Originally posted by scottycelt
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At the time, I had hoped that my fellow founder members were a bit more normal than that list as a whole. My "neutral" politics A'level teacher was in it, as I discovered to some all-round embarrassment in a party meeting, so too the teacher I most respected in the politics department at my university but who else? One local guy I campaigned for can't even be found on Google.
Why didn't I join the Liberals? Why didn't others? The start of something new. That breaking of the mould. But it was the economics. The Liberals were a party of good issues. Their economics less certain. So it was that idea of social democracy, references back to post war Labour, a bit of Macmillan too, the stunningly successful German and Scandinavian examples.
Blairism was very far removed from what was in my head. With hindsight, perhaps we were all wider apart in our values that it seemed. How a Lansley can be "broad left" at university and now to the right of Thatcher heaven knows. It is somewhat ironic that it was formed at the time social democracy across Europe started to be attacked to end up dead in the water.
So how many now are Tories or Blairites? How many Greens? How many went further to the left as they became older - what we are told is the opposite direction to how most people travel? I'm happy to be in that select club.* How many are Nationalists as I would be living in Scotland or Wales? And how many now feel completely disenfranchised and totally disgusted with it all?
*Footnote - "I'm happy to be in that select club" but there's also a feeling that I am pretty much where I always stood and that it was everything else that moved to the right, presenting itself as the same and for some peculiar reason getting away with it.
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