The Day I Went to See Jeremy Corbyn

Let me get this clear right at the very beginning of this blog in that classic McCarthyite response ; I am not, nor have I ever been a member of  ….. any political party. Although I have been interested in politics since a teenager and I have flirted with various political organisations, I have never felt captured enough by any individual politician or party to actually join up as a member.  My political activism has always taken the form of organising activities and attending rallies and meetings .

 Although my politics has always been broadly left wing I always found my personal beliefs and opinions at odds with the likes of say the Socialist Worker Party or the Labour Party.  Although influenced by the ideas and writings of such great Labour stalwarts as Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan and I was lucky enough as a young man to be represented by that Labour legend S.O.Davies  party politics never had any allure for me. 

At election times I have tended to vote Labour as broadly I suppose I support them more than anyone else and up until the last general election I have always lived in a Labour constituency but on occasions I have voted for other parties.

In February this year I had attended the Welsh Labour Party conference in Swansea, not as a party member or supporter but because my work had sent me.  Ed Milliband had been there and quite a lot of the other Welsh Labour party hierarchy and it had struck me how staid, static and smug they were in their skins and quite confident at the time that they were poised to return to power.  Obviously, as we know now, that was not to be the case.

Following the 2015 general election I felt increasing disgust with the UK election system due to the blatant political machination of the media, who were obviously supporting particular powerful  elite interest groups and an electorate that seemed to be becoming increasingly self-cantered , isolationist and frankly xenophobic, hence the growth of dreadful parties such as UKIP. 

When the Labour party leadership contest started I was sort of vaguely aware of Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper but really had no idea as to who Liz Kendall or Jeremy Corbyn were.  If you had asked me at this point who I would have supported I would have unhesitatingly said Andy Burnham.  However, as the contest developed, although I have to admit it was not something I was following too closely, my opinions started to change.  I quickly started to realise that although I had no idea as to who Liz Kendall was her utterances seemed completely at odds to what I thought Labour was.  Obviously the party had changed quite a bit from last time I had paid any attention.

What really bought the difference to the candidates home to me was the welfare vote in July. Harriet Harman the interim leader of the party had said for Labour MPs to abstain???  WTF was that all about??? Yet another attack on the poor of this country and the leader of the supposed party of the working people of this country is saying to abstain??? At least one of the candidates Corbyn had the courage to vote against it.  That is the first time I remember him coming to my attention.  It was also the time that Burnham and Cooper started to go down in my opinion. Why, if they were against austerity did they not vote against this attack on the poorest in society?

Increasingly the name of Corbyn was being brought to my attention mainly through the attacks the other candidates and others within the party were directing toward him. What was it about this man and his politics that they were so afraid of particularly considering he had been an MP for so long? I did a bit of research and reading about his background and history and saw that he wasn’t the ordinary Oxbridge PPE party apparatchik, he was someone who had stayed true to his values all his life, something that seems incredibly rare these days.

I began to talk with friends, colleagues and on Twitter about the upcoming Labour party leadership contest and other people were picking up on the difference of the Corbyn campaign.  I said I had some sympathy for his approach and people urged me to sign up either as a member or supporter to vote for him.  I did seriously think about it but decided I would have been a hypocrite as I had never been involved in the party before and who was I to say who should be their leader.  My attitude was, let them pick their leader and then, if they pick Corbyn I might consider joining.  That, in itself was a pretty major change on my behalf as I had never ever considered joining a party before.

In August Jeremy Corbyn came to speak in South Wales.  He spoke at a number of venues but one was the Aneurin Bevan memorial in the Sirhowy Valley   This is an historic venue, where Nye Bevan used to hold open air meetings and somewhere right in the centre of my stomping ground.  I turned up at the meeting more than anything to see what the fuss was all about and because it was a nice afternoon to spend walking about the mountains of my beloved Welsh valleys.  I turned up early as I thought there would be a good turnout. Although I turned up a good three quarters of an hour early there was already a good crowd there and more than that there was a real carnival feel already.  The Red Choir were already there.  Being Wales we have a strong choral tradition and the Red Choir have been going years and they often perform at rallies and political meetings. People were around chatting and talking of the buzz of the Corbyn campaign.  People were catching up with friends and family and there was a real “valleys” feel to the event.

Then the man himself arrived.  No fanfare, no announcements, no hyperbole, he just walked in to the midst of us and started chatting to people, you know like a normal human being.  No minders, no security, no obvious hangers on he just walked in to the centre of the gathering and started chatting. I was stood chatting with a group of friends a couple of yards away and one of my group just went over and started chatting to him in a very natural way.  When I had been at the Labour party conference earlier in the year I just couldn’t have imagined that happening with Ed Milliband.

Corbyn then started to address the crowd, very unassuming, very naturalistic and not a particularly good public speaker.  He started to talk about the historic significance of the spot but more he talked about the late great Ray Davies. Ray was a local councillor, activist and character that I bet most local people in the crowd had come across at some time.  It was obvious that Corbyn knew Ray as a person, it wasn’t as if he had been briefed by one of his aides, he had connected with the terroir of the South Wales valleys, no mean feat in itself and something that cannot be faked.

