Friendships with the Enemy

It's good to see a new Labour MP making waves for the right reasons for a change. As readers well know, Laura Pidcock has raised a few establishment eyebrows since taking her seat in the House. Her maiden speech called out the clubby atmosphere and alienating pomp of the Commons, and rightly so. It's an affront to democracy. And this week she has earned the self-same elite's opprobrium for saying she has no intention of chumming up with members on the benches opposite. According to her interview on Refinery29, she wouldn't hang out with Tory women as they're "an enemy to lots of women". Even worse she elaborated on the theme on Skwawkbox.

To be honest, it's gratifying seeing people splutter and gibber in response. Because Laura has said an unsayable everyone knows is the truth. She is elected to do a job for her constituents, and she will in turns be attacked, blocked, and hampered by people who think poverty is the fault of poor people themselves, are happy seeing the health service fleeced by moneyed interests, and give more of a toss about the bongs of Elizabeth Tower than the lives destroyed by Grenfell tower. Because this is politics and basic honesty is absent from most criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership's supporters, Laura has been forced to clarify her statement. As was clear from the interview, she was referring to Tory politicians only and not constituents who didn't happen to vote for her. Her critics know it too.

What to make of Laura's position? In sociology there is a broad scholarship around friendship and how it is changing. For example, 20 years ago for most people in Britain friends were people they knew through co-present interaction. In 2017, there is a very good chance these are matched if not exceeded by a large number of friends you haven't met in the real world but who inhabit the digital spaces you frequent. Nevertheless the social consequences are unchanged. Friendship brings people into closer social proximity, and are founded on shared experiences and intimacies. They can be powerful social bonds that stretch across a life and can weather social difference and division. Small wonder Laura Pidcock wants to avoid friendship with Tories.

The pressure of and on the Commons combined with the somewhat unique situation of being a MP can lead some honourable members to earnestly believe they're all in it together. Given the proximity of the politics of a number of Labour and Tory MPs, some slip into it rather too easily and their party labels appear nothing more than a ticket affording them a seat on the green benches. Yet they are not. MPs from the two main parties sit there because their affiliations represent two irreconcilable coalitions of interests, though until recently it suited both to pretend class and class conflict didn't exist. A shame that the general election shattered such illusions. Labour's job then is to give expression to the interests that are finding their political feet through the party and, in turn, help recompose its constituency as a political movement. This requires a certain clarity regards what Labour is now and should be about, and notwithstanding the limits of Corbynist politics as a (radical) strand of top down, we'll-do-politics-for-you Labourism, that politicisation is an ongoing process. This is undoubtedly helped by Labour MPs stressing the political distance between themselves and the Tories. After all, a wider divide between the two only reflects what's happening in the real world.

Does this have to rule out personal friendships? Of course, no one is requesting the leader's office issue a diktat about who Labour MPs can and can't hang about with, but equally there's no mileage in supposing cross-party friendships do not have political consequences. For some Labour MPs just as the passage into the Commons and the trappings of office confirms in their minds their standing as someone who has made it, so can relationships with well heeled opposite numbers. It can be flattering that a member of the boss class condescends to speak with them, asks them out for a drink and, gasp, occasionally takes them into their confidence. We know from our every day relationships how taking mates to task or telling them they're wrong is tough. This is no different for MPs. In short, friendships with the enemy get in the way and make you less effective, a point so obvious I'm amazed these very basics of politics need spelling out.

That, however, does not mean rudeness. As per my unsolicited advice reworked after the Stoke by-election, defending and pushing the interests Labour MPs are in the House to champion does involve building relationships with the other side. Being pleasant and friendly, establishing working relationships over issues of common interest, collaborating where suitable on committees, letting your parliamentary researchers circulate and schmooze, all this is the hallmark of being an effective representative of our class. And all this, as Laura made perfectly clear, is what she is prepared to do. She does that and not the rest because she understands what she's in Parliament to do. She has a class analysis and an understanding of what it means. If people want to criticise her for it, that's up to them. But they do no favours for Parliament's image and politics' legitimacy by pretending it's a place where MPs from all sides have a great deal in common.