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I am a political nomad, wandering in a desert of uncertainty and with no clear vision of my political home, certainly as represented by the mainstream of British politics. I realised this, with growing unease, even while working hard for the Labour Party during the last four years of my membership, until I quit over the Iraq War in 2003.

Is it really just over 20 years since I joined Edgbaston Labour Party,a part of Birmingham which then had a rock solid Conservative majority? I had moved house from Erdington, an area of the city which actually then had a Labour Member of Parliament, a fact which tends to concentrate the minds of Labour members wonderfully. They had been slightly dull, middle of the road, solid working men and women who knew their task was primarily to support the sitting MP and not make waves.

Edgbaston was a different kettle of fish. Without a hope in hell in 1984 of electing a Labour MP, here was a Party membership composed of teachers, social workers and students which could give full rein to its, for the most part, hopelessly impractical idealism. I remember my first ever Branch meeting at which I remained quiet for much of it, being the new boy, until the Branch accounts had been read by the treasurer. He had announced that the Branch possessed some princely sum of about £35. Then the agenda moved on to resolutions and, one after another, members proposed and seconded funds to be sent to left wing resistance groups in South America and Africa totalling at least double what we had in the kitty.

When I found my voice and pointed this out, I still recall, with some fondness, one of the proposers,a guy I later came to like, saying loudly "I don't recall this meeting being thrown open to the bloody Tories!" So there I was branded as a right winger who was concerned only with practical things like..how we paid for our commitments.

In many ways those early Edgbaston meetings were hell. They contained Trotskyite apparatchiks who would know the meeting rule book inside out and manipulate it for their own ends leaving me fuming with anger at the devious manipulation of the political process. But although they made the most noise, they were not the core of the Branch. Most of them, idealistic though they were, simply wanted a Labour Party which had principles and ideals and real beliefs which the Party, when in Government (however many light years away that would be) would stick to.

Many of our Branch attendees, rare in those days, were women. They worked the hardest, did the hard graft uncomplainingly, and supported causes, clearly and unambiguously. They were prepared to get arrested at Greenham Common, demonstrate at Porton Down, while many of the men spent their time working out how they could get elected to the next level of power within the Party hierarchy.

Several of the women, particularly, were passionately committed to the cause of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I was a member too but not with the same degree of passionate involvement. I recall well my sadness and disappointment when a number of women I admired a great deal left the Labour Party over what they considered to be the betrayal of principle by its then leader, Neil Kinnock. Kinnock had declared a year long moratorium on new policy initiatives after a horrendous hammering at the previous General Election. When the period of silence ended Kinnock announced that Labour was now a multi-lateral disarmament Party, replacing its committment to unilateral disarmament once in power, and that he would be staying on as leader, despite he and his wife Glenys being, apparently, ardent supporters of CND.



How could he be so two faced? Was there no honour in politics? Should he not have fallen on his sword if he had any principle at all? Such was the, possibly, naive view, though it didn'tseem that way at the time.

Dammit, idealists or not, I loved some of these people. Not the manipulators, the apparatchiks, the Trotskyite plotters in darkened rooms..but the well intentioned who believed that the Labour Party stood for something good in the world and should not be ashamed to parade it even if the political sophisticates of the media laughed in our faces.

At this point, over a fairly short period of time, my own position in the political spectrum began to change. Kinnock resigned, the ill fated John Smith lasted only a few months as leader and died, then came the advent of Tony Blair. I actually voted for Blair back in 1994 because I saw this wonderful new dawn, after 18 miserable years of Conservative government. A leader who shared my own view that the Labour Party needed to change by, for example, throwing out the clause 4 committments to state ownership of all the means of production, which may have done us proud between the wars and immediately after, but was seen as the heavy hand of state control in 90s Britain.



My first signs of unease, however, were back in 1995, before Blair won his first election victory, when as then Political Officer for my Constituency, I went to a Political Education briefing in Manchester organised by the now famous/notorious Peter Mandelson. I had been to these many times before under previous leaders and they were an ideas dump, a two way feed top down and bottom up, so that the leadership sounded out the views of the Constituencies as well as imparting its own stances.


This one was different. Delegates were ushered from reception into the hall so there was none of the sloppy rolling in late so typical of Labour meetings and during the sessions, stewards walked up and down the aisles, walkie talkies strapped to the hip, motioning sharply to anyone who tried to stand up and make a point or ask a question during any speaker's address. We broke up for the first scheduled 'workshop' and I produced the copious notes I had written on my Constituency's behalf which I was expecting to impart at some point during the meeting.

I asked the workshop co-ordinator when delegates would be given their chance to speak and she looked at me with some amazement. "Oh you won't," she said "Your purpose here is to take back what you learn today on how to win elections and make sure that your Constituency stays on message!"

And that, essentially, has been the formula ever since, epitomised by the Prime Minister himself. He has tried to answer the accusation, not too successfully, that he has contempt for the Labour Party, its institutions and its traditions of open democratic debate. Certainly my experience at that meeting was a precursor to the manner in which 'New Labour' (God how I hate that term!) has stage managed its conferences and the personal views of its members. I can see some sense in bringing stability to a televised conference that used to be dominated by extremist, minority rabble rousers who often destroyed the Party's electoral credibility but things have gone way, way too far.

Anyway the evangelism worked and Blair won a resounding electoral victory in 1997..and with it my Edgbaston Constituency achieved a sensational result by gaining its first ever Labour MP. It was a wonderful result and we were all cock a hoop but, when the gloss of the twin victories had worn off a little it was obvious that the Party had changed, not just nationally but locally too.

Only thirteen years before I had been a staid middle of the road Labour pragmatist trying to knock down some of the walls of extreme left wing silliness. Now in 1997, I hadn't changed one iota, but the Party had picked up its tents and moved sharply to the right. I was even the subject of one comment from one fairly senior local official that 'although that Brian Fargher has some good ideas, he's a bit too left wing for my tastes' which, if it hadn't been so sad, would have been hysterically funny.

So my disenchantment with Blair and his private financing of hospitals, his opt out of schools from local government control, his obsessive pandering to wealthy sponsors grew and grew until finally the decision to support the invasion of Iraq created such bitterness in my Party and in my soul that I could no longer bear to be a part of going along with any of it ..and so I quit.

Which brings me back to the beginning. Now I am wandering in this political desert picking up scraps of comfort ..like joining Compass the pressure group of the Democratic Left. I went to their AGM last month which was splendid..except it doesn't substitute for a political party and I soon realised that what we all had in common was a profound dislike of what we have now but no unanimous view about replacing it.

So I feel as if my once idealistic and slightly quirky home, for all its faults, has been replaced by a huge modern apartment with no atmosphere and no soul, just a desire to get re-elected and re-elected and re-elected.

Where I once felt to be among comrades in a left of centre party that believed that Britain should start accepting its limitations and remodel itself on socially improving lines rather than trying to keep up the front of being a 'world player' by spending wasteful billions on, particularly, defence, my former Party has moved sharply to the right and now allocates social welfare based on some budgeted funds of a local trust.

Am I wrong to be angry that Alzheimer patients have just been denied a drug that would ease their condition because the NHS Trust says its 'not cost effective' Am I wrong to be annoyed that health care is a lottery in this country depending where you live? That Britain has one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe? That all these things could be rectified if we stopped trying to be a first rate military power and spent the money where it could really do some good? Am I really naive to want that?

Truly, as I feel left behind by the rush to pragmatic, mustn't upset the tax payer, election winning solutions, I sense that 'I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.'