The Life That Didn't Happen

What I miss most is the life that didn’t happen. Is that the same for everyone?

There was a short moment, a long time ago, when I realised I’d landed exactly where I had always wanted to be.

Everything was in place; from now on the trip would be pretty straightforward.

The family, the children, the home, the career, the fun, the hugs, the laughs; it felt like things were going to be plain sailing.

Dreams do come true.

And then it didn't quite happen. It just didn’t come off.

And for what seems like forever now I’ve felt like I'm the guy who found the key to the locker of happiness, only to find that the key wouldn’t turn and the locker remained unopened.

I know what was inside the locker, it’s just that I never got to open the door and let it all fly out, never felt it rush over us, spray its joy in our faces and feel its wind in our hair.

......But somewhere, the key did turn and happiness did happen. Somewhere, in another place, a parallel place, maybe I am happy.  

       

Tom Waits - Somewhere (written by Bernstein & Sondheim)

You don't HAVE to Vote Labour

Twenty years ago this week I attended my final Labour Party meeting. It was quite a meeting to make my last.

Held on April 29^th 1995 in the Methodist Hall, Westminster, it was a ‘special conference’ called by Tony Blair, the Labour Party’s new leader, with the sole aim of winning him permission to remove Clause Four from the Labour Party constitution.

Clause Four committed The Labour Party to Socialism; it made it clear that purpose of The Labour Party was ….to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.    

Tony Blair won the vote and as I watched ‘Clause Four’ being amputated from the constitution I was left wondering what The Labour Party was now for. 

A torrent of questions seemed to pour over me; if The Labour Party isn’t committed to Socialism then it isn’t a Socialist party; if it now commits itself to the free market enterprise economy, then philosophically it is no different to The Conservative Party, so just what is the purpose of this new “New Labour’ Party?

It struck me that the only real difference between it and The Conservative Party was in the style of management that each Party would offer the country.

Voting Labour or voting Conservative would be just like deciding which new Chief Executive to appoint to run your business. It wasn’t going to be about Politics anymore, it was now about competence, tone and attitude.

Two years later, on the 1^st May 1997, I walked into my local General Election ballot box full of trepidation and heartache.

On the one hand I had the option to vote as I always had, for The Labour Party, which was now led by this public school rich kid who’d attended Oxford and spent a couple of years as a Barrister where he’d represented a business who wanted to refuse to pay their workers holiday pay.

But on the other hand I had The Conservative Party, led by John Major, a working class man who’d left school at 16, been unemployed, worked as an office clerk and never gone to University. He’d become a local Councillor in Brixton and whilst there he’d pushed through a huge expansion of council house building.

Between Tony Blair and John Major it was obvious which one would understand and recognise the background I’d come from.

So my question to myself was, why are you about to vote Labour?

The more I thought about it the more I saw that the reasons I wanted to vote Labour were all based upon tradition, habit, culture and fear. I had no idea at all why I was about to vote for a toff from Fettes, rather than the working class kid from Brixton.

As my mind swirled I tried to focus on my key questions: which of these guys would know what was going to be best for the working class, which of these Leaders would instinctively understand the hopes and dreams of my community, which Government would manage our economy and public services in a way that would help families like mine improve our circumstance; which Party would see their role as ‘helping’ the UK’s working class communities and which of them would envision Government’s job as being to ‘take care’ of the poor?

This last question was crucially important to me, because I didn’t believe my class needed ‘taking care’ of. The working class didn’t want to be patronised. What we wanted was simple; the tools, the chances, the opportunities to do better. We did want to know that there would always be a safety net to give security to those who find climbing upwards harder than those who are more agile, but no matter what our agility I knew that we all wanted to climb.

Improvement and aspiration, that was what had been at the heart of Clause Four, the philosophical soul of Socialism was about the empowerment of the working class: but we no longer had a mass Socialist party to vote for.

It was clear that there was no longer any reason I needed to feel duty-bound to vote for The Labour Party. So the question now was, what was I to do?

