I count myself fortunate for having spent my teenage years in the 1960s, a period when, as Wordsworth said of an earlier period of great change, 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very Heaven.'
The prevailing mood was for change; the Profumo scandal had been the last nail in Harold Macmillan's coffin, and the Labour Party had swept to power on a manifesto that offered a new order for working people. The Vietnam and Biafran wars were the main stories in the news, and the surge towards left wing politics ensured that there was plenty of grass roots protest. There was, as Bob Dylan wrote, 'revolution in the air'and one could not help but become excited by the tremendous events of the time, particularly at the time of the Paris uprising of 1968. I am now firmly convinced that it was during those exhilarating days that I was launched upon the tide that would eventually lead me, like so many of my contemporaries, to become a socialist.
I was an only child and had a very traditional upbringing, in a home where I was greatly loved and in which spiritual beliefs were not only discussed but lived out, and where materialism and the pursuit of wealth was despised. My father came from a solid working class background. He had been brought up in a simple Methodist home, where political activity was confined to trade union membership and to voting Labour. He had a fine brain, and was an autodidactic intellectualI still have all his books, which range from theology and politics, through literature and the natural sciences, to music and art.
My mother whilst not having a privileged background, came from a more affluent family. My grandfather was a cotton mill manager. Both he and my grandmother were practising members of the Church of England. Although they were not particularly interested in politics they always voted Tory.
I became captivated by social history, a subject which still fascinates me today. I became increasingly aware that the real heroes of history were not the kings and queens of England, or their minions, or the men who had waged the wars that had won Britain an empire; the real heroes were those ordinary men and women who had refused to be oppressed, who had stood up to be counted, and who had fought for justice and for the right of all people to enjoy a dignified and worthwhile existence. Annie Besant and Will Thorne, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Cobden and Bright, William Lovett, Keir Hardie, Ellen Wilkinsonthese were my icons, and events like the Chartist riots, the Peterloo Massacre and the Jarrow Crusade captivated my imagination. What was happening, of course, was that I was beginning to look beyond my rather confined environment; I was starting to recognise the unfairness and inadequacies of capitalism, and I was already rejecting it as the basic system for the kind of world I wanted to live in.
While I was at university I finally cast aside any notion that Christianity contained a solution for all that was wrong with the world, and instead discovered that Karl Marx did! His analysis of history, of the evil of capitalism and of the class struggle made sense of the increasingly fragmented nature of society and consequently made a huge impression on me. I started to understand the nature of the enemy and, moreover, I came to realise that by espousing socialism I could play a part in ridding the world of the terrible monster of capitalism.
When I finally dropped out of university, I took these beliefs with me and in the intervening years of marriage, motherhood, divorce and a return to university to complete my degree course, the socialist seeds sown by them have germinated and flourished. They have been watered by the numerous injustices of the last 20 odd yearsthe emasculation of the British trade union movement, the deliberate destruction of the British coal industry, the disgrace of decent working people forced to live on slave wages, the creation of an underclass of homeless and hopeless people, the tolerance of those in power towards the crimes of the businessmen backing them.
They have been fed by that steadfast refusal to be oppressed that manifested itself in the poll tax riots, in the struggle for justice for victims of an increasingly racist and homophobic establishment, in the fight for the release of a number of wrongly convicted prisoners, and in the growing revival of solidarity between working people to stand together and refuse to be defeated.
The scenes of policemen attacking miners on picket lines in the 1980s particularly stirred my conscience, and forced me into a definitive hard left position. My son, Jeremy, himself a committed socialist, has shown me by his own example how important it is to stand up and counted. Just recently I typed up his thesis for his history degree, which was concerned with the International Brigades and the response of the British working class to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. As a result, I now have some new heroesnot just those men who went to fight in Spain, but all those men and women at home who played their part in trying to secure the success of the Spanish Republic because, as Cecil Day Lewis so movingly put it in his wonderful poem 'The Volunteer', 'their open eyes could see no other way'. If I do have any regrets it is that the demands of my work, with its unsocial hours, prevent me from taking a more active part in local socialist activities.
I wish I could believe that Tony Blair's New Labour manifesto will eventually lead us to the New Jerusalem, but I fear that so long as he espouses the market and discards socialist principles, things will only get worse. Wordsworth wrote, 'England hath need of thee: she is a fen / Of stagnant waters,' referring to the 17th century poet John Milton: I endorse these words, but I address them to socialism. Britain is a nation in decay, where greed and materialism are seen as virtues, and where there has never been such hopelessness, poverty and injustice. We have never been in more need of the socialist alternative, and I am proud to be a part of the struggle to achieve it.