General Election 2019 Page 16

Quote: Billy Bunter @ 14th December 2019, 2:54 PM

To be fair I don't think that being born "to the roar of the Stretford End" necessarily means that they were roaring at precisely that moment. Any more than being born "within the sound of Bow Bells" requires them to have been actually ringing at that precise time.

In any case maybe the reserves were at home that day...

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Or maybe it was just that a television was on in the ward and it was Match of the Day.

I was born to the sound of Blowing in the Wind played live by Bob Dylan. OK. He went from the Airport to the Mayfair Hotel before performing in Central London while I was emerging 12 miles south of there and no one can agree whether it all happened on that day or the day before. But as far as I am concerned he and his guitar were at the end of my bed.

Quote: A Horseradish @ 14th December 2019, 3:51 PM

Or maybe it was just that a television was on in the ward and it was Match of the Day.

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Nice try, Horse!

That would indeed explain why a child born anywhere in Britain might be born to the sound of the roar from the Stretford end.

However, there is no roar from the Stretford end (live or on Match of the Day) when Manchester United are not playing at home.

The early hours of Friday were a very weird experience for me.

It was the tenth General Election I had voted in (although I can vividly recall 12) and the only one in which my vote could be described as successful. My long record of failure in voting for a Government is possibly - even probably - unique.

I voted for a centre party (Lib/SDP/SLD/LD) six times in 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005, Obviously none of these got into Government. By this time Con voters of my age would have had three victories and Labour voters also three.

In 2010 - the year in which Lib Dem voters finally had success - I decided to vote Green rather than Lib Dem. I voted Green again in 2015. It was only on election number nine when I did opt for the winning party by shifting to the Tories but Mrs May's performance was so dire it was widely treated as a defeat. This year I almost did it again. I was so close to spoiling my ballot paper that my hand was shaking even when I got into the polling booth before I decided against my will to vote Conservative for a second time. At the tenth time of asking, I have had huge success but I'm not sure that it really suits me.

Quote: Rood Eye @ 14th December 2019, 4:03 PM

Nice try, Horse!

That would indeed explain why a child born anywhere in Britain might be born to the sound of the roar from the Stretford end.

However, there is no roar from the Stretford end (live or on Match of the Day) when Manchester United are not playing at home.

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Oh yes - good point.

And according to her, didn't her mother describe it as a roar?

I don't think there would be a roar for the reserves.

Horseradish's Potted Political History

The Early/MId 1970s - Age 7 to 13

My parents always had Radio 4 on during meal times in the mornings and evenings. Bizarrely they would claim in the late 1980s that they had never taken notice of politics and knew nothing about the subject until I showed an interest. That is, other than to vote in elections when they remembered them. Much later I decided that the radio had been on for only two reasons. 1. To ensure that none of us spoke while eating - I listened to it and had wrongly assumed that they listened to it too and 2. It was there just in case there was a special message from Mr Churchill about our boys' progress in the war in what was for them a long time warp. Whatever, I had probably picked up on a few political names in the first few years.

With the help of TV, I was able to recognise Ted Heath and Harold Wilson like I recognised Rod Stewart but nobody else. And, of course, R4 was a home for radio comedy and quizzes so it was those which stood out much more. I don't recall the election of February 1974 but repetition is the best form of learning so I was well aware of the one in October 1974 as elections suddenly seemed to be a regular thing in life. Two moments stand out. Before I knew I had got a free place to an Independent school via a council exam, I sat the school's own exam which was much more difficult. I didn't pass it outright but did well enough to get an interview. I was informed by everyone including my parents that it was a big posh place in which everyone would be ultra well dressed and well spoken and well polite. We would all feel out of our depth and in awe and if I passed we couldn't afford the fees. Still, it would be very useful experience and "don't worry - you won't pass".

So even getting to that interview was a moment of crisis as no one expected me to get that far. And on walking in, there were six formers with long hair and looking like they had stepped out of Genesis. They had stuck loads of Labour posters in the foyer and my mother was visibly shocked and appalled and asked why it was allowed. It was not what we had expected. I worked out from this that she was Conservative. We had all, of course, experienced lengthy power cuts because of the unions. I passed the interview and all hell broke loose as my parents accused each other of having led me into a situation which they couldn't afford. Anyhow my parents' marriage was saved when the other result came through.

