Political compassion or political indifference?

A couple of Thursdays ago, my wife and I attended the Labour Party South West’s Gala Dinner in Bristol to hear Ed Miliband speak. Although a lifelong Socialist and Labour voter, it is fair to say I haven’t been politically active since my years as a unit secretary in a small National Health Service union, back in the 1980s. Then, as Margaret Thatcher waged war on the miners particularly - and public servants generally, I was proud to have helped persuade a small membership of less than a hundred staff, who administered the contracts of Nottinghamshire’s GPs, dentists, chemists and opticians, that strike action, for the first time in our union’s history, was the moral and correct decision to take, to try to defend our jobs and the NHS, from Thatcher’s heartless cuts.

Nonetheless, I eventually succumbed to the poor morale that was all-pervasive in the NHS during those Thatcher days and got out; deciding instead to cocoon myself in the relatively self-absorbed world of self-employment as a driving instructor. I figured that by relying on my own efforts, working how and when I wanted, success or failure would not be at the behest of a megalomaniacal, ideologically-obsessed government. I was wrong, of course, as a few years later, Thatcherite policies sent interest rates sky-rocketing to over 15% and the home I had bought a year or two earlier was plunged into negative equity, while my £60,000 mortgage repayments rose to almost £700 per month. That was a lot of money twenty-five years ago (heck, it’s a lot of money today) and it forced me to change careers again. I ended up running pubs for the next twenty-two years, because at least living above the shop guaranteed a roof over my head.

When the present economic recession started to bite, our daughter had just been born, people were abandoning pubs out of economic necessity and the writing was on the wall for the future of the market town pub which we had renovated and reopened after years of it being closed. We sold up and moved to Cornwall, where my wife now goes to work part-time (and seasonally), in a small hotel, while I stay home, do the school runs and write. My first book was published earlier this year and I’m working on my next. We are officially poor and my overdraft is scary, but we’re surviving. At the moment.

At the last local elections, I discovered that I didn’t even have a candidate I could vote for. There was a Lib Dem and a Conservative candidate, (not one and the same person) and a UKIP candidate. For the first time since turning eighteen, I left without casting my vote. Instead, I came home and decided that if my sense of outrage was not being represented, I should at least fight for it to be so. For the sake of my children’s future, I felt compelled to stop being a political whinger and start being a political doer.

So earlier this year, after a lifetime of support, I finally joined the Labour Party, a decision that led me to my first Cornwall Labour Party meeting last month and the dinner last week, where Ed Miliband was to personally address the members of the South West region. I wanted to hear the man, who contrary to what I was reading in the press, was our best chance of re-uniting the country, as opposed to the insidious Tory tactic of divide and rule, which I’d lived through before. I wanted to see the flesh and blood behind the political persona and satisfy myself that I could give him my total support. I was not disappointed.

He arrived in the large ballroom, set out with over twenty tables each seating ten of us and greeted those on his own table before sitting down to eat his soup. I then expected him to dine like the rest of us, say a few words and head home after a long day away from his family. I was wrong. He had no sooner finished his soup than he was up and walking around the room, saying hello to every single table, shaking all 240 hands and posing for endless photos before returning for his main course. He then rose to his feet again and thanked prominent Labour members from the South West - people such as Dawn Primarolo, Kerry McCarthy, Alison Seabeck, Doug Naysmith, Marvin Rees, Karen Smith, Todd Foreman, Darren Jones, Mark Dempsey, David Drew and Andy Newman – I’m sure I’ve missed some, so apologies to them.

He then went on to ask the faithful if they were ready for the fight ahead. He restated how Labour had a duty to the citizens of Britain to abolish the bedroom tax, to ensure that 4.8 million low paid workers received a living wage, to allow hard-working mums and dads access to affordable childcare, to freeze the prices of the energy companies so that the elderly and the vulnerable were not forced to make a choice between eating or heating, to stem the spiralling misery of debt exacerbated by Payday loan companies, and to support small businesses by cutting business rates. He promised more policies would be announced between then and the general election, aimed at stopping the Tories’ ‘race to the bottom.’ He declared he would fight for those with lower-paid jobs struggling to make ends meet because the wages of the majority of workers had fallen behind the rate of inflation, while those at the top had seen their incomes rise by as much as ten times more. He would fight to unite the country to address the economic problems Britain was facing, and end the Tories’ loathsome ploy of causing divisions in our society by pitting the rich against the poor, those in work against those on benefits, the young against the old and the fit against the disabled and the sick. He concluded by reiterating his vision of a country working best when working together. It was a solid statement by a man with sensible, reasonable and fair ideals – ideals that resonated with me personally. That he is also a declared atheist, like me, also gives me hope for more secular government and an end to religious privilege in our supposedly democratic system.

To my mind, voting Labour isn’t about finding the panacea for all the country’s problems in a few good politicians. Politicians are fallible human beings who sometimes make inaccurate predictions, read the wrong signs and make incorrect decisions - that’s par for the course. So for me, it has to be about the inherent moral fabric; not just of the political party en masse, but of the individuals who are its integral parts. When the morals of a government are so abject that it measures its success in direct proportion to the suffering it inflicts on the vulnerable and the profit it warrants for the rich, then only the privileged few can benefit. Politics should be about everyone, not just an elitist one percent.

I see nothing moral in watching families choose between heating and eating. I know, because we are one of those families. Where we live in Polperro there is no gas and turning on electric heating is a bit like posting your bank account details on Facebook and watching your balance sink into oblivion. We’ve done everything we can to limit our heating usage and still can only afford to use it between the hours of 4pm and 9pm when the kids are home from school and before they go to bed, when we hope that their high-tog quilts will keep them warm until the morning. We installed a shower and a dishwasher for the primary reason of avoiding having to use an emersion heater. A tumble drier is not even under consideration, even though with kids at school, it would be a real boon. However, we’re not as vulnerable as others who have to make grim choices about how much energy they can afford to use. For the elderly, it could literally be a life or death decision. I know it could be argued that Ed Miliband’s promise to freeze energy prices may be nothing more than a cynical ploy to win votes, but wouldn’t we all rather have a politician who champions for the elderly, the less well-off and indeed, every working family in the country struggling to pay enormous fuel bills, than a politician, who like George Osborne is currently fighting the EU in court, to remove the cap on fat-cat bonuses?

Millions of us face some stark choices as the Tories’ austerity measures cut deeper and deeper into the heart of our society and into the economic fabric of increasingly desperate families. We have never ‘all been in it together’ as Cameron and his sleazy cabinet of manipulators repeatedly pontificate – if we were, we’d have all enjoyed the 14% pay rises the top bosses have continued to award themselves. Let us hope, that when it comes to choices, the electorate understands what is needed when called to the polls. We have to ditch this divisive government of Conservative ideologists and their power-grabbing LibDem coalition partners, ignore the xenophobic fear-mongering of the politically inept UKIP party and vote for a united Labour party with Ed Miliband at the helm. I see no other way of uniting the country behind common ideals and compassionate politics.