Chapter 11 - The Political Alien

In 1979 I had no choice but to go into the world whilst following the only rules I knew, which were that money, politics, sex, and religion were never to be discussed anyone live in front of me. The reason given for the rule was that people might be offended by any disagreement they had to accept. The loopholes in the rule was that the subjects were allowed to exist as the long as they were not discussed, and they could be mentioned on television and in print, as long as the consumer of the view kept what he had read to themselves. That meant I was banned from seeking good advice on how sex should be negotiated for, for it to be wholesome and healthy. The nearest I got to advice I thought was good was when Woody Allen was asked on BBC television if sex was dirty he replied 'If it is good, yes.'. 

Alan Wilson was not the first person to coerce me into un consensual sex. That dishonour lay with two boys in the boarding school who's actions six years earlier, in 1973, I could neither forget nor remember with any comfort. The memory of what they did brought with it too much pain and misunderstanding for me to cope with. What they did was horrible. After they were found out and I was separated from them the matter was declared over. But however much the boarding school/care home said it was over for them, with me the memory of it was a red hot burning ember that was not losing any of it's heat in any hurry. It hurt me and would hurt me for a long while yet.

To the boarding school/care home I appeared to not be hurt by what they did. Soon it seemed as if the event had never happened. But to appear unhurt I had to learn to lead a life where my feelings were divorced from my words and actions. My body and mind had to split off from each other for me to cope. If this made me a masochist and further made me poorly physically coordinated, then there were a lot of us like that in the school. Our masochism was some sort of shared school 'normal'. It was only when we left that we were seen as utterly abnormal compared with better coordinated and educated children who went to normal schools. 

After leaving I occasionally met a few of the boys who had gone to the same school in the town after they left. We all left the school with worse wounds than the parental wounds we went in with. We all seemed to be frightened of the people we were meant to be. Adam Blaine was a nervous wreck who had no energy. Jon Cronshaw was polite company in small doses but not long for this world for physical health reasons. I endured a depression that was going to last for decades and would require the work of half a dozen therapists, sequentially, for it to be rooted out and made manageable. When Adam Jon and I met we met because of our shared pasts but tried to live in the present, where still we could not do right for us all having 'the wrong past'. We were all outsiders, when we were angry and openly upset as sometimes happened because all three of us were 'thin skinned', we became outsiders towards each other.

If by following the parental house rules I had so comprehensively bungled the idea of choice with sex then how badly could I misunderstand politics? 1979 was a good year to find out. In March the Labour government fell because of a vote of no confidence in it's dying days. Though it should have gone to the country six to nine months earlier than it did, whilst there was still some energy in it's message. But that it didn't was proof of it's paralysis. That said, the earlier it went the fitter for re-election it would have appeared to be. I saw some of the election television debates. Labour sounded exhausted the Tories were alarmingly slick and prescriptive. Oddly I was given the vote even though I was only seventeen. The card came through the letterbox and there in front of me was the choice of who to vote for.

The town's MP was called Marcus Kimball, I read his name in letters sent to the local press that requested that he protect the jobs in this factory or that work place, which was in imminent danger of mass redundancies. He only ever responded in the 'I can't do anything' line of reasoning. He made the local press an echo chamber in which we heard nothing more than our own words and concerns fed back to us. Though I liked to read the reviews in it of the latest play put on by The Theatre Club in the arts section. At least with The Theatre Club people saw them. Our MP may as well have been invisible, declared officially missing. He could be dead except that if he died there would be change; the next invisible nonentity would have to be voted in. It would be some time before I heard the term 'rotten borough' to describe a parliamentary constituency where the sitting MP does as little as possible to represent the people living in it because the borough was in the hands of a party or family who practically owned the voting process and misrepresented/disenfranchised many who lived in the constituency through the MP's indifference towards them. Our town was the nearest anyone could experience to life in a modern rotten borough. We could vote, but the man who always got returned as 'our MP' had no interest in us.

