Your say / Politics
‘For the first time in my life, I could be voting for the winning candidate in a general election’
I was a teenage anarchist.
It was the most enormous fun. Me and my schoolboy anarchist chums would go on those big CND rallies in London, where we’d make our way to the front and wave our black flags in a manner that was certain to make the establishment quake.
We’d also take the piss out of all the daft left-wing sects who were trying to sell their newspapers to one another.
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We could be rather naïve too. Those lefties were told what to think about everything from global politics to matters of personal morality. So we pestered the greybeards for the anarchist line on issue X and hot topic Y.
But we soon discovered that there was no anarchist ‘line’ on anything – just a set of guiding principles.
What’s more, it turned out that there were as many different kinds of anarchism as there were anarchists.
So what sort of anarchist was I? As a solidly middle class (state) grammar school lad, I could hardly be a class war anarchist unless I was also prepared to be a hypocrite (which didn’t seem to bother our chums on the hard left).
After giving the matter some thought, I decided that I was a hardcore green anarchist and social libertarian (this was long before the far right annexed libertarianism for their own ends, just as they’ve stolen conspiracy theories from the left).
As soon as I was old enough to vote, I faced a dilemma. My school history teacher was a Jew who’d lived through the Second World War and therefore carried a certain moral authority.
He insisted that we had to vote or we’d be betraying all those who’d fought for that right. It’s a now-familiar argument, but I thought it was bollocks then and still think it’s bollocks today.
Then a pal came up with a seductive idea. If we spoiled our ballot papers, we could still claim to have participated in the election.
And if there were only ten spoilt ballots in our solidly Tory rural constituency, we could claim to represent 20 per cent of the spoilt ballot ‘vote’ and the great anarchist revolution would be firmly within our grasp.
I remember going to cast my first ‘vote’ at the local church hall, where I was the only person present.
My ballot paper was handed over by a little old dear who wore an expression of grave disapproval.
She was clearly used to the sound of people inscribing a firm X with their pencil next to the name of the Conservative candidate.
But from within my voting booth, only the noise of furious scribbling could be heard. I can’t recall exactly what I wrote, but I’m pretty confident that the C-word was in there somewhere.
Like many an impressionable teenager before me, however, I soon fell in with the Wrong Sort. Yes, that’s right: the Greens.
Except that they weren’t called the Greens back then. They were still the Ecology Party.
These people were hippies. The west country Greens also seemed to have access to the highest quality hashish. I liked them. I was delighted to find that some of them were also anarchists who shared my aversion to parliamentary politics.
Some of them were very posh indeed and lived in huge county piles. I vividly remember going to visit one guy on the outskirts of Totnes and being asked to “wait in the music room”, which was vast and filled with every instrument known to man.
Many of the lady Greens were also radical feminists and therefore occupied peak position in the Top Trumps of radical politics.
Later, of course, they were to be recast by Gen Z as the hated TERFs and suffered a dramatic demotion – which should serve as a grave warning that fads and fashions in progressive politics can be just as volatile as fads and fashions elsewhere.
Arriving in Bristol as a student in the early 80s, I found myself sharing a house with a postgrad who was also a Green Party candidate.
The Greens were polling at best a few dozen votes in local elections back then and it was interesting to observe the utter contempt in which they were held by Labour and Conservative candidates.
Only one rather eager young Liberal candidate seemed remotely interested in engaging with them. His name was George Ferguson. Wonder what happened to him.
Anyway, it often seems to be forgotten that Bristol West was a safe Conservative seat back then and the personal fiefdom of patrician Tory William Waldegrave.
Those students who could be bothered to register (home counties Oxbridge rejects) generally voted for him. Different world, huh?
I should stress at this point that I never actually joined the Greens because (a) I’m not a joiner and (b) as is about to become apparent, I would have been swiftly chucked out for the crime of wrongthink.
But one afternoon, I actually read the Green manifesto (hey – I was bored and had nothing else to do) and was impressed by how radical it was, especially in those areas I cared most about (chiefly animal rights).
Had they also read it, the manifesto would have come as quite a shock to those wealthy middle-aged women from Clifton who seemed to imagine that the Greens were the political wing of the National Trust.
Anyway, I resolved that henceforth I would always vote Green, but spoil my ballot paper if no Green candidate was standing. This means that I’ve voted for an awful lot of losers over the years.
The most difficult period was in the run-up to the 1997 general election. My lefty colleagues insisted loudly and often aggressively that it was my ‘duty’ to vote Labour, since nothing mattered more than “getting the Tories out”.
I disagreed, arguing that I could see little difference between ‘New Labour’ and the Tories, which is broadly how I feel about this upcoming election.
