If I was a purist I would not be a member of the Labour Party. I have friends who feel the same way and they are not. It’s said that Labour is a broad church and I might go further and say we are polytheists, one or two having already sold their souls to the devil. But the Labour Party is not a cult, a debating society or a self-help group. Its not a club whose aim is to further the ambitions of its individual members though you might think so at times.
The truth is that if you genuinely want to drive meaningful change in this country you cannot limit yourself to working with those who align with your world view because you would be in the minority and your influence would be severely limited. Of course if you had a despotic personality you probably wouldn’t be too concerned about the majority aligning with your philosophy. There are ways of engineering a consensus.
Its not really surprising that those in power (namely MP’s) have widely differing perspectives and ambitions ranging from the benign to the nefarious and why should MP’s be automatically virtuous because of the their political leaning. Power acts upon those who choose it and change is inescapable, just as innocence is naturally lost in growing up, something we, whose kingdom hardly extends beyond the chair we sit on, might want to consider.