Mother was doing the ironing when with the same naivety that I had once asked 'Mother what does 'left dress' mean in a pair of trousers?' I asked Mother who she voted for. When I asked her about the instruction in trousers she was embarrassed at the question but answered it, when I asked her about how or why to vote she was embarrassed and gave me a non-answer. Her reply was brief and gnomic, 'I vote for Napoleon.', as if to say 'I am not telling you who I vote for; I don't even admit to myself who I vote for.'. Her response could have had a certain playfulness, she did not reject outright who to vote for and why. She could have described the place of the town in the constituency but she didn't. She always had an admiration of all things French and so made obscure references to the second French republic of December 1848. There the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, was elected as French president and later installed himself by military force as emperor for the duration of that republic. What Mother meant by the phrase 'I vote for Napoleon' if she had expressed it was 'I vote with the majority. Whatever that majority votes for I vote for too. I believe in majoritarianism.'. That was how Napoleon III made votes work for him until he found he did not need voters any longer.

The town I lived in was an exception to the constituency it was part of. The constituency covered an area of land of mostly rural and military use. The farmers had their landed interests and there were five air bases where the RAF had occupied land that they had bought in the 1930's within a twenty mile radius. The town was the most concentrated mass of voters within the constituency, but it was isolated for being so urban when the rest of the constituency was so rural. The constituency had returned the same Conservative member since Winston Churchill had resigned as Prime Minister but remained an MP, and Anthony Eden had been made Prime Minister after Churchill, 1956. Marcus Kimball was elected in a by-election and he made an art form out of avoiding the concerns of his electorate from the start of his first term as MP. The election of 1979 was going to be his last term as an MP before he was going to officially return to what he had spent most of his time on in the last twenty years, his interests in rural affairs, hunting and animal welfare.

After listening to Mother I voted, but not for the candidate who always won. I did the opposite of what Mother did and started a long run of voting for candidates who never won but their parties continued to put candidates up whoever else won, thus proving the right of the public to a candidate rather than narrowing voter choice. I voted for who and what I could believe in rather than put my lot in with whatever majority was going which I always felt outside of. I instinctively mistrusted the majoritarianism that Mother attached herself to. I both voted left and dressed to the left. Mother was not impressed with the only poster ever to appear on my bedroom wall which had a black and white picture of Margaret Thatcher with sharpened molars, underneath it declared 'Margaret Thatcher; Britain's Nuclear Threat'.

Like my interest in many other subjects, my engagement with the politics of nuclear disarmament came first and most effectively via television. There were several scientific and social documentaries on BBC 2. My favourite was 'Horizon' because of how efficient and informative it was. It  was fifty minutes long, the length of a school lesson. It usually had a voice over by actor Paul Vaughan to clarify the scientific argument being portrayed in the film and it always edited the footage it used very well. It was quite cheap to make, but it put a premium on intelligent logical explanation. 'Horizon' looked thoroughly but calmly at what would happen if the defence via the threat of mutually assured destruction broke down. It looked at what would happen if one side disbelieved that the other side would strike back faster if under the duress of unstable domestic and international politics they pressed their nuclear button anyway.

The programme was horrific, but it could never be anything other than horrific. The 'Horizon' documentary calmly went as near to the hysteria of the banned BBC film 'The War Game' (1965) as any filmmaker had dared to attempt with a new Conservative government in power. It might well have been that the prospect of a scientifically measured mass destruction fed into, and confirmed, my already quite strong sense of having an undiagnosed depression anger and hysteria from all the bad sex that I seemingly could not stop myself from wanting/accepting. I would not be the first or the last to be secretly disabled, even as I tried to protest, if that was the case. But unlike the secretive bad sex the possession of nuclear weapons and the cold war were public issues that were real and tangible. Nuclear weapons were surely something about which it was both allowed and necessary to show some collective concern about, much more than the private vices of one individual. I thought I could do something about nuclear weapons, though what the most useful thing was that I could do was debatable. Debate was healthy because it was open and open-ness was much better than secrecy. As a cause it got me nearer meeting new people closer to my own age with very much more liberal and articulate convictions and ideas than my family had, those convictions from new friends gave me the sense that there was something I could do, which half cheered me up.