So they voted Labour, I voted Green and we all got Tony Blair. Look how that turned out.
Thereafter, my mantra was: “There are no circumstances in which I could ever envisage voting Labour.”
I’ll admit to having a little wobble during the Corbyn years. I remembered him from the CND days and knew he’d been an active member of the League Against Cruel Sports in his youth.
For a while, I thought I might even be persuaded to vote for such a man of principle and integrity. But it soon became clear that even if he won, there was no way he’d be permitted to honour his pledges.
These days, psephologists insist that just as Farage has peeled away the substantial elderly and uneducated portion of the Tory vote, so the Greens have become a repository for left wingers disillusioned with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
There may be some truth in this, but I’m not one of those. I’m part of a smaller demographic: tribal Greens.
Inevitably, the Greens have changed over the years. There are fewer beards and sandals these days, which is rather disappointing, and I’m always alarmed when I see a Green in a suit.
That said, I’ll be voting for Carla Denyer in Bristol Central on July 4. It’s the first time I’ll ever have voted for a candidate who’s likely to win in a general election.
Carla seems to me to be exactly the right person to hold Keir Starmer to account, articulating Green policies clearly and persuasively.
Meanwhile, some of my old chums on the left appear to be clinging to the same fantasy as the Tories: a vote for Starmer will herald a pivot to hard left politics as soon as he gains a ‘super-majority’.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ll rejoice at the Tory rout as much as everyone else, but refuse to play any part in a Starmer victory, especially as he’s abandoned his green pledges.
Seems to me the only Labour policy worthy of applause is the one that annoys the people who most deserve to be annoyed: adding VAT to private school fees.
But I’d be prepared to bet that this will be among the first to be jettisoned after the election. It’s also dispiriting to see Labour banging on about growth and business.
I always thought that “Fuck business!” was the only sensible thing that Boris Johnson said, and when Liz Truss revealed the existence of the ‘anti-growth coalition’ I searched in vain for a membership application form.
So are there any circumstances in which I’d go back to spoiling my ballot paper?
Well, back in the 1980s there seemed to be no doubt among the Greens that their analysis of the state of the world was correct, and I recall some half-hearted discussions about how to respond when everybody else caught on.
The main fear was that the party could be vulnerable to the same far-left entryists who’d made life so difficult for Labour. No one anticipated the rise of special interest activist lobby groups.
In common with many charities, government departments and arts organisations, the Greens now seem to be in thrall to the obsessions of Gen Z.
Like many of my generation, I find some – but by no means all – of these to be risible.
I applaud the commitment to environmentalism, the rise of veganism and the determination to view Israel’s long-running war on the Palestinians through a wokey prism at a time when there seems to be a co-ordinated campaign to expand the definition of ‘antisemitism’ to incorporate any and all actions of the Israeli state.
But I’m fundamentally opposed to censorship and ‘cancel culture’, and having a biology degree burdens me with the knowledge of what biological sex is.
I have read nothing that JK Rowling has written on the subject of gender that I would disagree with.
The Greens have traditionally been outward looking, so it’s disappointing to find so many of them falling for the relentless solipsism of identity politics.
I’m aware that this is the subject of fevered debate within the Party and that the tide seems to be turning, albeit very slowly.
But if I was ever asked for my views as a voter, I’d suggest doubling down on the actual Greenery.
To give just one example: we hear a great deal about the so-called ‘war on motorists’. But in my experience, those who choose to define themselves as ‘motorists’, rather than people who simply use a car to get from A to B, tend to be odious Brexiteer conspiracy theorist beetroot-faced men who also enjoy ranting on social media. So let’s give the fuckers a proper war.
[Full disclosure: I don’t own a car and never learned to drive.]
I’d like to see the introduction of a civic award for the most creative vandalism of a gas-guzzler.
Entrants could begin with the brand new Range Rover owned by the bloke in my street, who tucks it away so tightly on the pavement that even schoolchildren have to look up from their smartphones briefly when they realise they’ll have to step into the road to get past it.
Anyone owning a second vehicle should be subject to a substantial financial penalty.
All 20mph zones should immediately become 10mph zones, heavily armed death squads enforcing the speed limit with particular attention paid to those who race through inner city streets late at night.
They could also deal appropriately with any parent caught taking a child on the school run wrapped in metaphorical bubble wrap in the back of a 4×4. Hang on, I’m just getting started…
This is an opinion piece by Robin Askew, Bristol24/7’s Film Editor, the former news editor of Venue and the author of ‘The West’s Greatest Rock Shows 1963-1978’
Main photo: Martin Booth
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