#103

I love stuff like this. Who are those people? What are they doing now? I want to know about them

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#104

I saw a great one like this in Birmingham library- portraits of people in the early 70s and they’d tracked them down and interviewed them about their life in between

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#105

I feel like this is a really easy trap to fall into because so much political coverage seems designed to obfuscate the process so it seems impenetrable to people who don’t read the Telegraph or whatever. Feels like it’s designed so that people don’t make the connection between why things are shit and those posh guys shouting at each other on the news every Wednesday.

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#106

Yes! 100% And that was exactly me until that argument. I’m so, so glad we had it

#107

Growing up during the Miners’ Strike and under Thatcher in NW England.

My mum was the first of her family to go to university and my dad left school at 14 and was a massive leftie. He died when I was 7 and my mum remarried and we became pretty middle class. I think I had a backlash against the tweeness of it all and some notion of wanting to follow in my dad’s footsteps.

Then I went to university and all the interesting people were left wing.

Mainly though, being right wing is not very nice and even though we are all to some extent products of our environment, actively choosing to be a Tory is a shit choice.

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#108

I hadn’t heard of Jarrow until moving to Newcastle, but shortly after the move I met someone from there, and he mentioned that it often comes up in geography textbooks as a “town in decline”… including the textbooks he had in school at Jarrow.

And that seems really shitty to me. What does that do to the mentality of kids in Jarrow, who are taught that where they live is considered by the whole country to be beyond any kind of state help. Yeah, it’s accurate that it is a town with a lot of issues, but being singled out would surely make you so disillusioned with everything? And make you feel even more self-conscious about your upbringing than you would do already?

Edit: Just realised this maybe comes off a little negative. Sorry for the unasked-for Jarrow anecdote!

#109

Whilst there was certainly an awareness of Jarrow being something of a ‘poster child’ for post industrial towns in decline; it was taught to us in a relatively positive light - I remember a distinct focus on the Jarrow Crusade, which was very much conveyed with a sense of pride.

Not at all!

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#111

That’s good to hear, certainly better than I assumed. And aye the marches are fascinating!

#112

If you ever go to the Baltic Gallery they’ve got a copy in the library. That’s how I first came across it. then I set up an alert and got a copy when someone put one on gumtree.

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#113

Scunthorpe

#114

No obligation to answer if you don’t want, but I’d be interested in knowing if that was like a lightbulb moment or if it still took time for you to get more engaged?

#115

He said it’s an ex

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#116

Mostly my powerful intellect

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#117

I hate you Epimer.

#118

I get that a lot

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#119

Always think part of their anger is that all the absolutely shittest culture is the right wing stuff. Right wing comedy and music, all just complete trash

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#120

Mum and Dad are and have always been Labour voters, but neither are particularly engaged.

I was reading Jeremy Clarkson books when I was 17/18, I think I’m mostly the leftie that I am because I decided to read up on politics because I hated not being able to join political conversations. Sure this place has had an influence, plus Twitter and the like. BRAINWASHED COMMIE

#121

growing up here

and being intermittently unemployed etc while living there

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#122

Yeah, exactly this! In turn it lead on to taking A Level politics at college. A politics class in Wigan just after the 97 election was only going to go one way politically, even without it being taught by a loud, charismatic Old Labourite - I hung off every word she said for two years to the point where my parents clearly started to resent her influence.

It was an easy decision tbf. The Tories were totally on the ropes at that point & nobody wanted anything to do with them - they seemed to represent everything naff, corrupt and old. Although the teacher was a leftie, she enjoyed taking the piss out of us/playing devil’s advocate/possibly being half serious and kept saying if we wanted careers in politics, we should all go & join the Tory party now as they’d bite your hand off. Any youngsters showing interest in them would get fast tracked up the party & they wouldn’t be out of power forever. I cant imagine anyone in the class did. I remember a couple of years later starting university & seeing a Conservative stall at the fresher’s fair. I couldn’t believe such a thing would exist & was in amazement that students were willing to show their faces in public and man it. I kept thinking what the hell is wrong with them? I still struggle with that sentiment now if someone (especially a young person) identifies as being an actual Tory.

Another formative sixth form politics experience was some event we went down to London for. One of the speakers was John Redwood and at the end of his speech he did a Q&A. There were hundreds of teenagers in there, so it clearly took some nerve to even put your hand up & ask a famous politician a question. One girl asked for clarification about something he’d said (possibly about Maastricht or something?). He sneered at her and said he’d thought the answer to her question was so obvious that he hadn’t thought it needed spelling out in his main talk. It was a proper Michael Owen/Neville Southall “Well done, he’s 13” moment and forever cemented Redwood and his party as a bunch of smug, superior twats in my mind.

I’m not really much of a participant or particulatly close follower of the intricacies of party politics now tbh, but it was an important grounding in principles and values that stayed with me. I knew from there that I wanted to build a career with some kind of social mission in public services and try to make some kind of difference that way. The likes of the Manics and student politics are the reason after graduating I found an entry level job with an NHS provider, and resolved to work my way up from there, and the reason that nearly 15 years on I’m still here.

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#123

interesting point, this

I can remember that my first proper exposure to RATM was buying the live DVD in 2004. What really struck me was the footage of them playing outside the national democratic convention in 2000.

I think I was vaguely aware by then that the democrats were left of the republicans and therefore less bad. But what Zach was saying on stage at the start of that set was “fuck both the main parties, it’s all bullshit” and that was quite a revolutionary thing to hear - it was the first time I’d come across someone who had an audience and was saying that the system itself is bullshit.

timestamped here if anyone’s interested (the entire half hour of their set is fucking brilliant too, really well shot)

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