Secondly, in the quick holiday before I started there, we were on a beach in North Devon when a helicopter came down on the sand and out stepped Jeremy Thorpe. That fired my imagination but not in any meaningful way. By the end of year one at the school, I was on tranquillizers for extreme anxiety and noting that everyone there was wealthy and the Tories stood for wealth I forgot all about the earlier Labour posters and took a stance against Conservatives on that basis. Then I forgot about politics completely. That was until 1976 when in the second year a note went up on a board to say that Harold Wilson had resigned and people said how suspicious it was and he was obviously working for the Russians after all.

Except that in summer 1975 - I used to think it was 1974 but I'm sure it was 1975 now - another political moment had occurred although I hadn't comprehended it as overtly political. Given the Thorpe moment in the previous year - we had only viewed the helicopter from some distance - this one was uncanny in its similarity. It has always made me think that some things in life are just mapped out. The spotting of a second politician by the sea when on holiday and on the holiday just after the Thorpe one - I doubt that has ever happened to anyone else - but this one was not on the campaign trail.

He was sitting quietly with a mate on an almost deserted Pembrokeshire cliff. My Dad recognised him as being Harold Macmillan. I went over and got his autograph and we exchanged a few words. He was a figure from the past in many ways but I was excited that it had happened when I discovered more. And while I couldn't take to the new Conservatism, it supported my Mum's outlook in my head to the extent that older Conservatism seemed alright to me. That was reinforced when he cropped up years later to complain bitterly about Thatcherites "selling off the family silver" through privatisation.

Quote: A Horseradish @ 14th December 2019, 4:46 PM

we were on a beach in North Devon when a helicopter came down and out stepped Jeremy Thorpe.

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When on the brink of adulthood, I was once introduced to Jeremy.

He was a most charming man and I have to admit I was rather taken by him.

No, Missus - not in that sense!

Quote: Rood Eye @ 14th December 2019, 5:05 PM

When on the brink of adulthood, I was once introduced to Jeremy.

He was a most charming man and I have to admit I was rather taken by him.

No, Missus - not in that sense!

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In what context were you introduced?

Quote: A Horseradish @ 14th December 2019, 5:22 PM

In what context were you introduced?

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I was at a small Liberal gathering.

Jeremy smiled as we shook hands and asked, "How's the Red Guard?"

Mid 1970s - Early 1980s - 13 to 19 (Part 1)

By 1979 when aged 16 I had worked out quite a lot about my own map as most do, not that it is necessarily right. I had been one of three high fliers at my bog standard junior school and then in the first two years at the senior school come 120th out of 120 in the end of year exams. That, among other things, was a heavy and confusing blow. While I picked up somewhat in the next three years by working twice as hard as many others there, there was a big question mark on how the O'levels would go. Given my past, it could have been anything from dire to outstanding. I expected totally dire.

The policy was that anyone getting less than five would have to leave. Everyone else seemed so confident, I assumed it would be just one person and that that person would be me. In the end I got eight. Only one was to A grade. Even the English ones where I hoped to do well were Bs and two were Cs. I was astonished not only to be in a position of returning to the 6th form but to see how a quarter of the confident fee paying folk had just gone as if sent off into the abyss. My impression was that the school was amazed and deeply irritated that I had got through. And what I knew was that I didn't have three previously studied subjects in which I could cope with an A'level. I went by default, therefore, for politics as my third subject which wasn't taught there to O'level. From the outset, it seemed oddly that I already knew more than most.

All of us had had the benefit of witnessing a recent general election when we started the course in September 1979. This, though, was not a time of obsessive 24/7 news and political social media. It all felt a bit niche and ever so slightly cool compared with studying Physics or Greek. I was lucky. Having been overly respectful and even timid in the presence of teachers, in truth I don't think I had liked any of them. But with Adrian Garne, a quiet, thoughtful and meticulous young guy, I landed on my feet. He immediately took to my written work and was able to be non judgemental about my inability to talk or use eye contact in class. This was with hindsight an odd personality, even for an adolescent, in that when with family and a few friends I knew well I was very talkative, light hearted, humourous and even considered outgoing but elsewhere I was not so much timid as rigidly terrified. It wasn't really known by those who mattered as they never saw it but it was patently obvious in the day to day where it appeared very peculiar, Internally, I wrongly blamed the school.