The Red Flag - the anthem of the 'clause four' Labour Party

Scream into Space or Making A Difference?

It would seem a bit amiss if I didn't write something to do with the impending General Election given that Politics was one of the subjects that prompted me to start writing this extremely occasional Blog.

It is clear that the mass public are both turned off and bemused by the two main Parties and on the face of it there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why people should put their time and effort into deciding whether to support either the Labour or Conservative Parties. To almost quote Shakespeare, ‘a plague on both their houses’.

Of course, if you're in Scotland there is a strong and valid reason why you might choose to vote SNP and only someone divorced from the real world would pretend to not understand the passions that are driving hundreds of thousands of people towards voting UKIP or Green across the rest of the UK.

The frustrating aloofness, arrogance and general weirdness of our mainstream politicians has left us all wanting to give them a good kicking. Thursday is our payback time.

Do we not all feel an urge to give them a bloody nose for their blatant incapability to have a single clue about what it’s like to be a regular British citizen, whether you’re a “hard working” one or not?

But as Thursday approaches, our collective mind needs to become a lot more focussed on the real choices that are facing us.

Unless you live in a safe Lib-Dem constituency, a vote for anyone other than Labour or Conservative is just a scream in space. A cathartic burst of passion and frustration that will leave you momentarily feeling empowered and satisfied, but like a Haribo sugar rush the buzz will quickly fade and you will crash only to find that your job, your education, your hopes, indeed everything you hold important to how you want to live has been scuppered because your ‘protest’ vote achieved nothing.

Of course, if we had a system of Proportional Representation, a vote of dissent may be well placed, but in our first past the post, ‘you win - I lose’ system, it is essential that we each make sure our vote counts.

We must engage with the system we actually have and use our votes constructively; casting a vote for either the Labour or Conservative Party means we are actually impacting upon who will lead the next Government and that will make a difference to all of us.

It may not be your ideal scenario, but we are going to have a Government led by either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party; which one it is is going to be down to you.  

Make a difference.

Alice Cooper - Elected  (UK #4 in 1972)

Talk to People

I have just got home after an extraordinary evening spent amongst extraordinary people who are all involved in doing some extraordinary work.

We spent the evening discussing international affairs and politics. It was an evening unlike any other I have ever known. To be honest it was the kind of evening I’ve dreamt about having all my life. High end conversation with incredibly intelligent and well informed people who also happen to be thoroughly decent and lacking in arrogance.

I had a blast. In fact it was one of those moments in life when you keep looking around the room and thinking to yourself “how did I get here?”.

The answer to that specific question is that I made myself go along to an open discussion event some months ago and whilst I was there I made a deliberate effort, despite the difficulties we all feel in doing so, to introduce myself and make conversation with a range of people I did not know nor had ever met before.

Most of those conversations lasted a minute or two, often with little feedback from the other person; they were fleeting chats, quickly forgotten; but on one occasion the conversation clicked, it clicked enough for it to develop into a full scale chat and that chat ended with us swapping details and agreeing to continue our discussion on-line.

We did the on-line thing and our conversations continued to go well, so much so that he then invited me to join him and some of his colleagues at a dinner; that dinner was tonight and whilst at tonight’s event I met a couple of amazing people who I will also be staying in touch with.

Talking to people, no matter how awkward or difficult it may feel at the time, is the key to an interesting life. It is the way you find things out about others, about yourself and about the world. It’s the way you make friends, colleagues, acquaintances and memories.

You need to know that that other person, the one you don’t know but you’re considering saying “hello” to, is very likely to be just as unsure about talking to new people as you are, that they also don’t know what to say or do, but that they are just as keen to meet someone new, interesting and nice as you are.

So just talk to people.

If they don’t talk back, shame on them. But I wager that you’ll discover that most people do talk back and that most people are interesting, decent and extremely happy to make a new friend.

Dragonette & Martin Solveig - I Just Came to Say Hello