Nuclear weapons were a hot issue in the UK of the 1980's, which was still living out The Cold War. But from the moment that nuclear weapons had been sited in the UK by Prime Minister Anthony Eden in 1956 they had been the cause of mass protest. That protest was derailed and superseded by protests against the Vietnam war in the late 1960's. Even after the Americans had retreated from Vietnam in 1975 CND did not recover it's former membership numbers. Nor did nuclear weapons appear in the election campaigns of the different parties in 1979. What put nuclear weapons back on the political agenda was the discovery in December 1979, seven months after the election of Mrs Thatcher, that the previous Labour administration had quietly recommissioned the next generation of Nuclear weapons the previous December without the matter being aired in the House of Commons. The discovery of this decision enraged a lot of people for two reasons. Firstly they were angry at the hidden decision that they did not want secretly being made for them. Secondly they were angry at the then present Tory government who wanted the weapons, like previous Tory administrations had, but who could now make Labour seem partially responsible for what was Tory policy all along. Thus people became angry at how politics made all the political parties seem alike, and all Conservative. It felt like a moment predicted by George Orwell, at the end of 'Animal farm' 'The farm animals looked at the humans and at the pigs and at the humans again and could not tell which was which'.

But people are not farm animals, and from the time that the secret decision by the former Labour administration was revealed, along with announcement of  moving the goals of the policy forward to the UK paying more for less control over the weapons, the decision's former secrecy roused many to anger and boosted National CND numbers by hundreds every week, giving new life to small local branches of CND the length and breadth of Britain.

Grace Slick of psychedelic folk/blues band Jefferson Airplane is one of many people who is credited with being the first to say 'If you can remember the 60's then you weren't there.', with reference to the drug culture that encouraged engagement with the experimental new music of the period. The drugs also discouraged all clear recollection of why they were enjoyable after they had been collectively consumed. I could make a similar statement about how the decision making process of the local branch of CND was formed in the town. I no longer remember how my personal disbelief in the protective shield effect of nuclear weapons connected with the similar beliefs held by local people in the town. Music had something to do with it. In 1979 The Glastonbury Festival was revived, after being a festival in 1970 and 1971 and falling into abeyance thereafter. The first Glastonbury CND Festival was held in 1981, in this new format the festival raised funds for CND, raised CND's national profile, and made the festival the annual got-to weekend mini-break event for the youthful members of the many newly opened small town CND groups. All movements and ideas need a calendar and a peak experience once a year to renew faith in the idea, with Glastonbury, small town CND groups found their focus, CND worked through the music business, and the musicians and the cause created their annual peak event well outside the inevitable London protests, which a lot of regional groups only selectively attended.

The main reason I have now forgotten much about how my local CND was formed was less because of recreational drugs, and more because of sexuality. I was gay and closeted. I was practically half a person all the time I was in it, when nearly everyone else had a partner and was assumed to be heterosexual. With that assumption assumed they were presumed to be living the fullness of that life. The strange obviousness of me not having any girlfriend and showing no indication of wanting one, much less thinking how to want a girlfriend made me seem openly incomplete. The sense of incompleteness was multiplied by my being secretary of CND because nobody else wanted the job. Officer-ships had to be fulfilled if we were to have an operational bank account. But when it came to doing the work I had no prior experience and did not know how to ask others who shared our aims and beliefs for the right help.

In theory my literate liberal and leftist friends should have helped me more as secretary, and helped me out of the closet, so I could be a better CND secretary. But for all that they might have recognised my hidden side, they knew nothing about how to help somebody out of 'being the closet'. What they were up against how locally, in practice but not publicised, was homosexuality as a domain had already been claimed by patriarchal and often creepy married men on the make for serial adultery. With no declaration about it and them usually drunk they went looking for sex and covertly found each other in public toilets in which they saw the sex they got as not just a temporary comfort, but something nearer a virtual currency in their imagination. The local analogue version of bit-coin. These married men made homosexuality publicly mean permission for gay sex for them with whoever they wanted, outside of marriage because of their belief that 'gay sex did not count as heterosexual adultery', rather than the alternative belief that was rarely articulated that promiscuity was not necessarily a given with homosexuality and a healthy freely chosen and publicly respected monogamy between men should be very much possible if they made themselves companionable for each other.