On Googling Garne earlier in the current decade, I discovered he had later become the Head of a mixed gender state school of some standing in the North of England and, astonishingly in some ways, was Tim Farron's personal secretary. All those decades earlier, he was steadfast in refusing to reveal to any of us his own political leanings. But there was a very awkward moment around the time that I sat my A'level in 1981 when I walked into my one and only SDP meeting after the formation of the SDP with my head down and he was standing among the people there. It felt like I had somehow exposed him and I found it impossible to speak. I think he often wondered from the outset how I knew so much already.

The truth of it was that I was so scared to get up for school every morning, I delayed it as I saw it by listening to the radio until 2 or 3 in the morning. Talk radio, phone ins and so on were a lot lighter than they are these days but I learnt an awful lot from that experience. For all of my capabilities for rationality, I was deeply emotional so there was too an emotional quality to my political interest so that it seemed especially personally meaningful. A part of it involved quietly getting my own back for a troubled five years, Instinctively I felt that it was an opportunity to express how I did not closely identify with the school although the others studying alongside me were actually pretty good to me. They had matured. And several of them were fairly open to different angles in a way that many on other subjects were not. Nevertheless, time had also moved on since the days of my interview. Only one of these sixth formers was Labour. All the others were Tory. And I was the one centrist which until 1981 meant Liberal so what I wrote was chiming with my teacher and unique there.

AG in his modest precise way was very proactive. He took us all to the Commons to witness PMQs and into a Committee Room. Neil Kinnock, who was very young then and not very well known, stood out. I remember returning full of enthusiasm about having witnessed "the next Aneurin Bevan". Little did any of us know that he would become leader and then sell out to the EU. He brought in the Conservative MP for Croydon Central, John Moore, to mark one of our essays and discuss them with us. Moore was being spoken about as a possible next Tory leader "in the mould of JFK" should Thatcher turn out to be ineffective. I didn't really like the bloke. He seemed to ooze and was sharply critical of my essay but still he gave it the third highest mark, Not very long afterwards he faded away and no one now remembers him.

Mid 1970s - Early 1980s - 13 to 19 (Part 2)

And in order to bring me "out of my shell" AG made me Secretary of the Hansard Society which required me writing to MPs of my choice and inviting them to the school where he felt I could part chair the debates. I wrote to many enthusiastically, with imagination and on occasion controversially, focussing on people who were in too high positions to say yes but, hey, why not try - Hattersley, Howe, etc;, the very youngest (Stephen Dorrell and David Alton were both in their 20s); and extreme left wingers who would wind up my enemies including the only Communist in the House of Lords who wrote back in green ink. All the while I prayed that none of them would actually turn up as I knew I couldn't handle the events themselves. Well, most said no. Some said yes but the yes people invariably pulled out when an important debate cropped up. Consequently, I was let off the hook by them all. But I have some lovely letters here from that time.

The other backdrop was family about whom I got to know more and what politically it meant to be truly in the lower middle class of distinctly ordinary origins. It transpired that my father's council house parents were strongly Labour but being anti EEC and witnessing union chaos were starting to have their doubts. In contrast, my Mum's father while being almost Cockney had been a compassionate Conservative in the 1930s and her Mum who didn't understand any of it and lived in the heart of Labour London had always remembered him and followed his lead. One uncle on that side was in the print and while strongly Labour was scathing about those who signed in as Mickey Mouse and then went down the pub. Another was Conservative and the two of them constantly rowed. On hearing that I was Liberal, the Labour one accused me of being "neither one thing or the other", The Tory one felt I was being odd seeing that I "was at such a good school".

Among the other events at this time were the Thorpe trial in which meals were taken with my parents in stony, uneasy and even frightening silence. Sex was in their view a topic that was purely private. It shouldn't even be in the news. Any sex. So the nature of the Thorpe allegations were especially troublesome. There were regular weekend visits to my Nan in her inner London council tower block where the lifts were out of action because of the kids urinating in them and the stench of uncollected refuse because of strikes was overwhelming. It even went into her flat because the refuse chute was immediately outside it beyond the uncarpeted concrete and had filled up to the sixth floor from the ground and probably beyond. Beyond the caged off security areas in the vicinity was a glimpse of the distant grandeur of St Paul's Cathedral.

