When I was in University (studying nursing – a course I never completed btw), I got heavily into politics. In fact I was the chairman of the Hendrefoilan Student Village association (HEROES), as well as the representative for nursing students in Swansea with the RCN. Before that I was a shop steward for the engineering apprentices for the AEEU whilst I was at GE (another course I didn’t complete). I saw politics as a way to change things that were broken – or more arrogantly – as a way to make people who had more power than me to sit up and listen to what I had to say.
In both roles I worked hard to ‘make a difference’ – but frankly it was small-fry and those small victories I won (getting Swansea University to accept monthly payments for accommodation or nursing students on a monthly bursary for example) were limited in their scope and ambition – and one thing I’ve never been short of is ambition.
A city and council election was on the way and the Labour incumbent was up for re-election – in a district split almost 50/50 between local residents and students Labour had always done well out of the student vote, and our councillor was a good man. However, he had rather forgotten who he was there to represent, and time and time again we saw him pander to the residents (who tended to vote Lib-Dem) to the detriment of the students – a good solid plan to broaden his support whilst holding on to his supposed safe votes from the students.
I was a staunch supporter of New Labour, and still held Tony Blair up as an outstanding statesman, optimism was still the message of the day. However, a good friend of mine who worked at the student union – Stewart Rice – had decided that the local Labour councillor didn’t have the needs of the student population top of his priority list, and that he should run as an independent (Stewart is now a Lib-Dem Councillor for Uplands, Swansea) to both remind him of that fact – but to also get an elected official in-post who really knew about students and what our needs were. I swung my support behind him, I campaigned for him – both in my official capacity at HEROES and by knocking on doors and getting people out to ‘vote for Stewart’. Of course what we’d managed to do was split the Labour vote down the middle and hand the election to the Lib-Dems – my first practical lesson in politics – always look at the bigger picture.
The count that night was a nasty affair – as it became obvious what we’d done the Labour camp grew increasingly upset with us – and several of my ex-friends in the Labour movement cast nastier and nastier looks in my direction. It eventually boiled over and in a horrible shouting match in the middle of the count it was explained to me in rather colourful language and at high volume how much of an idiot I had been.
I left the count at some dreadful hour of the morning, exhausted after the campaign as well as my 12 hour nursing shifts and holding down a carers job at the local nursing home. I collapsed back at my student dorm and was taken into hospital with sever exhaustion which brought about some other complications that had me on my back for nearly three weeks. I vowed in that hospital bed that I would never go near politics again.
But the time has come for me to put that aside. The reason I was so passionate about politics really stems from the fact I grew up in the South Wales Valleys – Brynmawr to be exact and the famous Blaenau Gwent constituency – Labours safest seat until they forced an all woman list on the voters and the voters told them where to go (twice). I grew up under the Conservative government of the 1980’s, I saw first hand what the massive loss of work and industry had done to South Wales – I grew up in a family where the word Conservative was as dirty a swear word as you could utter.
Things change though. Over the last term of the Labour government I’ve become convinced that they don’t have a clue. I’m convinced that they’ve lost all understanding of what life is like in Britain today, and I’m convinced that they’ve not got the foggiest idea on how to start to move us forward, to once again capture the imagination of the whole country – as Tony Blair did in 1997 – and get us to the point where we can build a Britain based on a modern idea of what we are capable of on the world stage, rather than out-dated ideas of what we might have been as an ex-empire.
I do think I know who can help us achieve that goal, or at the very least start moving us in the right direction – and as odd as this sounds from a Valleys boy – that party is the Conservative Party. Today, Gordon Brown finally got around to making the election official, and today I’m going to stop not talking about politics, today I’m going to re-engage and start to campaign – I’m going to do my bit to try and get us going again.
This is fair warning 🙂 I’m pegging my colours to the mast and I’m going to do everything I can to convince you over the next few weeks to put that cross in the right box – at the very least I’m going to try to convince you to at least get out there and vote – this time it matters – this time we can make a difference.
