Alan Sillitoe: 'To hell with New Labour'
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'Vote for New Labour? No way. I hope they go down the fucking chute.'
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Alan Sillitoe, author of such angry young classics as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, has lost faith in the Labour Party.
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'I have voted Labour all my life, they were always the party that offered the most hope. But I will never vote for them again. Never. They are so out of touch with ordinary people who are trying to get on with their lives. They just sit above us all, not knowing or caring what we are doing, and running the country with no regard for the people who live in it.
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'I mean the bombing of Serbia, I just couldn't believe it. All the lies they told us to justify dropping bombs on people's homes and workplaces, calling it a "just war" and all that, when in fact it was an imperialist war in my books. And they didn't just kill people in Serbia, they treated the rest of us as if we were idiots during that war.
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'There was a time when a working man could vote Labour in some hope that they might represent his interests - now Labour have their own political and financial interests and to hell with the rest of us. Well to hell with them, too.'
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Mark Seddon: 'Old Labour still exists. Somewhere.'
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'Will I vote for New Labour? Well, I'll certainly vote Labour.'
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Mark Seddon, editor of the left-wing newspaper Tribune, will put an 'x' next to New Labour at the general election - but not without reservations.
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'People should always have reservations about everything they do. The idea of 100 percent loyalty just doesn't wash - especially 100 percent loyalty to something like New Labour, which is pretty much just an advertising slogan.
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'But I've been a member of the Labour Party since I was 15. And for people like me and others on the left it has always been more than a party - it's about the ideas and the principles. New Labour may have ditched some of those principles and Old Labour may be much weakened - but Old Labour does still exist in the party, somewhere.
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'New Labour may not exist for much longer. Peter Mandelson was probably the only true believer in New Labour - the shifting of power from the grassroots to the centre - so his departure is phenomenally important because it has weakened the whole project that he was pushing. So perhaps Old Labour principles will be remembered now.
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'I'll vote Labour - but I have to say, personally, I'd be in a real quandary if I was in an area where there was a New Labour hyper-Blairite up against a green, or an old-fashioned liberal, or a socialist. Then the choice wouldn't be so easy.'
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
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