My father (see U75 passim) has been an unreconstructed tankie activist since he left the army in 1958 until a (doubtless CIA engineered) stroke felled him 4 years ago. This week he finally passed on to the great politburo in the sky and I thought it would be interesting if I briefly reflected on a whole lifetime spent in relentless far left political activism.
If you don't find this interesting or relevant please feel free to call me a Tory and move on to the next BNP thread.
He spent his entire adult life working for and oscillating between various Marxist-Leninist groups in UK politics. Even when I was too young to really understand the political context I was fully aware that he was unlike other fathers. Every evening would see him at our kitchen table pounding away on an old manual typewriter churning out endless letters to newspapers, pamphlets and articles.
He was an intelligent, literary and sensitive man who spent his entire working life earning a derisory wage as a hospital porter. He steadfastly and somewhat perversely refused to harness his significant gifts to advance his own fortunes. Consequently, he and my mother spent pretty much their entire adult lives, if not in poverty, then not far from it. When he returned from his National Service with the Army in Hong Kong he never travelled outside England again - his entire world was that typewriter, sparsely attended party meetings and occasional trip to Manchester or London for a slightly less sparsely attended meeting. My parents lived their whole married life for forty years in the same council house paying enough rent to buy it several times over. Their retirement was dominated and characterised by the petty tyranny of enforced economies and penny pinching.
I wish I could share with you a detailed expostion of the various organisations to which he pledged his fealty over the years but it was very complex and I lack the background knowledge to fully understand the organisational mitosis. I do recall that he was in CPGB until, I guess, the early 70s when some doctrinal split occured.
My own realisation of his mortality and how his politics has become a prison for him was one night in May 1984. We were both at the kitchen table,listening to the radio. Actually, he would have persisted with his anachronistic idiom and called it 'listening to the wireless in the back kitchen'. I was feverishly revising for my Maths A-level. I badly need to get an 'A' in order to obtain the RAF bursary about which I had not yet worked up the nerve to inform him. We listened together to the accounts of the day's festivities at Orgreave and he made a remark to effect that, "Well, that's it. That's as close as we are going to get." I knew that he meant that Orgreave was to be no Aurora and the revolution that he had spent almost 30 years working for and keenly anticipating was never going to happen. That was the first time I ever looked at my father and saw an old man.
And yet, He worked on, unabated for another twenty years after that night as the world for which he toiled slipped ever further from view. So how do we judge him? Did he squander his life in pursuit of an unworkable dream on behalf of a people who were indifferent, at best to his efforts? Or do we salute his idealistic persistence? I don't know.
RIP Comrade Dad
. The reasons he chose that may have lost all validity after a while - but they were genuine enough when your parents started out on their path. And you old man's commitment was genuine.