Most of us rolled up on one afternoon at the retirement home for print workers in a posh area just outside Brighton. It was run by my Mum's cousin, Jimmy, who was really a barrow boy and a friend of the trade union leader Brenda Dean. He had been made its manager. My Mum was privately furious at the sharp contrast between its luxury and the conditions my grandmother was enduring. But, of course, not one of them had the massive contrast of my own experience in which I could be in that tower block near Peckham on a Sunday night and back in the ivory towers of my school on the following morning. I discovered that my parents had actually met while working as basic clerks on leaving school for a trade union and that my father had worked for two. For them, though, it had been "just a job". Dad had been Labour for quite a long time but turned Conservative on getting a mortgage. Neither, though, really thought about it much and felt they "didn't have a clue." So the broad background was very, very mixed and in a way it was logical for me to be in the centre.

When the Liberals looked for a replacement for Thorpe, Dad and I had sat down to watch the debate between Steel and Pardoe. He was always a butterfly. Never sure what he thought or where he was on anything serious. I thought I was sure although open to influence. We both felt it was time for a change. We both wanted Pardoe. They chose Steel. To both of us, that seemed fair enough. I applied to join the Young Liberals. What as a consequence came through the family letterbox left me feeling shaken and disturbed. Along with the membership application were photocopied newsletters containing, among other things, adverts for cannabis plants and telephone numbers for an organisation advocating the legalisation of sex with children. I remember shaking before tearing them up and taking them out in the dark to stuff them in a street bin. Shortly afterwards the SDP was formed. I thought "thank god". I recognised it as my natural home but I still had to tell myself so as to maintain my centrist economic position that the mainstream Liberals were probably ok.

Early 1980s to Mid 1980s- 19 to 22 (Part 1)

Had someone in my A'level year put a gun to my head and said "you can't be in the centre - you have to choose left or right" I would have asked to have been allowed a distinction in time terms. This is to say that I would have wanted left historically. By this time, I was aware of the achievements of the post war Attlee Government and I had a lot of emotional interest in older socialist types who had helped so many people until the unions had run amok. In contrast, I would have gone right in terms of the present so as to sort out that mess. My first opportunity to vote came in the GLC elections when we all thought that if Labour won the regime would be moderate but nevertheless I voted Conservative, partially tactically and partially because the SDP hadn't really got going and I was still reeling from the Young Libs thing. Labour did win.

Within days, there was a coup. The Labour leader, the barely known Andrew McIntosh, was ousted by Ken Livingstone and what was pursued was not at all what was in their manifesto. McDonnell was put in charge of the money but I have to say that I didn't even know his name for another 20 years when I met him in Minister Tony McNulty's office in my workplace. Was I aware of Corbyn? Yes, probably. A name and a face and a stance. Probably not a great deal more. He may well have been more on my radar somewhat later in the 1980s when I returned to the London area. But it all seemed very fringe.

Having left school with fairly strong A'level grades, I didn't feel that I had the confidence to leave home for university. I went to work in an insurance office where I got on brilliantly with a lot of other young people. We regularly went out on Friday nights. In my spare time, I occasionally walked the local streets delivering leaflets for the SDP. However, I was in a pickle because I was highly political and yet I didn't like any of the members I met. I also had huge issues with office managers. I had no confidence when around them and I didn't like them. They didn't like me either as I compensated by acting the clown with people of my own age. It was something which to my surprise I found very easy. I had a choice of two things I didn't want to do. Stay there for the rest of my life or risk going into more education. Somehow - god knows how - I managed to get a place at what was then a Top 6 university. On arriving, I expected to leave within a week.

As things turned out, I didn't have to fly home for my security. I was lucky. I fell in early with a bunch of people who seemed to be good mates. We were very close, going out almost every night. Looking back, some were great and others less good than they seemed but that is life. In my room. I worked hard on my politics and history course but just as in school I could hardly handle the day to day. Since the age of 11 I felt that I was mostly self-taught because I was so nervous in classrooms that I could hardly take anything in so I had to then get on my own and teach myself what I had missed. My nerves were so bad that I couldn't walk a street in daylight alone and occasionally walked on my own at night.

