Rosemary Randall

I’ve been a Labour voter for over 40 years and today I’ve been rejected by them as a supporter – they don’t want me to vote in the leadership election and I have no idea why. My time spent scanning the rival manifestoes has been wasted, my enthusiasm for this opening up of democracy dashed.

Their email telling me this starts with the chilling formula “We have reason to believe…” It goes on “…that you do not support the aims and values of the Labour Party or you are a supporter of an organisation opposed to the Labour Party.” No reason is given for this assertion and there is no possibility of finding out what information, gossip or hearsay has led to the decision. And they don’t offer to return the £3 either.

I made an attempt to join the Labour party in 1975. At that time you had to be a Trades Union member and my NALGO membership had lapsed as I was between jobs. The Labour party official sitting at my kitchen table scratched his head and pondered. “I could put you down as a housewife,” he said. Feminism was more important to me than party membership so I declined, unimpressed. Forty years later I am even less impressed.

I’m interested in my psychological reaction however: feelings of anxiety, a nervous racking of my brain for what the possible offence could be, a strange untethered guilt as I wonder what I could have done to deserve this response – feelings all too familiar to East Germans accused by anonymous neighbours of some unspecified offence or Americans caught up in the ravages of McCarthyism.

I don’t really wish to compare the Labour party to a police state but it does seem to share a similar paranoia, accusing innocent people in unspecified ways of unspecified offences and offering no explanation or possibility of appeal. Dark times for democracy.