So…
Just after the general election this year, I stayed in Dorset and visited the Soul Food kitchen in Weymouth at breakfast-time one Friday. Soul Food does meals for people who have benefit problems, or who are in and out of street homelessness. I spent a lot of time with people there a couple of years ago. When I visited in May this year, I recorded an interview with an older woman who I’ll call Leanne for this post. Leanne was a wheelchair user: cerebral palsy, she said. We talked for a long time. She spoke about the government’s harsh application regime for employment and support allowance. She talked about her social housing flat, which she said she’d been living in for years. She revealed a deep dislike of the social care types who she seemed somehow to answer to: “ I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” she said. Anyway, since we’d just had a general election, I thought I’d ask Leanne who she’d voted for. She told me that she’d voted for the Tories. “Doesn’t make any difference,” she said.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, except to say that life rolls this way outside of twitter. I meet up with people and they say things, and there we are. I speak to a lot of people who genuinely think of political engagement as a luxury enjoyed by other people. Their own minds are busy elsewhere: mainly caught up in a series of run-ins with bullying bureaucrats as far as I can tell (“I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” etc). That’s where the main action is. People read the papers and follow the news, but they don’t imagine for a second that their experiences count towards anything that goes down there. I think that’s why this latest wittering about Labour as the party of welfare has not engaged me. It seems a while since people I hang out with talked about Labour as social security champions.
My mum told me long ago that if I ever voted Labour she would disinherit me. I never told her I’d joined the Labour Party even after she and my later step-father told me that the reason I came to advocate nuclear disarmament, say, was that I’d been “got at by Communists.”
I gave up on Labour in the mid 1980’s when I realised it was not the party to bring about nuclear disarmament, though I maintained respect for John McDonnell who I’d come to know and admire him when he was Hampstead & Highgate constituency candidate in 1983. A problem with Labour in those days was that the Parliamentary Labour Party’s policies increasingly differed from what had been democratically adopted by Conference.
Yet I reckon much can be gained from recognising the validity of Alexander Pope’s statement, “A man [sic] should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
A tv ad I’ve see ad heard this week is for a coin of the realm commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s death. The quotation is something like, “Never, never give up.” I don’t share his politics yet note that Churchill changed party allegiances — thus ‘giving up’ on the party that he was in at the time.
And there is Sir Walter Scott’s, “Without courage there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue.”
It’s interesting in its way. I’m not from a roaring socialist tradition myself. I think the only time the family really voted Labour was when Labour went Tory (in NZ in the mid 80s). I obviously come from a fine tradition of Liz Kendalls. Tis one of the reasons why tribal politics does my head in. Only tribalists are into it. Everybody else either swings, or ignores the whole thing, or just makes a choice on the day.
As well as ‘tribalism’ in itself, there has also long been the terrorism of the Hate Mail — sorry, ‘Daily Mail — etc. that has operated against clear thinking. Eg, I told an actor friend in the 1980’s who was a household name, of a Daily Mail ‘exposé’ article about ‘red teachers in the classroom’. That article was part of a centre pages spread and was written by a reporter who reported that he had ‘won the confidence’ of the directors of CND-friendly ‘Teachers for Peace’ by going ‘under cover’ as a left-wing teacher wanting to install Peace Education classes into the school curriculum.
The reporter did not acknowledge that successive UK governments had been bound by UN disarmament protocol to introduce Peace Studies in the classroom, but he did disclose the private home address of the teachers he ‘outed’. The Teachers for Peace members so identified first heard of that ‘exposé’ by way of a phone call from NUT Press Office, and later received, say, anonymous post cards advising them to get ‘fire insurance’ for their property.
My actor friend told me that he had great respect for Vanessa Redgrave and her politics, but would not dare to be so outspoken himself. He cited the example of another actor who had spoken in favour of CND and got dog dirt pushed through is letter box in response.
I wonder how much wheelchair user Leanne has been fed of the UN Convention on Rights of Person with Disabilities?
And it now seems to be very dangerous to be a gay trade union activist. Trade unionist attacked in wake of Pride and anti-Fascist mobilsation
Just chocking… But I’m glad you’re posting this Kate. Because it is a problem when people become so ignorant of their power that they end up supporting their perpetrators.
It’s stories like these that make me realise just how many parallels there are between state/economic abuse & domestic abuse.
Yes. And when I first encountered the Social Model of Disability, it helped counter much of the spiritual self-harm brought on by the Medical Model of Disability. The latter says that the disabled person is at fault.
The Green Party of England & Wales recognises the Social Model. “SW600 The Green Party has endorsed the social model of disability (DY200) where there is a recognition that society has put up barriers which prevents disabled people with different impairments from becoming and being full and active citizens. The Green Party is strongly committed to valuing, empowering and supporting people with illness and disabilities.”
What other parties recognise the Social Model?
Well it sure aint Tories. Or SlaveLabour for that matter.