But I was fine when with friends. Very outgoing. Very clown like. Very popular actually. We were privately very critical people of people involved in serious student politics and on occasions argued about politics down the pub but in a comical way. It was as if we weren't at university doing politics at all. I had initially joined the student SDP but just couldn't get on with it or the people there. York was a strange choice for me. Not exactly close to home. Different from anything I had ever experienced. But it suited me. I think I needed that difference. It gave me the space to become me. It was helpfully a marginal constituency, initially two way and then three, It was touristy, A mixture of all classes and the old and new. Most of my new friends had been to comprehensives and it felt when being with them rather like being with the bright comprehensive school friends I had never had. Plus culturally there was a lot of northern and young adult influence.

Bands from Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull. The Red Rhino indie record shops was just up the road. We read the left wing NME. We listened to the Clash who to me were a revelation in striking a chord on what I had witnessed of tower block life. Various left wing bands from an aging Lindisfarne to the young fierce Redskins played live on campus. Given that I had always been into music much more than I had ever been into politics, all of this was far more influential on me than any book I read. And just before the arrival of The Smiths came the miners' strike. In the house we shared, the pictures of the battles were on our teatime screens every night. The local Yorkshire news which made it seem closer to us than it was geographically. It was hard not to empathise. In parallel, some of the women students were going to Greenham Common. I did not become Labour but I was now - and suddenly - unequivocally left rather than right.

Early 1980s to Mid 1980s - 19 to 22 (Part 2)

There had, of course, been a General Election in 1983. It was the one in which the Tories achieved a staggering victory on the back of the Falklands War and Labour under Michael Foot produced "the longest suicide note in history". It was my second and last time delivering leaflets, this time on streets that were largely unknown to me and only once it was dark and I couldn't be seen. None of my friends were politically active in the campaign. I worked alone once I had collected the leaflets as I didn't have the confidence to make friends with anyone in the city's branch of the SDP. I never met the candidate for the SDP who I was helping. His was not in any way a household name although he had previously been a Labour MP and very much later he would become a Lib Dem MP. It was Vince Cable. He got a lot of votes but came third.

Two encounters - and I did my utmost to avoid encounters - on those delivery rounds which were always on council estates stand out to me. While York is unquestionably in the north of Yorkshire, it arguably has as many links with the North East as it does to South Yorkshire. An elderly gentleman with a very strong north eastern accent raced down the road on his stick to greet me and tell me how Labour had lost his way. He told me all about Ellen Wilkinson, a wonderful early female Labour MP who had supported the Jarrow marchers. It was very touching and a great education.

The other involved being questioned by two pesky kids who were playing in the dark in their patch of front garden. They didn't really understand what politics involved but insisted that their parents would definitely want to meet me. They literally led me down the path and into the living room in the house where Mum and Dad - young - were having their dinner and watching some soap on the telly. The looks on their faces at my arrival showed me immediately that I had overstepped the boundary but when I told my mates what had happened they thought the fact that I had been led into it by a couple of eight year olds very amusing. In response I told them they should get more involved. I was going to see Roy Jenkins speak at the De Grey Rooms. Most of them were Labour and decided to do so "for a laugh". I don't know if Roy had a cold that day but for the entire hour he spoke he had snot running down his nose and never thought to look for a handkerchief. They were saying "this bloke is a twat" and laughing their heads off. Then I started laughing totally uncontrollably. A lot of people were complaining about us. We all only just got away with not being chucked out.

My time at university ended in Summer 1985. Somehow I had achieved a 2:1. It seemed finally to be a vindication of passing the eleven plus eleven years earlier and I was able to tell myself that the problem had indeed all been about going to a Conservative school. What I didn't know then was that the heights reached at 11 and 22 were to be the only ones in my life. I picked up my degree on the day of Live Aid. All the students had the TVs on to watch it until it was their time to collect their awards. With everyone's parents on the campus too, the combination of things going on seemed surreal.

While others I knew had studies Marxism and anarchism ansd a lot of other isms my interests had been more basic. How elections worked. In the UK, the US, Germany and France. Voting behaviour. The chartist movements, union movements, youth movements, the origins of the welfare state, Northern Ireland and especially race relations which was chosen emotionally on the basis of my best teacher of all time. The Jamaican woman who had taught me when I was just 7 and had been a special friend to me. I was acutely aware of the Brixton riots of 1981 because my Nan had lived so close to them and I wanted to understand those better. I was convinced in my mind that every black person was deep down just like my teacher. It was really in all seriousness that level of emotional naivety in me whatever my supposed intellectual abilities. And I was desperate to make a contribution which would assist albeit from the side lines in future harmony for all.

