Exclusive: Love's Labour Lost

'Or, maybe not now?'
Exclusive Comment by James Hynes from Mold, Delyn

After having passed the proverbial three score years and ten and after having been a supporter of the Labour Party from boyhood on, I now have no intention of voting for our incumbent MP. He will not be getting my vote this time around although I was one of his very active supporters canvassing for his first election in this constituency.

My first disillusionment with David Hanson and Tony Blair began before the election of 1997 when Labour Party members across the country were asked to get rid of Clause 4 relating to the nationalisation of the means of production. At constituency level, David Hanson, showed a willing pragmatism by agreeing with that move in the run up to the election of members of the New Labour Party. It was evident that he and the leaders of the new government had sold out to big business. Matters could only go downhill from then on so far as I was concerned. They did.

Recently, I actually heard David Hanson say that he had never ever voted against the government on any issue whatsoever. That in itself was a prime self-condemnatory statement if ever there was one because it is not theoretically possible for a person with a conscience to agree with our political masters on everything. Against my wishes as a Party member and a member of his constituency, he has supported all privatisation schemes, all so-called education reforms, and all five of the wars the government engaged in over a period of six years. By supporting those actions David Hanson failed to represent my views and those of many other constituents.

Where was David Hanson's conscience when decisions were made to join with the Americans in the ten year bombing of the peoples of Iraq and the subsequent murderous invasion of that country and of Afghanistan? We now know that his conscience had been handed over to Tony Blair to do with it what he will.

In the lead up to those attacks, I wrote to him and his boss, again and again, protesting against the British alliance with the American state terrorists. David was always very scrupulous about replying, but all his responses were culled from standard letters put out by the government PR office and he always agreed with them. Never once did he express any reservations about the government's actions.

My own resistance to the attacks on Iraq by Britain and America go back to 1991 during a time before New Labour had ever got anywhere near government. On Wednesday, March 13th, 1991, as a member of a Mold Justice and Peace Group I helped set up a protest meeting against that first recent war on Iraq. Among the people listening to Dr. Hany Nasr, deputy leader of the Islamic Party of Britain and Fr. Owen Hardwicke of Pax Christi, were many loyal supporters of the Labour Party. Following that meeting, many of those protesters worked very hard to get David Hanson elected as the first Labour MP for this constituency. None would have voted for him then had they known that he would agree to a second murderous attack some years later. Now many of the 1991 activists have angrily resigned from the Party in protest against government policies actively supported by our Member of Parliament.

If David Hanson truly believed in the bombing and invasion of Iraq for gain, then he is too unscrupulous to be my MP and if he supported it for other reasons then he is guilty of culpable ignorance. Either way I no longer want him to be my Parliamentary representative.