I'm unashamedly left wing. i know a lot of people will have a negative reaction to that, but I try not to let that get in the way of who I can be friends with. I work in a charity that is, by it's nature, non political. I generally draw the line being friends with people who spread hatred. Myself and our volunteer organiser at the time once had the task of telling a volunteer who was a member of the British National Party not to come back. His Facebook was full of posts about burning mosques down. However, that wasn't the main reason for ejecting him. He was stalking a female volunteer about 25 years his junior, good looking and definitely not interested.
I take my inspiration from the likes of Gerard Winstanley, William Morris and Peter Kropotkin, which makes fitting into the political spectrum difficult. The Green Party are the nearest to my ideals, but, for as long as they've existed, the chance of them gaining any real power has been vanishingly small.
Along with many others, when the Labour government got elected after 14 years of Tory misrule, I was elated. I knew that they wouldn't be perfect, but, at least there would be an end to the incompetence, class hatred and corruption of the Tories.
I was never a fan of Jeremy Corbyn despite being very left wing, mainly because he seemed very naive to me. At the same time I deplored the efforts of his own party members to undermine and unseat him. When he failed to get elected and Keir Starmer replaced him I was pleased. Even if he was not left wing enough for me, at least he was electable and could really not be worse than the corrupt and shambolic Tories.
The new government inherited a mess, I accept that, but they started making blunders, like cutting the winter fuel payment, almost from day one. They have been well meaning, but pedestrian and uninspiring. They've actually got good stuff done, but most people don't know about it.
I was puzzled when they appointed Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. Surely they knew how dodgy he was! I rationalised it as using a sheister to catch a sheister, for surely, nobody honest could survive in the court of Emperor Donald!
What I've now learned is what a tangled web of undemocratic capitalism all these people are mixed up in, enabling more of Britain to be swallowed up by transatlantic corporations, so that in the future even more of our earnings will go as rent to these ravenous entities.
I live in Tameside. After the local government elections it is now in no overall control, with Labour as the biggest party and Reform as the second. It's going to be very difficult for the council to make any decisions.
I feel partly responsible for this state of affairs. Let me explain why.
i actually think that the Labour party have done a good job running Tameside in difficult circumstances of declining grant funding from central government. Several Independent councillors have got elected in recent times because of the Labour government's shameful denial of the genocide in Gaza. What a local councillor is supposed to do about that eludes me! Many people don't really know what the difference is between an MP and a councillor. They also believe all kinds of malicious rumours such as councillors are all corrupt and get paid a fortune, Angela Rayner, our MP, has a mattress strapped to her back (not anybody's business anyway) etc. At the same time the massive links between right wing politicians and foreign billionaires are ignored.
Because the government has done an appalling job of putting its case, and the Mandelson scandal, the Labour brand has become toxic. People are turning to Reform because they're the new kids on the block. To me they are both fascist in nature and , being funded largely by oil money, have policies that will plunge us all into global hellfire. The important thing is to stop them. After the wonderful Hannah Spencer got elected it looked like the Greens were the best bet to keep them out, so, I started plugging the local Greens in my Facebook posts etc.
Unsurprisingly, when it looked like they might make a breakthrough the biilionaire owned press started a smear campaign, scraping the barrel for anything that might look dodgy and deliberately misrepresenting their largely excellent policies. I think this knocked a fair few percentage points off their vote share. The result was that in most Tameside wards the Reform candidate got elected with less than 30% of the vote because the anti Reform vote was split. That's first past the post for you. Labour usually came second. Whether it would have been different if the Greens hadn't stood I don't know. Many people would vote anything but Labour.
Sadly, many good, honest, hard working councillors lost their seats and it's going to be very difficult for the council to make any decisions in the future.
In 1933 the Nazis got elected with about 40% of the vote. The other 60% was mostly split between Social Democrats and Communists. It didn't end well! I do wish the other parties would co-operate in keeping Reform out. They're a serious threat to our future.