Mid 1980s - Late 1990s - 22 to 34 (Part 1)

While I had travelled frequently between north and south between 1982 and 1985 and spent many months in that time with my parents, the more permanent return in summer 1985 was something of a cultural shock. On one level - them, the neighbourhood, the slightly broader area around it - nothing whatsoever had changed. What was so obvious was just how hated the miners were. There was no sympathy for them at all. Everyone felt they had had their just desserts. I could see where they were coming from but was also aware that they had no insights into how it was from the other perspective.

On another level - everything had changed. London's commercial radio had virtually no light talk even in phone ins, It was wall to wall news. There were masses of adverts. It sounded so corporate. Greater London itself looked totally different. Modern buildings replacing areas that had been blitzed prior to 1945. Neon lights everywhere. The same shops every three miles. In contrast, York had felt in its humdrum rather than well known historical architecture and in many other ways more like stepping back into the 1960s or earlier and in a good way. Certainly the Tories had not been accepted there to the point of being revered and with the view that all socialism had rightly been defeated. So Conservative had become the mainstream in the south that when I joined the Civil Service in Dorking in late 1985 it was pretty much as if it involved no political dimension. That was how it remained for the next two years. I worked to engineers on introducing road schemes.

Admittedly we were out in the sticks. But when I moved to a post in Road Safety late in 1987 it was just as apolitical there. I don't recall Ministers being mentioned much in the three years I was there. Nor was my post in the policy on the transport of dangerous goods one which felt political. I was there from 1991 to 1997. It took me on 13 occasions to UN Geneva. But it was very much a case of Civil Servants deciding what happens. Don't involve politicians in it. It will be too technical for them and they won't want to know or understand it. They will trust whatever we do or they should do.

Partly this feeling of an absence of politics was because of the areas of work I was in but I think also it was a symptom of those times. For those who adored Mrs Thatcher in 1987, she was surely going to be Prime Minister for ever. Yes, Labour needed watching but Kinnock had replaced Foot and clearly was keen on reforming the party. In parallel, they were sure he himself could never get Labour elected. By the time John Smith replaced Kinnock as Labour leader, it was obvious that Labour was fully sanitized. As for the Tories, all of the big drama was hopefully in the past. It was a bit boring in comparison but, hey, that kind of boring is great. Then came the poll tax. She went. Major took over. Not so many everyday people even noticed the Maastricht Treaty. It ultimately descended into sleaze but by then Blair was leading Labour and nobody who had been worried about the Labour left was bothered if Blair got in. Things could only get better.

Quote: Billy Bunter @ 14th December 2019, 12:42 PM

Then we really would know that the Labour Party has a death wish.

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Fingers crossed!

(I think they'll keep way off to the left in the next leader, but a Lammy is possible distinctly possible after that.)

Mid 1980s - Late 1990s - 22 to 34 (Part 2)

Changing perspectives with the passing of time is a very strange thing. I remember feeling extremely low and even shocked when the Conservatives under Major won the 1992 election. But with hindsight Kinnock's Labour was no sort of answer to anything. Personally I never felt that Blair's Labour was either but I would have found it easy to support Labour under John Smith who died fairly quickly after he took over from Kinnock. Had you asked me how I felt about the Conservatives in 1987, 1988 or 1989 I would have said that they had been in too long already but there was no viable alternative option. Ask me now and I genuinely think that those years represent a political pinnacle of sorts in the period 1973-2019. Whatever the presentation by many, Thatcher was to the left of everyone who followed her as all of them including Blair simply took her ideology further on. The union troubles of the 1970s were long behind us. Even race relations to my mind seemed pretty good pre the hip-hop explosion which is now a menace. We were all Soul II Soul and Back To Life. Those of us who were white were even reaching out to the daisy age rap of De La Soul. I saw them live.

