It’s Wednesday which Polly Toynbee’s back on another one of her ‘don’t mention the war’ rants.

This time around, in the world according to Polly, Labour voters who may still be just a tad pissed off with the whole business of sending British forces in a war on the back the most oversold document since Kenny Lay’s last Annual Report at Enron are now committing the heinous ’sin’ of not caring about ’social justice’.

It’s right about now that my blood is really coming to the boil…

I care about social justice.

I joined the Labour Party - because I care about social justice.
I campaigned against the poll tax, helped to organise an anti-poll tax union, supported poll tax defaulters as a ‘MacKenzie’s Friend’ in the local magistrates court, defaulted myself and spent the next few years dodging bailiffs and with a crap credit reference - I never did pay a single penny of that hated tax - all because I care about social justice.

I’ve worked in community development for more than ten years for the both the NHS and in the voluntary sector - because I care about social justice.

I know all about Labour’s record over the last eight years, about the time, effort and resources that have gone in the NHS, into improving education standards and providing better schools, into getting people back into work through the New Deal, into Surestart and the Children’s Fund and into urban and rural regeneration…

… and all because I work in a field which brings me into the closest possible contact with many of these things, rights at the sharp end where many of these initiative are delivered to the public.

And all this is because I care about social justice.

If there’s one thing that I fucking understand its exactly what social justice is because I’m a working class kid who grew up on a council estate in Oldbury and I’ve spent my entire adult life, even through the long dark years of Tory rule under Thatcher - the don’t give a shit decade of the 1980’s - fighting for social justice because that was my one chance, the one hope that I and others like me had of making a better life for ourselves and our families.

So don’t you start fucking lecturing me on the subject of whether I care about social justice. Geddit.

I opposed the war in Iraq for a whole bunch of reasons, most of which had little or nothing to do with whether I thought our ‘imperious leader’ was telling a few porkies to get Parliament to see things his way but, as a party member, I’ll still be voting Labour on May 5th.

I’ll be voting Labour because I’ll be voting for a Labour government and not for Tony Blair, the sooner he has his retirement party and pisses off to the House of Lords the happier I and many other Labour members are going to be - Party Leaders, Prime Ministers even, come and go but the party goes on - and if, Polly, you even managed to find time to get off your arse and talk to the rank and file of the party you’ll find that down here at the grass roots we still believe in the things we’ve always believed in. And every single one of those things springs from a single, simple idea - Social Justice.

But you see the problem here, Polly, the reason why many Labour voters, Labour members even, are angry is not just about Iraq and the question of why we went to way. It runs much, much deeper than that.

Before you can have social justice, you have to have good old fashioned justice, itself - can’t have one without the other - and the current government from the ‘we’re tougher than the Tories’ stance in the Home Office to the gradual but continual erosion of our basic rights and civil liberities, has got a pretty fucking abysmal record on plain, simple Justice.

That’s why we’re angry. We’re angry because we put a Labour government in place to take care of and look after our rights, not fucking well take them away in order, most of the time, just to cover its own collective arses when it makes a cock-up of things.

Suspected terrorists should be taken before a court and tried on the evidence, not banged up in Belmarsh or put under house arrest without the right to a trial or even independent legal counsel. (Prevention of Terrorism Act)

Government’s should not be able to direct the course of judicial enquiries into governmental maladministration and negligence or pick and choose which evidence, if any, is heard in public during the course of such an inquiry. (Inquiries Act 2005)

These are simple matters of justice which go to the very heart of British democracy - and that’s why many Labour voters, myself included, are angry.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m about to vote for the Lib Dems or even (god forbid) the Tories - I’m a member of the Labour Party and I intend to stay a member and fight from within the party for what I and many others believe to be right.

So, Polly, spare me the rhetoric, the scaremongering and the thinly veiled insults. I don’t need it and I don’t need you trying to tell me whether I care about social justice or not. Angry or not, I can make up my own mind thany very much.

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