It was my fate for my sexuality to have to be hidden. With that fate I was to not be in a relationship and I was to lack the ease of conviction that others who shared my leftist politics seemed to have. For them CND was only the latest organisation they had joined. For me it was my first. And yet for all the inequality of experience I did not give up. CND gave me a social life away from what I had to hide away from even to myself. We had meetings in the historic building that was The Quaker Meeting House, where the local Quakers both supported and joined us. We discussed what we believed, what we had to do to prove what we believed to others, and in the business section of our meetings how we might raise the funds to further the campaign given that we were a financially poor/ideas rich organisation. These meetings with the Quakers were my first introduction to Christianity in my own right as an adult, after going to church as a child with Gran a decade earlier. Many of us lived on benefits and the organisation had very little seed money with which to grow.

One of the several paradoxes we lived with was about the effects of hustling the locals for small amounts of money in a friendly way from local people. Many people gave to us because of who we were more than what we believed. The more they gave the more we were reminded of how like the locals we were, rather than us being the exceptions we wanted to be and how agnostic most people were about our improbably grand aims. To people who gave money to CND it was a small amount of money on an each way bet against Armageddon. For us we were all giving our belief, our time and money and we were not going to get any of it back if we were wrong.

It might seem absurd and mildly surreal for a small group of people, never more than twenty and barely more than a quorum, to meet every two weeks if not more often for several years to agree to campaign together against something that they were incapable of stopping either by themselves or in conjunction with others, but the wish to campaign was also a wish to combine forces with other groups in the region like ours. One thing I gained from CND was to feel less confined by the town I lived in. Too many of the people I knew felt affirmed by their confinement to the town because of how little money they had and repeated lack of choice in how it was spent. Living alongside them made me feel like we were all actors in a soap opera with a rather circular script. My sense of life alongside them depended on me trying to see beyond the repeats in script that reassured other people without alarming them. 

Accepting the CND script of recognising the threat of nuclear weapons in order to want the threat to be abolished was a way of looking as far outside of ourselves and outside of the town as any of us could look. Perhaps for my being closeted and gay, and having the hope of being free of my invisibility because of my sexuality then I had more faith than some in the local CND who were settled and heterosexual. I placed greater hope in there being life elsewhere for me than they needed to, given how many that supported us were in a couple.

In summer 1981 we went with many of the region's CND groups on a coach to London to join the big protest at a national CND rally. The nearer we got to the central site of the protest the more of us there were, and the more anonymous we seemed. And yet we knew that our intentions were to be part of a larger number, because we thought big numbers mattered to the government we were protesting against. I remember our group walking with many others from the same region in front and behind into a tunnel where only some of us saw the surveillance camera filming us as we passed towards the protest. In our protest we felt subject to the secret state, a state that we could only make guesses about. None of us knew where going on the march might lead us. But the idea of the camera looking at us as we used public transport stirred up strong feelings of mistrust.

I was as unknowing and unclear about the drugs culture as I was about heterosexuality, and both affected the local CND more than I knew. My take on drugs was very distant and second hand. It came to me most through the records I bought, where the musicians took recreational drugs to make the music and I thought I could hear chord sequences where the drugs had created their effect even though I was listening to them whilst clean and sober. It felt natural to lie down and close my eyes when I listened to Pink Floyd's 'Echoes', if only to avoid the visuals of the storeroom/bedroom that I was playing 'Echoes' in, which were distracting from the music. There was a little more to be understood, second hand, about recreational drugs from reading the myth-making rock journalism about the famous trio of 1960's 'acid casualties', Syd Barret, Peter Green, and Brian Wilson. But two of them would eventually recover from their former distress sufficient to record and perform live again, and the third was always more celebrated the more mythologised accounts of him became. Stories of Syd Barret should more accurately be read as cautionary tales against taking large amounts of hallucinogenic drugs, particularly whilst touring.

With the local drug scene and CND the linkage was about who among us liked going to the pub after meetings because the pub was where the dealer would sell a little cannabis or something more powerful to whoever was in the know. CND social activities were good cover for their sales. It was impossible to know what to say when I found out much later what the people concerned kept from me at the time. I could have said something about infiltration being not from government but from illicit capitalism but I didn't, by then I was 'out' and finally understood the appeal of illicit activities from the hindsight of no longer being forced to use public toilets to find sexual partners. 'Wise too late for my wisdom to be useful' was my overall response. Selling drugs was like doing magic tricks, it relied on the majority that saw it not recognising it for what it was and being both ignorant and impressed with how it was done. Like the Grace Slick quote I started with here, recognition excluded the sense of participation.

