I grew up in an ex-mining area (grandad was a miner) and one of my earliest memories was going to a protest about a mine closure, but my mum is kind of aggressively apolitical and I was sent to a private school and then went to St Andrews and then (don’t know if I’ve mentioned it) Oxford, so there was definitely a time where I was being encouraged to believe in the own personal hero myth kind of individualistic policies.
It didn’t stick, I think because being in those places and surrounded by those fannies taught me that they’re not special, they’re just privileged, lucky and arrogant. Turning that into a more structured political belief system was done by here and Twitter, I think, plus going off and reading more widely.
Where I grew up was massively lib dem, although my parents were rather apolitical. I had a few very left wing friends at uni, and I ended up on the Student Union - as Ents office though rather than anything political myself.
I got quite disenchanted with political parties at the time - there were people standing for positions on the union under the Labour banner, and part of their tactics was to suggest that people who were Labour were obviously tories, which was a steaming pile of horse shit.
1997 was obviously a Good Thing, but I carried my general disdain of political parties while remaining firmly left of centre ever since. I remember going on a rant about representation / First Past the Post with an ex on a very early date, only for her to sheepishly pull out her Labour membership card. Oops.
Anyway, now I’m living somewhere where I can vote for Caroline Lucas, and while I’m not a card carrying Green Party member I there’s absolutely no doubt that a vote for her is the right thing for me to do.
Grew up in the Tory heartlands of Essex but my parents have always had good leftwing views.
It’s weird that I made friends with people who all dressed differently, liked different music, did or didn’t like football but it turns out the one thing we all have in common and the reason we’re all still mates 15 years later is cos we all think the Tories are scum and have a shared outlook on life
I say weird cos as a teenager I guess people kinda hang about together based on identifiable things like music or skateboarding etc
I’ve always been very left leaning - not sure why as got Tory parents and a middle England hometown - but I think it was Corbyn’s leadership that cemented it for me and made me see that these ideas weren’t unworkable or fringe, but could be national policies if the right person was voted in. Obviously won’t happen but it made the politics of the left seem a lot more feasible and understandable.
My mum was very vocal about politics and I would always remember her shouting at the news when I was really little. I remember asking what the parties were all about and she told me that Labour wanted to take from the rich and share it with the poor like Robin Hood, and the Tories want to make the rich richer. And then the Lib Dems were in the middle lol.
I’m wary of romanticising growing up with a single parent in Thatcher’s Britain because I was lucky enough to have my nan and uncles who made sure I was shielded from the worst of it. But I definitely saw my mum struggle when things got really bad - I remember DSS went on strike for ages and we got by because the other dinnerladies bought us groceries. Mum still says if she ever wins the lottery she would give them a chunk for helping her out when she was desperate.
I just always felt like if my mum’s struggling, and people have it even worse than we do, how is that fair? Then I got really into it as a concept and became a precocious little shit about it. We had to do a project on famous people at school, everyone did footballers and I did mine on Martin Luther King and Anne Frank
The main thing is probably that in my early twenties I became friends with people who are much smarter than me and were much more well informed. I’d been political/left leaning before then (probably because of having very anti-tory parents), but in reality I was going along with it rather than forming my own opinions on stuff.
I also turned 20 just after the coalition government election, so austerity kind of hangs over my entire twenties, especially as I was struggling financially for most of those years. I also worked at the NHS for a while, and that opened my eyes to how our health and social care services are being squeezed.
think when my dad passed away it would have affected my confidence and extroversion growing up and that led me towards music rather than sports in my teenage years
Honestly not sure. Don’t really have any political memories from childhood, my parents certainly never spoke about it. I remember the 2005 general election because we did a mock election at my school and I drew caricature posters for it, I think by then I’d started watching HIGNFY and I just thought politics was a thing that happened and should be made fun of, I didn’t really appreciate any differences or ideologies.
At university I had friends from lots of different backgrounds, but again politics was never really a foregrounded issue - I remember watching Johnson win the London mayor job with a lefty friend and that was one of the first times I’d heard hard anti-Tory arguments, when I just knew him as a kind of character.
Then I worked at a newspaper in a very Tory area and started to get a bit of a view of Tory parochialism and conservatism and started to take against it… but ultimately I think it’s DiS, Twitter, podcasts and reading that have done as much as anything in the past 10 years to shape my political beliefs. I’ve been very lucky materially, I think I’d be an archetypal Tory voter without my good friends here on drownedinsound.com
Always been leftish out of an inmate sense of fairness. Initially pulled towards the Lib Dems because in '97 we ended up with a Labour Whip as MP and that just seemed wrong, plus it’s a relatively Lib Demmy constituency. Bought fully into the Social Democracy and didn’t realise that the Orange Book stuff was a thing until it was too late and Laws/Clegg had got themselves into a position of fucking up their vote for a generation. Even now, I think that broadly the Lib Dem’s manifesto was better than Labour’s in 2010.
Since then, my politics have mostly been informed by conversations on here and the constant failure of politicians giving in to “legitimate concerns”, not just on immigration, but social security etc. Clegg fucked the Lib Dems by failing on electoral reform and enthusiastically supporting tuition fees after negotiating a get out clause where he didn’t have to, Milliband’s Labour was moderately appealing, but he fucked it on Immigration in Feb 2015 and pushed me to the Greens, I only voted Livingstone as second choice against Johnson because… well… Johnson’s a lazy racist and tbh Khan only got my second vote because Goldsmith’s campaign was racist.
Very similar to me. My parents are centre-left and my wider family are a mixture of tory and left wing. So politics were often discussed and growing up in the Essex Tory badlands it was very very tory at school and things. Lots of ‘self made’ monied people with a lot of city workers as well. Very white. Everything revolved around selfishness which I didn’t agree with, success clearly came from unfairness.
So at school (grammar school) there were a clique of us into music and skating who were much more left, and had our run-ins with the tory pricks at school. Music was really important - The Clash, Radiohead, Levellers, SOAD… then Glastonbury etc. Going to a grammar school is a pretty significant incubator for tory beliefs and politics. Friends at uni were all pretty left (or centrist at the worst).
My wife is left wing and so are all of her family, so I fitted in pretty well even if they spent the first few years calling me David Cameron for looking and sounding slightly like him!
Think DiS has been really important, and then becoming a parent and getting even more angry about the long term direction we’re going in has made me even more lefty, even though I’ve extremely privileged and work in a pretty tory industry (pharma) and haven’t gone through situations like poverty or vulnerability etc.
