Politics...

I don’t think I’ve ever understood politics. Oddly, while I don’t come from a political family, politics has always been around and this is because of my dad who worked for the government. Dad worked inside Number 10 for two prime ministers - Ted Heath and Harold Wilson - and I remember, during that time, we had all the newspapers delivered daily and a scrambler put on the phone.

Dad was neither left nor right; he voted for what he thought was best at the time and that meant he voted for Labour and Conservative. He was always reading the papers at the weekend and listening to the Today programme and The World at One on Radio Four and during the summer months would sit in the back garden with a glass of Tolly Cobbold reading the Sunday Times.

I can’t remember who I voted for when I turned 18 back in 1976. In fact, looking back, I can’t remember who was in power. There was a long period of time when it was either Ted Heath or Harold Wilson and back in those days I didn’t really understand the difference between left and right. It would have been all about personalities as I could never be bothered to read the manifestos. Politics was boring.

I remember studying sociology in the late seventies and, for the first time, getting to grips with the different political stances of the parties and what it all meant. Broadly, Labour was for the working classes and the Conservative Party was for the upper class toffs and businessmen; one was for supporting the working man and the other for keeping him in his place, on low wages and as little benefits as possible. Labour was ‘right on’ and Conservative was stuffy old men snoozing under a newspaper in a private members’ club.

I was never for CND, firmly believing that ‘the bomb’ was the reason behind world peace and, therefore, had to be retained; but I did find myself wanting to stop exploitation in the workplace and occasionally aligned myself with Marxist thinking, especially about who owned the ‘means of production’. I understood where he was coming from.

Today, I would say I’m more left leaning than anything else, mainly because I’m a worker, an employee, somebody who has a ‘boss’ rather than being the boss myself. For a long time I felt that ‘being my own boss’ was way beyond my capabilities - although it wasn’t - and right now, still an employee, I don’t really care, although I do care about fairness and become elated whenever a business man is rumbled for some kind of fraud or mistreatment of staff. I like to see the ‘boss’ receiving his come uppance and I’ve started to view left and right as a battle between the haves and the have-nots, something that is always brought into strong focus when watching or reading Dickensian dramas or Catherine Cookson novels and television programmes. I’m never on the side of the mill owner, but always on the side of the downtrodden, so I guess that makes me a Labour party man.

That said, I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the Labour Party as it currently stands: full of the so-called ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ and black-Plimsolled Guardian readers who support the LGBT community. I’m all for gay rights as long as nobody tries to tell me that being gay is a lifestyle choice we should all be able to consider. There’s nothing wrong with being gay, they should have all the rights that everybody else has, but it’s not the norm, it's not something to aspire to and I often fear that there are people on the left of politics who would be quite prepared to send out the wrong messages to impressionable young people when the real message should be: love thy neighbour be he gay or straight. Similarly transsexuals. Fine, have a sex change, it’s a free country, do as you please, but don’t tell me it’s normal, it’s not. Fair enough, it's the way they are, they can't help it and again we shouldn't discriminate against these people or direct hatred towards them, but, well, I can’t bring myself to refer to high profile transsexuals, people like Caitlyn Jenner, as a ‘she’; for me he is a man with breasts, even if it’s not that simple; and don't get me started on non-binary, what's all that about? I know this all sounds very ‘right wing’, and I’m not that way inclined, although I have voted for the Tories in the past. During the 1983 general election I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Michael Foot and instead voted for Thatcher. It was the time of Greenham Common, Bruce Kent and CND. In essence, the last thing I want is for the UK to unilaterally disarm, leaving the country vulnerable to the world’s nutters, like President Putin and that Chinese guy who puts Muslims in concentration camps.

Equally, I don’t want to be taxed heavily. There were rumours about Jeremy Corbyn taxing people’s back gardens and I can’t help but vote against stuff like that. Similarly, where I live is dominated by a Labour-controlled council and they have a spiteful campaign of allowing planning permission on flats in the predominantly Tory area where I live. Our Tory MP is fighting the situation and he’s right. A lot of people say that the Labour-controlled council here in sunny South London is giving the green light to practically every developer just because the area in which they want to build their apartments is a posh, middle class area full of nice big houses. 

I don’t want a block of flats next to my house and that overrides any consideration of the fact that we need to build more houses in the UK. Some people on the right argue that there are ‘too many people’ being let in from outside of the EU and they’re causing the problem; that’s probably not true, but immigration has become a big issue which, I think, drove the whole Brexit debacle. The Tories are going to be stronger on immigration issues than the Labour Party, or so the argument goes, but under the Tories immigrant continues to go up and the media now reports that the population of the UK will reach 70 million before long. Nobody wants that, but only Tory voters admit as much. For Labour voters it’s a case of ‘come on in, we love you!’

In the end I voted Labour because I simply despise what the Tories stand for and I can’t abide Boris Johnson, a kind of anti-comedy figure with a stupid haircut and a faux buffoon persona. No, I thought, he can’t possibly be our Prime Minister - but as I write this, he is just that. I voted Labour as a tactical vote and I seriously considered not voting at all. Living in a strong Tory seat meant that my vote against the Tories was a wasted vote, they were always going to get in, and at least the Tory candidate, Chris Philp, sent through an email thanking me for voting for him (even though I didn’t) although I almost did because of the work he’s putting in on the local housing issue. At least he sent through a few leaflets, was standing outside the railway station shaking people’s hands and so forth. I never heard a thing from the Labour candidate. 

So now it’s all over for another five years and we’ve got five years of more Tory rule. Surely that will be it, David Miliband will become Labour leader (or at least Keir Starmer) and things will change. Hopefully, some time in the future, we’ll go back into the European Union and the current ‘swing to the right’ of British politics will come to an end.

Merry Christmas.