There’s a particular misery in expecting betrayal and then experiencing it as a shock.
This, I think, explains quite a lot of the emotional life of the British left. Not all of it, obviously; even I’m not foolish enough to attempt a Unified Theory of Labour People Being Cross Online, which would be less an essay than a cry for help. But it explains something real about the argument between Labour’s moderate left and its more idealistic left: the argument is so bitter not because the two sides are strangers, but because they’re relatives.
A Conservative government disappoints the idealistic left by being a Conservative government. It cuts, privatises, moralises, disciplines, tightens, lectures and, depending on the vintage, occasionally declares that society either doesn’t exist or should be made available to shareholders by Wednesday. None of this is surprising. It may be enraging, but it isn’t intimate.
Labour is different. Labour disappoints from inside the family story.
This is why Freud’s phrase, the narcissism of small differences, is useful here. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud observed that it’s often adjoining and related communities, not wholly alien ones, that sustain the fiercest feuds. The line usually quoted is this: “It is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds.” The point isn’t that their differences are imaginary. Small differences can be real, consequential and morally serious. The point is that closeness changes their emotional charge. It makes disagreement feel like betrayal, compromise feel like contamination, and ordinary political difference feel like a struggle for possession of the same soul.
The moderate Labour left and the idealistic left don’t hate each other because they disagree about everything. They hate each other because they agree about too much.
Both, broadly speaking, live somewhere within the same moral tradition. They believe in public services, redistribution, dignity at work, protection against market cruelty, some version of equality, some suspicion of inherited privilege, some commitment to collective provision, some discomfort with a society in which wealth can buy escape from shared failure. They sing from the same battered old hymn sheet in the same “Broad Church”.
That shared inheritance is precisely what makes the argument so painful. The idealistic left doesn’t look at Labour moderates and see Tories - or rather, it sometimes says it does, especially when it’s in one of its more theatrical moods, but that isn’t quite the underlying grievance. A Tory is an opponent. A Labour moderate is something more infuriating: someone who uses the same language, claims the same history, honours the same political saints, and then turns around and says that half the programme is unworkable, unaffordable, electorally toxic, institutionally naïve, procedurally impossible or best left for another parliament.
The anger comes from the fact that moderate Labour is close enough to the idealistic left to be judged as a failed version of itself, rather than a successful version of something else.
That’s the agony of proximity, summed up in a nutshell.
And I think this has probably got worse over time. For older kinds of radical politics, this proximity was easier to manage because the distance was clearer. There have always been arguments between Labour moderates, socialists, communists, trade unionists, liberals, syndicalists, Trotskyists, Bennites, soft-left organisers, Fabian gradualists, municipal socialists and so on. The left has never lacked internal disagreement. If anything, one of its less charming inheritances is a capacity to turn even minor procedural questions into acts of metaphysical warfare. But the forms of contact were different.
There was a time, and not a lost golden age so much as a different configuration of misery, when many radicals and many Labour people inhabited more separate spaces. In the early 2000s, for instance, the average radical student society and the average university Labour club were not necessarily recruiting from identical pools, even where they existed on the same campus. The anti-Iraq War, anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist campaign space often had its own meetings, jargon, friendships and rituals of exasperation. Labour students had theirs. Each group could dislike the other at a reasonably healthy distance. The radicals could regard Labour as a compromised imperialist machine; Labour people could regard the radicals as unrealistic purists with an overdeveloped taste for fiery denunciation. Everyone could go home feeling confirmed in their prejudices, which is one of the underrated pleasures of politics.
This separation had obvious costs. I concede as a self identified Labour moderate that Labour has often needed pressure from its left. There are plenty of instances where the people dismissed as unrealistic irritants have turned out to have been correct earlier than the mainstream: on deregulation, the banks, climate, and a dozen other questions, the respectable centre of Labour opinion has not exactly covered itself in glory by taking the slower route. Distance can preserve comity, but it can also preserve complacency. If Labour moderates never hear from the idealistic left, or hear from it only as a caricature, they become too comfortable with the assumptions of the institutions around them.
Still, distance did one useful thing. It kept expectation under control.
If you believed Labour was fundamentally a capitalist, imperial, managerial party, you didn’t have to spend every day being surprised that Labour behaved like one. You might vote for it reluctantly as the least-worst option. You might campaign against it. You might try to influence it from outside. You might have some grudging theory about lesser evils, parliamentary arithmetic and the need to stop the Conservatives from feeding another public service into the shredder. But you didn’t necessarily expect Labour to become the pure instrument of your politics. Your disdain performed a psychological function: it protected you from disappointment.
That arrangement was already weakening before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, partly because social media had made political distance much harder to sustain. The old internet had its own insanities, but it was often more segmented. Forums, mailing lists, blogs, student societies, pamphlet groups and factional publications each had their own audiences and their own little economies of approval. The contemporary internet is much more like being trapped in the same endless car journey with everyone you’ve ever disagreed with, except the car is on fire, the algorithm is choosing the music, and someone in the back seat has just discovered quote-tweeting.
