprared to meet to make one of the most important decisions that has ever fallen to it. The fact that an NEC member is seemingly traumatised at the thought of a union leader, in particular, intervening in the politics of a party called, well, the Labour Party, is a timely reminder of why we should elected a better NEC this year.

Lobbying is not intimidation. Nor is anything which makes someone feel intimidated automatically intimidation. Peoples' responses can be unreasonable, and the ruling caste of a Labour bureaucracy that have got used to a professionalised model of politics which isolates them from the concerns and passions of the mass of humanity seem systematically conditioned to respond unreasonably to political pressure. Add to this a culture in which a therapeutic cult of universal victimhood has increasingly substituted itself for proper politics and in which disagreement itself is considered pathological - for which someone's much-vaunted right to their opinion is translated as their right not to have their opinion challenged - and you have a recipe for wrapping New Labour in cotton wool and, absurdly, claiming that the political force which rained bombs down on Iraq is a delicate snowflake, in need of special protection.

You have, moreover, an excuse for the further privatisation of politics. Engaging with the leadership election is to be something that happens in the seclusion of one's living room, on the internet, with a solitary vote. Participation in a mass political organisation turns out to be akin to watching porn. The merits of the candidates cannot be debated at Party meetings, because there will be no Party meetings until the election is over. Members are, in a masterstroke of collective passive aggression, being intimidated into not lobbying representatives or arguing on behalf of a candidate, lest they be thought abusive.

There are victims in this country. They will sleep on the streets tonight, or will be struggling to feed their children on the few coins they have for the rest of the week, or are crying alone in detention centres. They deserve representation, and that is why we, the Left, should not allow ourselves to be intimated.

*A gaffe which, given recent allegations about the former Prime Minister, if nothing else demonstrates an impressive amount of Tory chutzpah.