Politics

26/02/2008 by admin.

The last time I was a member of a political party was in 1960. I drifted away, rather than resigned from, Labour Party membership. I had been active in University Labour politics when the CULC contained such luminaries as Jack Ashley, Kenneth (now Lord) Wedderburn and Greville Janner. I remember being warned off the CUSC as crypto- Communist for which  a rabid left-wing Union speaker in my college wanted me. He later became a very successful barrister on the Northern circuit and , so far as I know, was never heard of in national politics. I was pretty left then but never a member of the Communist Party of GB. This didn’t stop my first tutor’s solidly Tory wife introducing me at a drinks party as ‘our College Communist’ for which her husband later apologised!

Since the 1960s I have thought of myself as largely apolitical. I always vote and I have voted for all three major parties at either national or local level, including Labour in the 1997 General Election (but not in 2001 or 2005). As with many other people Iraq was the last straw although I had become a severe critic of Blair by the time of the 2001 election.

Since then I have watched the Conservative Party’s painful attempts at rebirth but, again like many other people, I am unconvinced that this process is either stable or complete. I do worry from time to time that my absence from active party politics for so long gives me no right to criticise from the sidelines and I also live in a solidly Conservative constituency. I rarely if ever talk politics with former colleagues and you’ll forgive me for doing so now but I thought it was time I nailed my absence of colours to the mast.

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