Two years after the election the local Conservative Party announced to popular indifference that our MP, Marcus Kimball, was going to stand down, as if we did not know he was going. The obvious local response was 'Oh, is he still alive?' which was calmer than the graffiti on a rail bridge over a road in the town that appeared in 1979 where the anonymous quote was 'Slit your own throat-Vote Tory'. The graffiti was promptly refined to be a criticism of the voting system rather than the Tories when somebody removed the last word of the quote to make it 'Slit Your Own Throat-Vote.' That graphitti stayed there for over a decade. In the announcement they also named his successor, a man called Edward Leigh. Both Kimball and Leigh came from the wealthiest families in the county, both represented the ideals of the landed gentry far better than the hopes of the working man, or more to the point with the declining fortunes of the town, the family man who was looking for work. But where Kimball had perfected the art of detachment from his constituents, Leigh was something of a high profile campaigner, albeit on a different stage. He got himself publicly known for being important in The Coalition for Peace Through Security, a pro-nuclear weapons pro-USA pro-NATO campaign group which was started by a few wealthy people who had access to the media to counter the popular success of the CND message.

There was a strong reaction across the UK against the increasing dependency on American values. Many UK citizens and a fair swathe of the press disbelieved that 'nuclear weapons made the country stronger' when America's finger was the one closest to nuclear trigger, not that locally we were capable of the high profile campaign that the Greenham Common women put up. The idea of an independent British nuclear deterrent was openly mocked. I had been mocking that idea for a couple of years but I did not have the media access Edward Leigh aspired to. The presentation of this man as the constituency's next MP was the catalyst for us to up our game. Late in the spring of 1982 we had a whole week of meetings around the town with different speakers taking on different aspects of what we campaigned against. The week culminated with us showing in the town hall the film that had become legendary for it having been banned from national broadcast on BBC 1 television in 1965 'The War Game'. It showed what the effects of a nuclear bomb dropping on England would be like for ordinary people and it did not stint on showing the effects and making them seem personal to the individual. I watched the film with the public and soon learned why it was banned. It portrayed a world where wealth and prosperity, and therefore the social class system, were utterly destroyed for an extremely long time.

Governments govern by maintaining and controlling the public's aspirations to prosperity and wealth; showing a world where the government are beyond woefully under prepared by what has dropped from the skies, where they are extremely coercive of the few civilian population who are left alive, and showing a government who to rule at all, indeed to stay alive, have to hide in deep underground bunkers was the worst public relations humanly possible. I think I joked at the time that Harold Wilson got the film banned for it's possible effect on the market for housing and mortgages.

I'd like to say that however much I was opposed to the purchase of more nuclear weapons and the UK's continued membership of NATO I tried to accept that there was some logic behind Edward Leigh's arguments. But I disagreed. The Conservative Party were the party of first-past-the-post in elections, and they overtly wanted to be the-first-to-use-the-bomb in fighting wars. Much of their reputation relied on them winning narrow victories where history buried the alternative opposition scenarios. For being around so long Conservatives acted as if they were the inheritors of the principle of the divine rights of kings, only their principle was the divine right of the Conservative Party, to be in government. 

It was out of their belief that only they could govern that they felt Britain needed to be first (well third or fourth) to own a weapon that was so destructive that it could not be used, that it was also expensive and complex to keep. That as a government they had ceded so much control of to America proved that they were openly against the autonomy of the UK in it's own right as well as it being anti-libertarian because their idea of government was about the few deciding for the many, and the many being told as little as possible about it.

Edward Leigh was going to become our MP less because the local public wanted him to be and more because that was what his patrician family had bred and schooled him to do. He went to six public schools and a continental finishing school, he was their gift to the county and the country. His choice of party was inevitable because he was from a first-past-the-post family. I believed then as now in the more difficult politics of forming coalitions and achieving consensus through open debate, and of redistributing wealth downwards. I may have had some self interest in the idea of redistribution towards me for my having so little in life relative to others, and for having endured my non-education. Even if I'd had a lot more and been better educated I would still believe in redistribution downwards.

Ultimately I believed that however much it might be made to seem so, wealth and might were not right simply because they said they shouted the loudest and drowned out every other voice that might reach the ears of the many in the process.

Please find Chapter 12 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.