My parents are moderate Conservatives, although it’s not really discussed. I have strong Liberal leanings but I also believe that a Liberal Government will fail if their policies are liberally enforced. If you want these freedoms then you have to be tough and set clear boundaries, but you should also be prepared to be flexible. I think I’d define my position as a hard, hands-on style of Liberalism.
I grew up during the Conservative Thatcher era and I think, more than anything else, that has shaped my politics. I’ll accept that, in the short term, Thatcher was good for the country because it was in a pretty sorry state when her Government took over. After a while, her policies began to benefit a wealthy minority while those at the bottom end of the social scale found themselves squeezed.
It was a terrible era of great inequality and Thatcher used the police force to put down resistance in a very brutal and heavy handed way. She ran the country like it was still a world-ruling colonial power, rather than the diminishing empire it really was. Occasionally they show footage form the 1980s on TV and it’s hard to believe this was England only a couple of decades ago.
In the post Thatcher years, the Conservative party became ridden with corruption and sleaze. It was also deeply out of touch. They attempted to distract from this by embarking on a series of witch hunts. For a while, single mothers were blamed for the collective failings of UK society. There was a horrible, condescending political slogan that the Conservative party used around this time to defend their methods: “Yes it hurts. Yes it works.” The trouble is, their policies hurt the most vulnerable people in society.
On a more personal level, when I was 17 I moved away from reading Sci-fi and Fantasy and began reading a lot of left field literature and philosophy. A few people at my school came out of the closet and I began experimenting with hard drugs.
I did some travelling abroad and when I was in The Yemen Republic, frequently wandered into areas where foreign companies were extracting oil or natural gas, while around them the indigenous people lived in poverty and squalor.
Two of my friends, who I’d known since their early teens, got put in detention centres and later ended up in prison. At one point, one of them was selling his arse on the street so that he could buy heroin.
There was a terrible pre-determinism to their descent into crime: the shitty, abusive family backgrounds, the mental problems, the failure at school, the belittling comments from teachers who’d given up on them. It turned me off this perception that criminals are animals and that you should lock them up and throw away the key. These boys did bad things but they weren’t bad people. They were trapped in a cycle of behaviour, partly of their own making but also reinforced by things beyond their control. They were let down by a society that was too lazy to look for solutions or commit to anything other than lock them up whenever they caused trouble.
In addition to my Liberal beliefs, I also have a strong Libitarian streak, which is mainly a reaction to my parent’s knee-jerk deference to authority figures. It also comes from watching people in power demanding more respect than they are due or using their influence to bully those in inferior positions. Nothing really disgust me more than the misuse or power and it’s been difficult for me to disassociate this from the Conservative party in the UK, because they were a textbook case of how power can corrupt ideals.
I think that it’s only in my late twenties that I really developed a conscience and it’s been in those years that my political beliefs has crystallised. I have set myself a personal goal of being receptive to politics other than my own , but, so far, I’ve fallen well short of that goal. There’s idiots and scoundrels from all political persuasions. The only people who count on any side are people of integrity, which is what I hope to be one day.
