Moving from right to left

I was bought up in a staunchly centre right house. My parents were both Conservative voters and as they were my political sounding boards and as we had the Telegraph every day, the idea of voting anything other than Conservative never entered my head as a child. The Labour Party were the enemy of progress and making money as far as my parents and pretty much all their friends were concerned so when it came to the first election I could vote in I put my cross next to the Conservative candidate.

About 18 months later I went into the Royal Air Force, something I have reflected on before, and I was in close quarters with people from a very different background and with very different life experiences. I was from the South East of England, where the extremely negative effect of Conservative policies on the manufacturing workers and the miners was more muted. That said, we lived in the Medway Towns and had seen Chatham Dockyard closed, decimating the area and putting 10000 people out of work at a stroke. Most of my fellow recruits came from the North of England, Wales and Scotland and their families and communities had really suffered as a result of Thatcherism. They were the first breach in the wall of my Conservative thinking because I was faced with young men who had gone into the Armed Forces because they couldn’t see anything else. I had made a considered choice as to what I thought was best for me, which was a very different situation. The conversations we had made me quite uncomfortable because of my relative good fortune and relative family affluence.

A few years later I started going out with Janet who was a dyed in the wool Labour supporter and a year after that I went to Staffordshire Polytechnic where I met people with the whole spectrum of political views. I went through a whole Economics and Politics course learning about ideas from across the political landscape. By the time the local elections came up in Stoke I was a Liberal Democrat supporter. It was very much an expression of my then quite fluid political views. I wasn’t ready for the Labour Party as it then was, but I was never going to vote Conservative again. Now, it’s certainly the case that other people who supported the party did so from a strong political basis, but for me they were a stopping off point on my journey across the political divide.

I became a Labour Party supporter when John Smith became the leader. His vision of a Labour Party for the times was absolutely in tune with mine. I think that had he lived, he and his party would have created a much more equal and much better society than we ended up having. Tragically he died in his native Scotland on a walking holiday and Tony Blair became the leader who would be given the keys to Number 10.

For the bulk of the first two Labour terms of office I was abroad but I had nailed my colours to the mast by then. I was Labour but I was more of the Gordon Brown Labour. As Chancellor he made a massive difference to the poorest people in the UK. When I came back from teaching abroad no one would employ me as a teacher in the UK because there was, and still is, a massive snobbery about other education systems, despite the fact that the UK has one of the most unequal in the world with richer students getting every possible advantage and poorer students being basically ignored. Anyway, we were on one wage and would have struggled enormously if it hadn’t been for Working Family Tax Credits. That allowed us to give our children the chance to do activities outside of school and go on the occasional day out. By the way, despite the narrative, then and since, we weren’t living in luxury on benefits. We were keeping our heads above water but only just and only by cutting back as much as possible. If anyone tells you how good people on benefits have got it, take it from me they have never been poor and they are talking total nonsense!

Nowadays, my political views are pretty much as left wing as they could be, sometimes more than my wife! This means that in an increasingly uncaring right wing world even the nominally left wing or centrist parties are to the right of me. If we had proportional representation I would almost certainly vote for the Green Party, but where I live that would be pointless so I vote Labour but without the same enthusiasm of years ago.

So there you have it. The old saying my Dad used to use was ‘If a man is not a Labour supporter before he is 30 he has no heart. If he is still a Labour supporter after he is 30 he has no brain’!! I sincerely hope I have proved that completely wrong, but who knows?!