The youth of today are much more clued up about politics
than I was at their age. The internet has made it much easier for them to find
alternative narratives than just what their parents believe so they are able to
form their own views and opinions about things. They are also more likely to
have experienced negative things that have affected their short lives like cut
backs of school funding, parental unemployment, maybe homelessness, long NHS
waiting lists etc.
I was born in 1963. My parents were working class but my Dad
had aspirations for his children and wanted them to have a better life. They
managed to buy their own home a couple of years before I was born and lived in
it until the day they died. To them a house was something to live in not an
investment. They never thought about how much the house was worth and whether
they could sell and make a profit on it. They were lucky that for 25 years they
had a fixed rate mortgage – something many homeowners would no doubt love these
days.
Politics was rarely discussed in our home, infact I never
knew who my parents voted for until it was time for me to vote for the first
time at 18 in 1981. Can’t remember much about it, but I think it was local
council elections. I remember being scared of what to do on the day and as we
sat at the breakfast table on the morning of election day I asked my Dad what
to do when we got to the polling station. He said just take the paper they give
you, go into the booth and put your X next to the name that says CONSERVATIVE –
so that’s what I did, to my now eternal shame.
The constituency I was in was a tory area, although I didn’t
know it at the time. The local MP was Norman Fowler &the local council was
tory run. 1 year later I moved away to a small mining village in north east
Derbyshire when I married & shortly afterwards the miner’s strike happened.
That’s when I started to learn about politics. Dennis Skinner was the local MP
there. I’m proud to say that I voted for him every time there was an election
during the 10 years we lived there. I also voted Labour at every local election
too. Then in 1992 we moved to another Labour area where the MP was Alan Meale.
In 2002 we moved north of the border to Scotland and I soon
realised that politics up here was a whole new ball game. Here on west coast,
Labour are virtually non-existent so voting for them seemed a wasted vote. The
local MP was Lib Dem with the SNP always close behind. Even the tories got more
votes than Labour come General Election time. After the awful coalition with
the tories, the local MP Alan Reid lost his seat to the SNP and so it remains,
at the moment!
I did vote for Labour at the last General Election because
as a Socialist, I believed in the vision of Jeremy Corbyn. We have lived in sub-standard
rented housing and lived with the fear of being homeless; we’d seen how the
mining community had been torn apart by Thatcher’s determination to crush
Scargill and the miners union in the 80’s; we’d seen the rise of hatred towards
ethnic minorities with frequent EDL marches in town during the 90’s.
When Tony Blair became PM in 1997 I, like many people
thought things would change and to some extent they did. We had a Labour
government, finally everyone in the UK would benefit, not just the rich like
they did under the tories. We have a fairer society with more equality. Well,
we did for a while until New Labour started to look like Old Conservative.
I had never regarded myself as particularly political but
when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 I realised
that my views that had been formed over the years had found their home in a man
of principals who wanted everyone to have a good home, a good job with decent
pay, access to good healthcare & education. I began to believe that there
was hope for a better future for everyone in UK but sadly the backstabbers in
the Labour party & the MSM began to circle almost immediately. It became
apparent that there were many in the Labour ranks who were not as red as they
appeared to be. I believe they are called career politicians; people who go
into power with the sole aim of climbing the ladder to the top, doing whatever
it takes, including betraying the very people who elected them in the first
place, to bolster their own ego.
I’m not a political analyist or a journalist or anything
like that. I’m just an average person who believes that everyone deserves the
chance to live a full and content life. Under the tories we have seen social
housing decimated; our infrastructure like public transport, utilities, our NHS
etc sold off. Capitalism & economics rule under the tories. As we’re seen
over the past year with covid, lives mean little to them if there is money to
be made.
127,000+dead bodies – that’s a huge pile, right. After
everything that has happened over the past 12 months – the corruption, the
lies, the incompetence over Brexit etc – last night the people of Hartlepool
basically decided “We’ll take more of that, thank you very much”
I can understand them maybe not wanting to vote Labour at
the moment but why the hell did they vote tory? Do the voters of Hartlepool
have a serious masochistic streak or something? Was there no credible
alternative? OK, maybe that’s a daft question!!
We’ve had a tory government since 2010, that’s 11 years of austerity,
destroying civil liberties, incompetence, lies, rising homelessness &
poverty – the list goes on and on and on.
I don’t know what the answer is but I do believe that Jeremy Corbyn offered a better future for everyone but it seems that is not what enough people wanted. That is the reason why Hartlepool went blue on 6th May 2021.
I guess turkeys really do vote for Christmas.