In fact, not being able to afford to get on the mortgage ladder many of us saw hundreds of bands live. A couple of hundred. And with this, those of us who did so were rather more than employees. I attended my first ever outdoors gig entirely on my own in 1986. It was on one of the London commons. Featuring acts as diverse as Gil Scott Heron and Boy George, it was an Anti Apartheid event. In parallel, there was the emergence of the red wedge movement. Paul Weller, Billy Bragg and many others conveying a left wing message via music, it extended to fashion. We were all in doctor marten shoes (not boots) and narrow legged black trousers when not in work hearing the Labour left messages driven through something quite arty and trendy. That is, rather than through the lens of confrontation between Kinnock and the Bennites which was so often on TV screens and seemed to be in a different world. On one memorable night, I was at a Bragg gig when he was accompanied by a very large group from Nicaragua and its leader was the Nicaraguan Minister of Culture. 50 of us at the front got up on to the stage next to them and sang along with them. On another, there were buckets out for striking dockers during the set and then to maximise the money to be collected he played the set all over again.

Rebecca Long-Bailey's self promotional video picks up on the year of her birth, 1979, rather than the late 1980s but something of its vibe reminds me far more of this mid to late 1980s period than of the late 1970s. It is easy to see how Corbyn and McDonnell have been bedevilled by accusations of trying to drag the country back to the 1970s. Indeed, some of the portrayal of Corbyn in the media has been much the same as it used to be with Tony Benn. As older men, they are unlikely to be easily packaged as trendy however much Corbyn paraded around Glastonbury and was greeted there. Long-Bailey, though, is to my mind trying to look more like an updated north meets south version of red wedge. Her policies are in truth no different from those of Corbyn with whom red wedge did dally incidentally, being often London based while also reaching out and up to the north. While Bragg could sound rational about policy on stage, elsewhere that very same policy looked totally unreasonable in the hands of someone like Derek Hatton on Liverpool Council with consequential uproar. So much depends on packaging. And in stepping down, Corbyn and indeed McDonnell will recall this well.

I despised Hatton and the Militants. I rather liked red wedge and was even sort of a part of it even though once you drill down below the music and clothing it amounted to much the same thing. Such as climate change protestors know today, the sense of belonging to a tribe can be a persuasive thing. Red wedge very quickly failed. The main reason was ecstasy, not that I ever took it myself. No sooner had people discovered that and baggy clothing and raves off the M25, the most political they were going to become was in the occasional hugging of a tree to prevent a new by-pass. The vast majority of them declined that opportunity for being too crusty and too swampy - and partied for a decade without a political thought in their heads. Even I just moved on to the flash Stone Roses and the cartoon Happy Mondays before deciding on the grounds that I hadn't got married to relive my childhood for the umpteenth time via gigs in the lightish Britpop.

As early as 1987, the SDP had effectively fallen apart. Its alliance with the Liberals was very fraught on account of personal spats between Steel and Owen and even Jenkins and Owen fell out with each other within the SDP. At the time, I blamed Owen. The more I hear about Steel and Jenkins now the more I dislike them. They were not who I thought they were. I always liked Shirley Williams best on the SDP side but my e-mail exchange with Owen in the last year was so rewarding that I like him too now. My Dad and I were right. It should have been Pardoe and not Steel who had replaced Thorpe. When Pardoe stood back - he never seemed that ambitious - and Steel started to irritate by being so difficult, my big hopes had been placed in another Liberal man. But three days before Christmas 1986 a friend had called me at work to say that he had bad news for me. A car crash in Cornwall. David Penhaligon MP was dead. It seemed like a very big loss.

Obviously I had voted Liberal/SDP in 1987. In the first month of 1989, Steel had been replaced as leader of the Liberals by Paddy Ashdown who incidentally also died on a 22nd of December. Initially I took to him and I voted for Ashdown's version of the Liberals in both 1992 and 1997. Unlike half the country, I never even contemplated voting for New Labour. They seemed from the outset much further to the right than they claimed to be. Even their coolness seemed fake to me. As time moved on, I liked Ashdown less and less. He became so pompous. And I am now absolutely certain he was the figurehead of a secret services strategy. That is, I believe he was placed to make the Liberals seem more appealingly muscular at a time when Kinnock was battling away at the Bennites. In this way, even though they were losing power, the establishment could be sure that there was no way they could pull off a shock and somehow get into Government. He was at the helm before and until New Labour was fully created, then elected, and until it had proven to be harmless for a year.