But Corbyn changed the structure of expectation in a more profound way. He didn’t merely represent a left-wing challenge to the Labour establishment. He made the capture of Labour by the idealistic left seem plausible. For a period, the party - to the Left - didn’t look like a grim electoral compromise to be endured, or a hostile machine to be pressured from outside. It looked like a vehicle. It looked like a door that had unexpectedly opened. The old radical posture, in which Labour was irredeemably compromised and therefore emotionally discounted, became harder to maintain when an unreformed Bennite socialist had actually won the leadership of the Labour Party, then in 2017 fought and nearly-almost-didn’t-lose a general election as Labour’s candidate for Prime Minister.
Whatever else one thinks about Corbynism, and I have no desire here to relitigate every argument from 2015 to 2019 because some of us have work in the morning, it changed the emotional ownership of Labour. It brought into and around the party a large number of people whose politics were not formed by the old assumption that Labour would inevitably fail them. For them, Labour was not simply the disappointing parliamentary wing of a broader labour movement. For a while, it became the site at which politics might be transformed.
That’s why the aftermath was so bitter. Once you’ve seen your politics take the leadership of the Labour Party, it’s hard to return to detached contempt. The institution has been too close. It has worn your colours. It has sung your songs. It has sent fundraising emails in your idiom. It has made promises that sounded, to some people, like the end of managed decline and the beginning of moral seriousness. When it then reverts, compromises, retreats, triangulates or elects a leadership whose whole pitch is restoration after rupture, it doesn’t simply feel like defeat. It feels like dispossession.
This is where I think the narcissism of small differences reasserts itself. The hostility between the moderate Labour left and the idealistic left isn’t produced by simple ideological distance. If distance alone explained hostility, Labour people would spend most of their emotional energy arguing with Conservatives and Reactionaries of the right-wing parties. They do argue with Conservatives, obviously, but those arguments often have a different texture. They’re oppositional, not familial. The peculiar venom of Labour-left arguments comes from adjacency: from the sense that the other side is occupying territory that ought properly to belong to you.
The moderate left says: we share your values, but we have to win.
The idealistic left says: we share your values, which is why your compromises are unforgivable.
The moderate left says: look at the electorate, the press, the markets, the parliamentary party, the civil service, the bond markets, the inheritance from the last government, the sheer difficulty of governing a fractious country under fiscal constraint.
The idealistic left says: look at poverty, housing, climate, Gaza, inequality, collapsing public services, child hunger, the cruelty of the border, the grotesque fact that this wealthy country keeps rediscovering Dickensian social conditions and calling it realism.
Both are looking at something real. That’s what makes the argument hard.
There is a boring-but-true answer here, but it doesn’t quite settle the issue. Labour is a mass electoral party in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. It can’t function as the direct expression of one ideological tendency because it needs to assemble a coalition large enough to win power across places that don’t all want the same things. It has to speak to public-sector workers and small business owners, renters and homeowners, graduates and non-graduates, metropolitan liberals and socially conservative Labour switchers, trade unionists and people who think trade unions are always holding the country to ransom, people who read the Guardian and people who think the Guardian should be composted for the good of national morale. It has to win under media conditions that are often hostile, economic conditions it doesn’t choose, and institutional constraints that no amount of moral clarity can simply wish away.
This means Labour will always translate moral claims into something smaller, duller and more compromised than the idealistic left wants. Sometimes that translation will be defensible. Sometimes it will be cowardly. Sometimes it will be a strategic necessity dressed up as a virtue. Sometimes it will be a failure of imagination disguised as seriousness. Sometimes it will be, in the technical language of political analysis, absolute nonsense. But the act of translation itself is unavoidable. A party that wants to govern must turn values into manifesto lines, spending commitments, legislative time, delivery mechanisms, departmental priorities, fiscal rules, procurement decisions, parliamentary management, press lines and things ministers can say on breakfast television without detonating the day’s comms grid.
That isn’t romantic. It isn’t even especially noble. But it is what a governing party does.
The idealistic left often wants Labour to behave as a movement of moral clarification. Labour, when it is serious about power, behaves as a coalition-management machine with a moral inheritance attached. This doesn’t mean the idealistic left is wrong to want more. It means the institution it’s trying to pressure is not built to become what it wants.
This is the contradiction that produces so much rage. The idealistic left, both within Labour and without it, has a systemic critique of Labour that explains perfectly why Labour disappoints it: Labour is too attached to electorally-motivated caution, too constrained by elite opinion, too eager to reassure capital, too frightened of the press, too captured by the assumptions of Westminster, too willing to trim its principles in pursuit of office. But having made that diagnosis, parts of the idealistic left then react to each new compromise as though it were an inexplicable personal betrayal rather than the predictable behaviour of the institution they both helped to create and claim to understand.
This is not a plea for cynicism. Cynicism is often just wounded idealism trying to sound clever. Nor is it a defence of Labour moderates, who have their own bad habits: confusing caution with wisdom, treating left-wing pressure as childish even when it’s morally necessary, mistaking electability for virtue, and using the alleged sensibilities of the average voter as a ventriloquist’s dummy for whatever they already wanted to do. There is a type of Labour person who can turn any moral demand into a focus-group problem and any structural injustice into a comms risk. This person should be listened to, because politics does involve persuasion, but they should be gently prevented from designing civilisation.
