On not being mates with Tories

Dan Swain
Dan Swain
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read
Why can’t we be friends?

Laura Pidcock won’t make friends, and, like a child on the first day of school, deserves to be scolded for it. Commentators are lining up to patronise, infantilise, and pathologise a young woman for daring to take politics seriously. This sort of confected controversy now follows a pretty standard pattern: left Labour MP says something unremarkable, conservative press spin it in the most uncharitable way possible, liberal media establishment identify it as a talking point and concern troll us all into mind numbing tedium. But even by these standards, there is something decidedly weird about people’s sudden deep obsession with who a grown woman chooses to spend her free time with. Why, then, are people so keen on forcing Laura Pidcock to make friends?

First of all, on what she did and didn’t say. She insists she will continue to work with Tories to sign bills, sit and committees, and otherwise get things done, and never suggested otherwise. Fair enough, although this already seems to me a concession too far, firstly because to believe anything else requires the kind of willfully obtuse mendacity that doesn’t deserve a response, and secondly because it is designed to address an argument that barely deserves to be taken seriously. The point of this clarification is to allay the fears of all the oh-so-sensible people who insist that she must be willing to work with others to ‘get things done’. This, of course, is a fantasy. Parliament is not a business, in which co-workers need to develop camaraderie (or solidarity) in order to ‘work together’ better. It is a conflictual arena. She is a member of something called an ‘opposition’. If a player for Chelsea or Manchester City says they won’t be sitting down for dinner with their opposition on the night before a big match they will be praised for their ‘passion’. But Labour MPs aren’t supposed to have that, it seems.

But Pidcock, did to her credit, stand firm on the principle: She refuses to be chummy with Conservative politicians while they actively make life worse for the people, and the class, she represents. Good on her. But this too, is met with howls of derision. “Haven’t you ever had a friend you didn’t agree with politically? Sad. Immature. Silly.” The obvious response, which I’ve seen from many, is that having a former schoolmate who votes Tory because they have delusions of running a small business one day is somewhat different to drinking cocktails with Amber Rudd. One of them has wrong opinions, the other has dedicated her life to enacting those opinions in a devastating and destructive way. Tory MPs do not just hold Tory views, they attempt to enact Tory policy, and this is qualitatively different. One of the reasons certain commentators have a hard time seeing this is that this line is harder to draw for much of the establishment. I suspect Laura Pidcock’s background is such that she had relatively few opportunities to become mates with future Tory MPs (or funders, special advisors, columnists etc.). But for those who went to certain schools and universities, it is fairly common. At what point on your friend’s trajectory from seminar and bar interlocutor to minister do you draw the line and decide they are not your friend anymore? I suspect Pidcock’s position makes a lot of people squirm because it forces them to ask precisely that question.

But, looking closer at Pidcock’s point, perhaps it doesn’t so much rest on the distinction between politics as opinions we hold and as something we do, but strike at it. The idea that people like Pidcock should accept the friendship of Tories rests on a sense that to do anything else would be failing to respect their subjective desires, rather like refusing to be friends with someone who doesn’t share your taste in whiskey, ice cream, or movies. Toryness is one more personal choice, to be respected, tolerated, perhaps even celebrated. But, of course, political views are not like that. Their expression, whether through casting a vote, loudly pontificating on a commuter train, or buying a racist newspaper, has material consequences. In refusing to be friends with Tories, Pidcock reveals and undermines this convenient fiction. Where do we draw the line indeed?

In a sense, then, Pidcock’s line forces us to confront the consequences of the increasingly banal truism that the personal is political, and think how it might influence our conduct towards others whose politics we find repulsive. It also encourages people, and not just MPs, to think of politics not just as something we have, but as something we do, and forces us to take seriously questions of personal responsibility, complicity, and resistance. No wonder, then, that so much of the establishment prefer to paint it as an infantile disorder.

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