Late 1990s to 2005 - 34 to 42 (i)

Throughout the twelve years I worked in three posts as a Civil Servant during the Thatcher and Major Governments, I only ever personally encountered one Minister. It was a Friday night. I had worked hard all week. I wanted to get home quickly. My office was on the 17th floor. The lift that I got into was full of people who were clearly working late. It seemed like it stopped at almost every floor on the way down so that just one person could get out. So frustrating. By the first floor I was alone and in anticipation of seeing the ground floor imminently. The lift stopped. In walked Michael Heseltine with a couple of his cronies. He stuck a special key in a hole as was Ministers' privilege. A key which reversed the direction of the lift so that it whizzed up to his private office on the 10th with me still in it. No apology. Not even a hello. Nothing. Then he flounced out. I have always hated him. When I heard that he had almost strangled his Mum's dog I wasn't surprised.

1997 was not only the year of Blair's coronation. It was also a year that I moved posts. I went to water charging policy in the Department of the Environment but I also had a number of weird add-ons, one of which was having a facilitating role in the awarding of Queen's Birthday and New Year Honours. Loved the honours work. Loathed the water work. My worst job of all time because of it. But given my indifference to New Labour, this was ironically the start of my face to face dealings with Ministers. It started slowly enough. Just two Ministers there after which in ensuing posts there were so many I have lost count of them. Luckily the two were not Blairite. My first was Glenda Jackson which for the purposes of name dropping was a pretty great first. She was on 40 to 60 fags a day. May well still be now she is in her 80s for all I know.

They had recently made her building smoke free so she was given at taxpayers' expense her own especially sealed room where she could smoke as much as she liked and work like a trooper. She was really lovely to me, perhaps on seeing me as being nervous. I still think of her mainly in terms of Morecambe and Wise but I enjoy her sketch with them even more because of our dealings. The other was the late Michael Meacher who was quite a leftist if not quite the full works. He successfully managed to balance his socialist principles with personally owning nine houses. He was ahead of his time on environmental matters. No one ever gave him the credit for his radical approaches. Again, he was nice to me. I quite liked him. But two years in that place was all I could endure. I got out at the end of 1999 in the hope of a new millennium.

I went to airports policy which I enjoyed a lot. I stayed there for six years until 2005 when I had a major breakdown. There had been one in 1975. Nothing then until 1995 when I had quite a bad turn. There had been quite a lot of blippy moments between 1995 and 2005 although mostly I was alright enough. I was still going out as if I was 18 when I was late 30s/early 40s. One part of the backdrop was Glastonbury which I attended in 1993, every year between 1997 and 2000 and again in 2002 and 2003 and later 2007-2009. It was possibly at the one in 1999 when I wandered into a tent in the Green Field there to find a lot of people sitting like pixies on haystacks. A woman was at the front. She sounded very impressive. They were listening so intently it was like being in a barnyard library and yet they were also being invited to contribute. I risked saying something. She was encouraging and asked me to say a lot more. And that queen of the hay people was none other than Caroline Lucas. Was there an EU election in 1999? If so, I voted Green in it, never having voted Green before.

During this period, I also went out of my way to see Tony Benn speaking at Glastonbury and I always enjoyed it. He had changed and for the better. Released from political power games - as he said, he left Parliament to spend more time with politics - he was like an old testament prophet full of hopeful messages. You young people. The future is yours. That sort of thing. I was middle aged but saw no conflict in it. He was erudite, interesting, entertaining and moving. Briefly I did a bit of tai chi in my lunch breaks at work and found that he often spoke in the building next to the tai chi hall so I went to hear him there too on a couple of occasions. Heseltine was not my only lift encounter. I was in one with Douglas Alexander, who I never liked, and his aide as they whispered loudly to each other something along the lines that they thought the SNP were total bastards. It was really vitriolic and I found it embarrassing to be in the same space as that occurring.

In the wider world, the Tories were led by Hague who I had once thought ridiculous but came to respect a lot, Duncan Smith who did nothing for me and Howard who did nothing for me either. Charles Kennedy became the Lib Dem leader and I thought "at last, our time has come". I was aware that Kennedy when elected as the youngest MP had been a Social Democrat. I believed he was more of a Social Democrat than a Liberal at root. Furthermore, he was of my generation. And I liked him hugely. So there was no chance of me becoming permanently Green. In the elections, I was very strongly for the Lib Dems. Looking back, though, there is that issue of how New Labour were pushing the EU into ever greater expansion, even faster than they wanted to go, the Lib Dems loved it, and people like me either didn't fully notice or didn't question it because we were so pleased that Kennedy was our leader. He also did well in terms of getting more MPs.