But idealism has its own failure mode. It can confuse intensity with strategy. It can mistake the refusal to compromise for the possession of a programme. It can treat the moral inadequacy of moderation as proof that maximalism would work. It can assume that because a demand is just, the route to implementing it must be straightforward. It can understate the coercive force of institutions, the conservatism of the mass of voters, the limits of parliamentary time, the brittleness of governing coalitions, and the tendency of the right to unite around power while the left forms a working group on whether the concept of unity is sufficiently emancipatory.
This is why Labour will always disappoint the idealistic left. Not because the idealistic left is wrong about everything. It plainly isn’t. Often it’s right about the direction of travel before the rest of the political system can admit the road exists to travel down. But being right about the moral horizon is not the same as having a theory of how a mass party reaches it while staying electorally viable, institutionally coherent and capable of governing the country it actually has rather than the country its members wish existed.
The distinction that matters is between pressure and expectation.
Pressure is necessary. Labour should always be pressured from its left. It should be made to feel uncomfortable about poverty, climate, housing, welfare, migration, war, wages, private profit in public services, democratic reform and the hundred small cruelties that polite managerial politics learns to file under unfortunate trade-offs. A Labour Party without pressure from its left becomes grey, bloodless, complacent and too easily absorbed into the worldview of the state it’s supposed to change. The idealistic left performs a vital function when it keeps alive claims that would otherwise be buried under realism, process and the deadening phrase ‘tough choices’.
Expectation is different. Expectation says that Labour would naturally become a radical moral instrument if only the wrong people stopped preventing it. Expectation treats each compromise as a deviation from Labour’s true essence rather than a feature of its position in the political system. Expectation turns pressure into recurring heartbreak.
The idealistic left doesn’t need to stop pressuring Labour. It needs to stop being surprised by Labour.
Likewise, Labour’s moderates don’t need to accept every demand made from their left. Some demands are poorly thought through. Some would lose, or cost more than they would buy. Some would fail on implementation. Some are slogans pretending to be policy. Some are admirable in aim and useless in design, which is a more common category than anyone involved in politics likes to admit. But moderates do need to stop treating left pressure as a kind of adolescent weather system. The fact that a demand is inconvenient doesn’t mean it’s unserious. The fact that a policy is difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The fact that a group of people are annoying doesn’t mean they’re wrong, which is a tragic but unavoidable fact of political life.
The best version of Labour politics probably needs both impulses. It needs the idealistic left to widen the moral imagination of the party, and it needs the moderate left to ask what survives contact with elections, institutions, practical delivery and the public finances. The trouble is that each side tends to experience the other not as a corrective, but as a kind of corruption. To the idealistic left, moderation looks like betrayal. To the moderate left, idealism looks like self-indulgence.
This is not unique to Labour. It’s a recurring pattern among related political communities. The faction next door is often more infuriating than the enemy across the road because the faction next door competes for the same symbols, the same history, the same members, the same moral vocabulary and the same claim to authenticity. The fight is not only over policy. It is over who gets to say what the project really means.
That, in the end, is why proximity hurts. The stranger merely opposes you. The relative lets you down.
So yes, Labour will always disappoint the idealistic left. It will disappoint because it’s close enough to the ideal to be judged by it, but compromised enough by its actual function to fail it. It will disappoint because it carries the language of transformation into the machinery of coalition-building. It will disappoint because it asks morally serious people to accept partial victories, ugly sequencing, tactical silence, delayed justice and policies that move in inches when the scale of the problem demands miles. It will disappoint because it sometimes lacks courage, and sometimes because courage alone wouldn’t solve the problem. It will disappoint because any party capable of forming a government in Britain will, by definition, contain people whose politics are less radical than the leftmost people needed to campaign for it.
None of this means the idealistic left should go quiet. Quite the opposite. The point of understanding disappointment is not to make peace with every compromise; it’s to know which compromises are worth fighting, which are structurally baked in, and which are symptoms of a party losing touch with its own moral reasons for existing.
But pressure only remains useful when it’s attached to a theory of what the institution actually is. Labour is not the parliamentary wing of moral innocence. It’s not a seminar, a protest camp, a trade union branch, a tenants’ meeting, a student occupation or a group chat with standing orders. It’s a mass electoral party in a country that often votes cautiously, reads politics through partial and hostile media, rewards the right for forms of ruthlessness it punishes on the left, and expects Labour governments to repair the roof while being shouted at for the weather.
The idealistic left is right to want more. It’s often right about what’s missing. It’s sometimes right before everyone else, which is one of the reasons everyone else finds it so irritating. But wanting Labour to be better is not the same as expecting Labour to become something other than Labour.
That is the agony of proximity. It’s not that the idealistic left and the moderate Labour left are too far apart to understand each other. It’s that they are near enough to recognise the same inheritance, near enough to feel entitled to it, and different enough to keep accusing each other of betrayal.
The tragedy isn’t that they have nothing in common. The tragedy is that they have just enough.