The man talked, I wasn’t particularly impressed or overwhelmed but I just thought here is a genuine guy and that in itself, I am sorry to say in this day and age, is an impressive quality in a politician. He spoke, he took questions and there was discussion and debate. No spin, no managing the event, politics as politics should be, ideas not personalities. I was impressed by the approach, the social movement not by just the man himself. Although not a great orator the man spoke with passion and from the heart.  Without notes or script but with genuine conviction, when was the last time we saw that with all our staged managed politicians?

Well to cut to the chase dear reader that night when I got home I signed up as a Labour party supporter do you know why?? Because I could see hope, I could see a vision of a different way of doing things moving away from the bland, self-centred and self-obsessed politics that seem to have dogged us since the late 1970s. Although I had previously had reservations I wanted to be part of this opportunity to change things.

Since attending that meeting on the mountains of Sirhowy I have been increasingly disgusted by the antics of the other three candidates, including Burnham, in their personal attacks on Corbyn which he has had the good grace not to react to.  Who knows what the result will be??  I cannot believe the Labour Party machine will allow a Corbyn victory as there appears to be those in Labour who think they know better than democracy. This I believe is a real opportunity to change politics in the UK.  Even if people don’t think that Corbyn is the right person to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom he is the right person, indeed the only person on offer, to lead the opposition to this hateful destructive Tory government for the next five years.

This is my truth, tell me yours.

The Global Commodification of Care: A Rant

This blog post is going to be about the elderly care system in the UK, already I bet a load of you will stop reading. "I'm not old" "I don't need care" or it is seen to be so far off in to the future that it simply is not of interest. Stop and read on as what I am talking about is a crisis for our society because in the UK and The West in general we have an increasingly aging society and how we care for our elderly should be as much interest to people as the "war" on terrorism or drugs, global warming or global diseases but it just isn't.  The aging population and the looming crisis in our elderly care sector is the Cinderella  of social issues ignored for being frumpy and unglamorous.

How the elderly and infirm are cared for is a very good indication of what any society believes is important. Even for the young and fit, who may consider elderly care as something they would prefer not to think about, the increasing ageing population means we’ll be forced to consider, in a lot more detail, how we fund and organise it.  Care is important throughout all our lifetimes – from the care given by parents during pregnancy and infancy, through to the often guilt-ridden process of finding appropriate care for those same parents when they become elderly and infirm. How care is delivered and the quality of that care will increasingly come to the forefront of social policy concerns in the UK and elsewhere.

In Wales, the demand for elderly care will be further compounded by the fact we have some of the sickest communities in the UK. In areas like north Merthyr Tydfil, where research has shown people often start to have significant care needs from the age of 59, it’s possible people will need more than a decade of elderly care before the end of their lives.

At the same time, working in the care sector is, for many, a less than glamorous or aspirational occupation – many care workers work long hours for wages at, or near, the national minimum. Even in those areas of Wales with some of the highest levels of unemployment people may prefer not to take jobs in this sector, which I’m sorry to say, has low status throughout UK society. Additionally, the care home sector in the UK is increasingly part of a global industry which is often financed by offshore capital and feels that to be competitive and cost-effective it needs to import warm-blooded goods in the form of care workers from poorer areas of the world. Often you will find people from the Philippines or Eastern Europe in local care homes working long and arduous hours to provide care for our elderly people so they can support themselves and their extended families back home. These workers are often highly skilled, highly motivated and committed to providing good quality care, but managing care teams with different languages and different cultures presents its own challenges and problems that need to be overcome.

Care in general and elderly care in particular are not things that are held in high esteem in our society which seems to me to be increasingly beholden to the cult of the self over anything else. As outlined in this piece we are increasingly "farming out" the care of our elderly to economic migrants who are dragged to this country through poverty in their own and while they are here caring for our elderly who is caring for theirs at home. This situation is exacerbated and compounded through the UK's government's dogma of austerity which dictates the freezing and reduction of public budgets which in turn results in there being less and less public money being available for the care of our elderly.  We live in the 7th richest country in the world but from  my experience the care that is on offer is not as one would expect from such a rich nation.  Don't blame the government, don't blame the care workers, indeed I remember one Filipino care worker saying to me once " Why do you British treat your elderly so appallingly?"  It is you and I to blame that we live in a society that worships at the alter of youth, celebrity, wealth and beauty and have only disdain rather than veneration for the old and the elderly.

I am not overstating the case when I say elderly care is a disgrace in this country, basically it is invisible and nobody cares until there is some scandal of neglect and then a previously disinterested public sanctimoniously wags its finger at care workers the vast majority of whom are trying to do the best job they can while being under resourced, underpaid, under valued and who are often immigrants trying to support a family back in the land of their birth. People passionately defend the NHS but social care is as important if not more so. The British public recently voted into power a Conservative government on a ticket of further austerity measures. Such austerity measures will further impact on the poor state of our elderly care system but hey who cares, that's democracy for you :-(