Friday 7 May 2021

The Red Rose of Labour has faded

 

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.