In 1964, at the age of three, I moved with my family from Glasgow's Gorbals to Cumbernauld new town, one of central Scotland's new Jerusalems for the postwar working classes.
Although new towns have been held up to ridicule in recent years, it is hard to describe even today the bright promise and culture shock that I felt on arriving there. No more gas stairlights or communal toilets. No more wash houses and public baths (for washing, not swimming). No more coal fires and no more damp. Instead we had light and air, glass and concrete and plenty of wide open green space.
I came from a family of tradesmen. My dad was a shipwright in the Clyde shipyards and my maternal grandfather was an engineer. My mum and dad had met when they both joined a working class Communist Party (CP) run climbing club. These walking and climbing clubs were very popular in Glasgow at the time, and the CP recruited many young workers to their ranks through them. Both my parents joined the CP.
My grandfather had been involved in the anti-fascist struggle during the 1930s and had helped break up many Blackshirt meetings in Glasgow Green. Because he was in a reserved occupation he had to fight long and hard to be allowed to join the army. His tales of the war were not your standard Second World War history lessons. His stories were of meeting Communist Party partisans in Italy and near mutiny when the 8th Army was told to confront Tito's partisans at Trieste.
But worst of all was his story of liberating Belsen. He was a sergeant driver in the lead tank of the armoured reconnaissance column that actually found the Belsen camp. Images of that event haunted him till he died. Shortly before his death he told my father that they had found some guards in the camp who tried to surrender. My grandfather shot two of them with his pistol.
My dad was a shop steward during the UCS 'work-in' and the events of that time - mass workers struggling to keep their jobs - left a deep impression in my mind, convincing me of the need for rank and file self activity and the necessity for worker activists to organise collectively. The UCS 'sit-in' was planned and raised by 12 CP members in the Shipbuilding Industrial Branch.
It was during this period of workers' struggle that the class nature of society was made clear to me, not in the factories and shipyards of my father's generation, but in the classroom and countryside.
I will not regale you with horror stories about the selection of lower middle class sadists who swelled the ranks of teachers who taught me, nor bore you with buccaneerish tales of adventure, dodging gamekeepers and farmers while poaching, camping and bird watching. Suffice to say that these two groups of wretches taught me that power needs violence and power is property.
I was brought up in a home where three political ideologies battled for position - Stalinism, Scottish nationalism and syndicalism. This heady brew, so common to the Scottish left, will be familiar to many and may help to explain how it is that the left in Scotland has been about as useful as a chocolate teapot in fighting the Tories, and now Blair, over the last 20 years.
After leaving school I obtained an apprenticeship in a small, poorly organised light fabrication shop in Glasgow's East End. The shop worked piecework at a low rate for apprentices. I organised a 'go slow' and got the rate raised. Unfortunately, when my time was out I got the bump.
It was during this time that I came into contact with the left. I joined CND and became the local branch secretary. I also joined the CP dominated Boilermakers' Broad Left but none of these movements addressed the questions I needed answered.
Why, after the advances of the 1960s and 1970s, were the workers in retreat? Why was it that the so called left wing stewards in the shipyard I now worked in were negotiating survival plans with the bosses who cut jobs?
In 1980 I came in contact with the SWP. It was not love at first sight, but the party persevered and I joined during the steel strike of 1981.
It was in 1982 that I got a start on the then Govan shipbuilders and, full of revolutionary fervour, launched my abortive campaign to revitalise the struggle for jobs and socialism on the Clyde. Unfortunately both it and I ran straight into the 1980s industrial downturn. This shattering experience was a real blow to my confidence, particularly as at the time I did not accept there was a downturn. Anyway, I kept the faith and persevered.
Crisis followed crisis and redundancies have seen the workforce in the now Kvaerner Govan Ltd slashed from 2,500 in 1982 to 1,000 in 1997.
Two years ago I finally got my wish and was elected welder shop steward representing 235 men. I was elected less from popular enthusiasm but more from the fact that I was the only enthusiastic candidate. I had kept up a steady stream of militant rhetoric over the years and won some important victories as a union safety rep.
As you can guess my workplace has not been the sheet anchor of my political commitment. Instead I looked to Marxist theory, the study of history and an appreciation of culture to keep me going through the 1980s and early 1990s. They have taught me, in the words of St Just the French revolutionary, 'that the present order is the disorder of the future'. It is that hope and belief that has kept me going through the years.